If you’ve been thinking about trying out Ubuntu for a server, now would be a good time. If you’re accustomed to living inside the limited world of Windows, perhaps Ubuntu Server Edition would be your best bet for getting your feet wet with a real OS. The LTS releases are supported for a longer duration and there’s training and consulting readily available to support your needs as an organization.

Google Picasa is available as an rpm and deb for Linux. You can get it from google package repository if you already have that installed, but the latest version doesn’t appear to be available from there just yet. This app is run under a self contained wine installation.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine architecture on a different machine architecture. This is different than VMware, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V where you’re running different operating systems on the same architecture.

Get a developer key and install Unbuntu on a usb disk so you can boot any XO from the USB disk without modifying your XO laptop. All production XO laptops have firmware security enabled when you receive them. Once unlocked, you can run any operating system you want.

Run Wubi, give it a password, and click “install”. The installation process from is fully automatic from here. The rest of the installation files will be downloaded and confirmed, after which you’ll get the standard windows wants to reboot. Do so and select Ubuntu at the boot screen. The installation will continue for another few minutes depending on how old your machine is and will reboot once again. Choose Ubuntu at the boot screen again and enjoy.

eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise-class stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux that is…