SSDs (solid state drives) are great. They’re shock resistant, consume less power, produce less heat, and have very fast seek times. If you have a computer with an SSD, such as an Eee PC, there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and extend the life of the disk.

Last week, on the new MacHaxor site, I explained how to create an encrypted disk image on a mac, but there are similar tools available for Linux. TrueCrypt allows you to make all kinds of encrypted containers, but one of the most interesting is a hidden partition.

Want to run Linux any time, any place? Here's what to do with popular distributions like Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and Fedora, so you can boot up directly from your thumb drive.

So you just bought an external hard drive for backups. Now, with what filesystem should you format it? Ext2? FAT32? No matter which one you choose, there are trade-offs to consider.

Linux has a complicated hierarchy of files and folders that can be confusing right from the start when a user is trying to migrate to Linux. When asked for partition information by the installer, a user may feel uncomfortable continuing.  We’ll try to sort through some of that mess here.

If you’ve ever wanted to completely clone your Ubuntu install, with all of the tweaks, files you’ve downloaded and changes you’ve made to it, there’s a fairly simple way to do this. This is great if you want a complete backup, or if you’re looking to move your system to a newer (read: bigger, faster, stronger) hard drive or even just to clone your install to other machines with the same hardware.

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games.