Posted 03/10/10 at 08:09:50 AM by Mark Soper

Whether you are preparing to reuse a hard disk for another operating system, clear off your junk shelves by passing along outdated drives to a friend or relative, donate an old PC to a charity or school, discard a too-small USB drive or flash memory card, or repurpose an SSD, you don’t want to leave any information on the storage device. With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door.

When you erase/delete a file from your computer, it’s not really gone until the areas of the disk it used are overwritten by new information. If you use the normal Windows delete function, the “deleted” file is sent to the Recycle Bin until the space it uses is required by other files. If you use Shift-Delete to bypass the Recycle Bin, the space occupied by the file is marked as available for other files. However, the file could be recovered days or even weeks later with third-party data recovery software. As long as the operating system does not reuse the space occupied by a file with another file, the “deleted” file can be recovered.

In this article, we'll show you how to erase your drives the right way, leaving no trace behind.

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Posted 03/09/10 at 03:16:19 PM by Bart Salisbury

Freescale is certainly having some fun with the tablet PC concept. Back at CES it showed off it’s i.MX51 reference design platform, a 7-inch touch screen tablet running Android. In a repeat performance at the Mobile World Congress it trotted out the i.MX51 once more, but this time sporting both Chromium OS and Linux (Milos by ThunderSoft).

Freescale refers to this reference design as the “Smartbook”, which is7.87 x 5.04 x 0.59 inches in size, with a 1024 x 600 resolution touchscreen. It has a i.MX515 processor with an ARM Cortex A8 core. It has 512MB DDR2 memory and from 4GB to 64GB internal storage. It is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capable, with support for 3G and RF4CE. It also has a 3 megapixel camera, a microSD slot, a USB2.0 port, a USB mini port, audio input/output, and a SIM card slot. The battery is charged via USB.

While the tablet itself looks good, though perhaps a tad small, its pricing makes it look even better. It’s reported that Freescale is positioning its tablet for the sub-$200 market. Not a bad deal, if the proof of concept bears out. We’ll know in a couple months, as rumor has it Freescale is looking to have its tablet available this Summer.

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Posted 03/03/10 at 06:03:50 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Linux faithful should see quite a change when they download the next major release of the popular Ubuntu distro. Version 10.04 is expected to come with a heavily revamped default theme. Yes, gone are the days of the brown default theme that has graced Ubuntu installs since its introduction in 2004.

Canonical has evolved the look ever so slightly as the OS has gone through revisions. The look has been getting decidedly brighter as time goes on with oranges creeping into the desktop color scheme. An expected black/orange redesign back in the 8.04 days never materialized, but the idea of a visual refresh never went away.

The new theme uses “light” as the model. The iconic logo has also been refreshed slightly with a thinner font and overall reduction in size. The Canonical design document claims, “We're drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that 'light' is a good value in software.” There are two different looks currently posted on the wiki page, it is unclear which will be the new default theme. Both have purple and orange elements, while one makes heavy use of slate grey, and the other uses light tans. These are still in the early stages, but it seems clear that Ubuntu will never look the same again.

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Posted 02/19/10 at 06:09:58 PM by David Murphy

Does open-source really matter?

Think about it for a second. Do you care if your programs are open-source?  Do you care if companies whose services you frequent are built around open-source technology or not?  Do you care whether their developers, in turn, support other open-source movements or not?

If you're not a decision-maker at a company when it comes to IT requirements or business operations, then no, open-source doesn't matter. If you're not a developer who has the knowledge--but more importantly, the time--to invest as much into an open-source project as you receive back from its functionality, then no, open-source doesn't matter either. If you're a typical computer user who wants programs that offer more than what you'd otherwise find in a vanilla Windows installation, then the concept of open-source really has no bearing on you.

Open-source matters as a concept. In its execution, however, a vast majority of enthusiasts, average folk, and neophytes could honestly care less. But why is that?  Why aren't we all raising the flag with Linus Torvalds' head on it and parading through the aisles of our local electronics stores in support of the open-source movement?

