Question: I recently had to reinstall Windows on my dual boot system and now Linux no longer boots. Rather than booting to the grub boot manager it now boots directly into Windows. How do I recover my ability to dual boot?" --Tara Ryan, Mountain View, CA

The iPhone is certainly known for its elegance and beauty, but around these parts it's also known for being closed and proprietary. The Open Source community does a little cheer when we hear about jailbreaking the iPhone -- but soon we'll have even more to party about.

Question: I'm to the point in our organization that load balancing across multiple servers is really becoming necessary. Making the transition from standalone servers to server clusters is a daunting task to say the least. What's the best way to make such a change? Is it possible to start small and increase the "cluster" as we go?

P2P (peer-to-peer) is the nature of the Net. You can fight that, or you can embrace it. Here in the US, the mainstream entertainment business has mostly been fighting it. Hollywood and its phone and cable company allies have long regarded P2P, and BitTorrent in particular, as a copyright piracy system and a bandwidth hog.

Continuing my holiday machine maintenance saga I move on to some notable trials and tribulations with Ubuntu, but not before I report on a little more holiday cheer.

Using the SSConverter class that we developed last week, which used the OORunner class from the week before that, this week we'll create a Python function that allows us to use spreadsheets as if they were CSV files by converting them on

The January 2009 issue of Linux Journal is all about security. At LinuxJournal.com, searching for the term "security" returns 435 results, which might take some time to wade through. Here are my picks from articles that recently have been popular on-line:

The December holidays always hold some interesting surprises for me, and this year's season was no exception. However, in this context "interesting" can mean either "utterly engaging fascination" or "coma-inducing exasperation". This holiday season I got plenty of both.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is on the front lines of the battle against global climate change. Their mission? To convince you that saving power is good for both Mother Earth and the bottom line. The Green Penguin chats with Pat Tiernan, Climate Savers' new executive director, to see what the future holds for this green-IT organization.

It's time for New Year resolutions and what better than to resolve to not purchase media 'protected' by DRM? Many of us already follow this rule but by pledging this publicly we can educate the masses.