I second this. Just get another drive and start from scratch on that drive. If you need any data from the old drive, do it on a isolated computer on different non standard OS (*BSD or *nix) to prevent cross contamination. I would also reapply BIOS in case they found a way to infect it.

didnt know that, will have to take a look at it, thanks

LVM is another possibility. If you can get SATA drives and plug them all in, you can then create LVM volume spanning all the drives and just simply copy the data over to one large volume. LVM will take care how to span it across the drives.

cp doesn't preserver exact timestamp. If you want to do rsync later, it will copy all files all over. Jusd do

rsync --dry-run --archive --stats --progress --whole-file --exclude "/lost+found" --delete-after /source/ /destination

which is reproducible and later on will copy only the newer files.

Not sure if this is problem of distro or grub, but once installed then it works on /dev/mapper RAID drives just fine including failover. But I still believe the setup is so complicated that it easily result in unbootable system

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/997414

I am not sure what was your point. We were not discussing tax revenue of goverments or how to balance budgets. We were dicussing take-home pay of people in IT industry. There the tax rates really matter. It is not unseen to have effective tax rates (after all the deductions, etc.) in US for upper middle class (where many of the IT people are) in 10-12% range based on information shared with my friends in US. Compared that to 40% rate my friends in Germany IT industry talk about.

How about you factor taxes in and then we talk :-) How much taxes do you pey on 100+/year after all deduction? Now take a look at effective/actual tax rate in US in this category.

Full disclose as well - Our family uses Linux on all our home computers for 5+ years for most things including productive office type work, school (both elementary and higher level education), multimedia and development. We have Windows for rare gaming. We use iPads for mobile/entertainment/gaming, etc. I use Linux and Windows at work. I have never consistently used OS X.

While I do agree that the impression is that Linux "can't compete with Windows in terms of "Productivity Software for Average People"" the reality is that the gap is getting much smaller all the time. Just one random example of Corel purchasing releasing Bible Pro and releasing it as AfterShot Pro establishing legitimate competitor to Apperture and Lighroom" and Valve confirming Steam for Linux (still vaporware).

In any case, my point was that if OEMs are squeezed by Microsoft from their established markets (Windows based PCs and HW) they may be pushed to position to make additional resources (money, marketing, support) available for non Microsoft solution. This may change the established impressions about such non MS systems. Using the "Live by the sword, die by the sword" analogy, the OEMs if pushed may become Microsoft undoing. Microsoft succeeded to avoid OEMs and challenge established vendors using their XBox and it assumes it can replicate the same success in tablet market.

Actually I believe this is too bad for MS, they chose wrong time. Now the OEMs actually have an options (Android, Ubuntu and co.) to deliver compeling use experience without MS. The one who can actually loose here is MS, since it can have hard time to compete with gazillions of generic lower priced offerings on the bottom end and iPad on the high end.

Add these PPAs

https://launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa

and you will get 4.9 as soon as it becomes available.

NP. Look at the very first icon here

http://www.samsung.com/us/2012-smart-tv/#hub

It says Web Browser.

Then it is a possible problem of TV capabilities and not Samsung limiting what you can or cannot do. E.g. the D8000 has full featured browser available.

You can look at any website, not sure what you are talking about.

If your company give you stipend, use it. Get both DSL and Cable so that you are not cut off when one goes down. Thats what I did. Do the same with phone, have cell phone and regular phone so that you are reachable.

Games force me to have one computer dedicated to Windows. I do have couple of games on Linux but majority of my legacy and new games are for Windows. If Steam ever decides to create Linux client and motivate developers to support Linux, I wouldn't probably look back.

On the other hand all other computes in our household were switched 4 years ago to Linux and we never looked back. The main reason is that for our main family computer we are running 3 way multiseat configuration (1 computer, 3 displays, 3 keybords, 3 mice) and this is not possible with Windows (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiseatX). When we switched 4 years ago my wife who was graduate student at that time haven't even notices. She was using OpenOffice before and that still worked the same way on the new system. We use KDE which has proven to be extremely usable and stable with very fast learning curve.