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Posted 02/18/10 at 08:02:31 PM by Ryan Whitwam

An ARM-based netbook running Ubuntu could be in your future with the newest version of  Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Much like Windows, the popular Linux distro did not previously have support for ARM processors. This meant you’d only see Ubuntu on Atom-based netbooks, a category dominated by Windows. With the anticipated flood of ARM packing “smartbooks” expected to materialize, the devs got to work rewriting Ubuntu.

According to Ubuntu’s Jamie Bennet, the problem was that Ubuntu Netbook Edition required 3D graphics drivers that didn’t exist for ARM chips. They got around this by employing 2D Enlightenment Foundation Libraries to fake a 3D interface. We’re hearing that you won’t be able to tell the difference in the interface.  If true, that’s a big win for smartbooks and Ubuntu.

This may be the space that Ubuntu specifically, and Linux in general, can succeed in. Windows is completely locked out of the smartbook game until such time as Redmond gets around to adding ARM support. Don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Is an Ubuntu smartbook something you’d buy?

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Posted 02/16/10 at 07:35:44 AM by Paul Lilly

Adobe on Monday announced it has joined the LiMo foundation, an industry consortium "dedicated to creating the first truly open, hardware-independent" Linux OS for mobile devices.

The move will have Adobe bringing its Flash platform to the LiMo platform, enabling developers and content providers to create apps that can run on LiMo devices.

"Bringing the Flash platform to LiMo opens up a significant opportunity for Adobe to further its goals of open standards and multi-screen interoperability of rich mobile content," said David Wadhwani, general manger and vice president, Flash Platform Business at Adobe. "Following the goals of the Open Screen Project, the openness of Linux and the Flash platform represent a common vision to enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere."

In addition to Adobe, the LiMo foundation said it also added ELSE Ltd. MobiTV, and SRS Labs to its ranks.

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Posted 02/15/10 at 01:40:38 PM by Paul Lilly

On paper, Linux doesn't seem susceptible to any of the performance pitfalls associated with transitioning from 512-byte to 4096-byte sector hard drives, but is that really the case? According to Timothy Miller, founder of the Open Graphics Project, Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

Miller came to his conclusion after picking up a pair of new Western Digital Caviar Green drives and putting the paper assumption to the test.

"The problem most likely to hit you with one of these drives is very slow write performance," Miller wrote on his blog. "This is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment. OS's like Linux use 4K blocks (or multiples of 4K) to store data, which matches well with the physical sector. However, nothing restricts you from creating a partition that starts on an odd-numbered 512-byte logical sector. This misalignment causes a performance hit since the drive has to read and rewrite the 4K sectors with whatever 512-byte slices changed."

Miller's findings fly in the face of WD's claims, who says that both Mac OS X and Linux would be "unaffected." During Miller's testing, he found that 1000 random aligned 4K writes consistently took between 7 and 8 seconds, while the same number of unaligned 4K writes took between 22 and 24 seconds, or three times longer.

"We've known about this issue for LONG time, and now it's here, and we haven't fully prepared," Miller added.

Get the full scoop here.

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Posted 02/04/10 at 07:59:58 AM by Paul Lilly

Never heard of Leeenux? If you're a first-gen netbook user (particularly a 7-inch Eee PC owner), it might be time to acquaint yourself with the ultra-lean Linux distro based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Leeenux's developers have just released version 2.0 of its open-source OS, stuffing the distro with a bunch more apps than the previous version while keeping the installed footprint down to a tidy 1.2GB.

And it's the applications that are the major draw here. The distro's small enough to be installed on a 2GB SSD, but doesn't skimp on software, installing Firefox 3.7 beta, Thunderbird and Lightning for calendar, email, and contact management, a handful of emulators for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games, an e-book reader, VLC media player, Pidgin, and more (view the entire list here).

Intrigued? Download the lightweight OS here.

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