One of our goals as a web site news source is to provide our contributors with a forum for sharing and discussing business practices and corporate decisions that affect Linux users. Adam Kosmin, author of “The Toshiba Standoff” (www.linuxjournal.com/article/6318) took us up on our offer. He wrote about his frustration with the Toshiba Corporation and their refusal to grant him a refund for returning the copy of Microsoft Windows that came pre-installed on his laptop. He outlines well the runaround Toshiba's customer service gave him; he couldn't get a laptop without Windows, and they wouldn't give him a refund, even though the Microsoft End User License Agreement offers one. They told him if he wanted to pursue it, “they'd see him in court”. Excellent customer service, indeed.

More recently, Adam updated us about the creation of WindowsRefund.net (www.linuxjournal.com/article/6363), his attempt to reorganize the operating system refund movement.

Continuing with the activism theme, Doc Searls wrote about his visit to Beverly Hills to attend the Digital Hollywood conference (www.linuxjournal.com/article/6360). Perhaps the fact that he was almost the only attendee with a laptop should have been a clue about who the rest of the crowd was. Are we the only ones thinking that the industry most desperate to control the Internet doesn't even use the Internet? Like Fast Food Nation, Doc's article confirms that, yes, it is that scary behind corporate doors. But he reaffirms the fact that the next generation of Hollywood blockbusters are all being made on Linux farms. So how long are the big guys going to fight the future when their own tech teams have switched sides?

Moving on to some of the technical articles, Leon Goldstein's review of Libranet 2.7 is titled, “Debian on Steroids” (www.linuxjournal.com/article/6358). A distribution based on Debian, Libranet's main appeal is it offers all the security and upgrade convenience of Debian, but with an easier installer.

Pat Shuff asks the important question, “How Many Disks Are Too Many for a Linux System?” (www.linuxjournal.com/article/6238). In light of the trend to recentralize resources and facilities, many system administrators are wondering exactly how big of a server they need to efficiently handle network traffic. According to Shuff, the answer to his title question depends on bandwidth, latency and addressability much more than it does on the OS running the show.

George Toft takes a look at “Using Logical Volume Management” (www.linuxjournal.com/article/5957), tries the LVM support in SuSE and Mandrake and reports on attempts to resize a ReiserFS partition on the fly. Now you don't have to re-install if you made your /var too small to log all the hits your web site is getting.

If you want to share your story of grassroots activism, or explain how you managed to connect your garage-door opener to the microwave to your office computer, send your article idea to Heather Mead at heather@ssc.com. And, be sure to check the Linux Journal web site often; new articles are posted daily.