Hacking
All major Linux distributions include a lot of free software applicationsand libraries, which turn Linux into a powerful desktop or server.
Red Hat in particular has done a great job in including numerous applications and libraries which work right out of the box, without much tweaking required.
This is a screenshot tour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0.
Enjoy!
Terminal Server Client for connecting to Windows ServersI've been looking for an SIP program for a long time. Linphone, OpenWengo, and Gizmo all failed to work with my Logitech AK5370 USB microphone (ah, the joys of drivers!). Eventually, after about half a dozen programs, I gave up. Then, out of the blue came Twinkle, a Qt-based VoIP phone.
On the 9th of March, IBM DeveloperWorks held a technical meeting at their Bedfont Lakes office in London. I was sent an invitation and—due to the fact it sounded interesting, was free, and they were supplying lunch—I decided to tag along.
Sharing photos has become one of the more popular methods of sharing information on the internet. A wide range of different people, groups and organisations are using photo sharing as a way both to promote their activities or simply to share their photos with friends and family. Some companies, for example, are using online photo systems to show product shots, others to enable users and customers to provide examples of the company products in use. Many professionals are using photo software to advertise and show off their expertise and portfolios.
An advantage to free software is that it is an environment where competition can thrive, choice is always available and different solutions exist for the same problem. However, it’s also fair to say that free software is disadvantaged where competition breeds, choices are forced on unsuspecting users and diverse technologies fight each other.
Do you manage a website?
This article is intended for new Linux users who wish to use their Linux-box for some real work. Speed control of an industrial motor? Sounds complicated?
Email is one of the most common activities we perform on the internet. However, email is also one of the most vulnerable internet services currently used. Email spam is common, but what most people are not aware of is that email identity theft is common as well. There is also continuous concern over the privacy and security issues surrounding the matter. However, most users dismiss security software as complex and still continue to send email messages with very little or no regard at all to security.
Security is a process, not a result. It is a process which is difficult to adopt under normal conditions; the problem is compounded when it spans several job descriptions. All the system level security in the world is rendered useless by insecure web-applications. The converse is also true—programming best practices, such as always verifying user input, are useless when the code is running on a server which hasn’t been properly hardened.
So you have decided to try a free software operating system such as GNU/Linux, congratulations. GNU/Linux is not that different from other operating systems on the surface. You point and click using the mouse and call down menus to get programs to work.
However, these icons and windows are just the sweet candy coating on top of a much older system, a system of programs designed to be accessed by the command line.
Sun have made some headlines in recent months through the release of their Ultra 20 workstation and a number of new servers based on the AMD CPUs. For some this is seen as major change of direction for a company that is well known for the use (and continued interest and development) of the SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) CPU. With so many new machines being based on the AMD CPU it will be surprising to some that Sun’s new mobile units are based on SPARC technology.
“Do you pine for the nice days of Minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?” Linus Torvalds
In order to develop Linux device drivers, it is necessary to have an understanding of the following:
Everyone likes pretty pictures. The newsagent’s stand is now crowded with glossy magazines, roadside advertisements glare out at you as you drive along the freeway, you see a wondrous mosaic as you look at all the packaging on supermarket shelves. Television long ago replaced the radio as standard home entertainment and the fact that you cannot judge a book by its cover doesn’t prevent the vast majority of the human population from doing so. The same applies to computers now.
The GRand Unified Boot loader, or GRUB, has all but replaced the default boot loader on many GNU/Linux distributions. It includes some conveniences over LILO, the LInux LOader. One advantage is not having to remember to run /sbin/lilo every time you make a configuration change. It also can function as a boot loader for removable media such as floppies, CD-R/W and USB flash memory keys. It is short-sighted to view GRUB only as a boot loader to be installed on a hard drive of a GNU/Linux system.
I’ve seen a lot of new users—and even kids—using Linux comfortably. And everything goes fine—until they decide to install new applications.
You see, in Mac people can install an application by simply downloading it, copying it wherever they like, and double-clicking on it. In Windows, it’s a matter of running an ugly installer, answering a few questions, and letting it copy a zillion files all over the place.
In Linux... it depends.
Zope is a web application server, similar in concept to proprietary products like Cold Fusion. However, it is free software that is available under the GPL-compatible Zope Public License, which is very similar to the BSD License. Zope was designed with the specific goals of creating a powerful, secure framework for the development of robust web-based services with a minimum of effort.
This article compares two development platforms: Java and Mozilla. The object of this comparison is not to establish which one is best, but rather to measure the maturity, the advantages, and the disadvantages of Mozilla as a platform from the point of view of a Java programmer (as I am).
The term emulation means to either equal or exceed something or someone else. As computer jargon, however, emulation means recreating another computer or console’s operating system on another system; e.g., recreating a Nintendo Entertainment System on your Sega Dreamcast so you can boot up a _Super Metroid _ROM, or playing classic arcade games like _Ms. Pac-Man _or _Omega Race _on your Gameboy Advance SP. Certainly, neither Nintendo nor Sega ever meant for their systems to be used for such purposes.
If you ever worked on a free software project or if you have ever worked as a developer, you probably know that managing source code, patches, and software release cycles is not the easiest task to perform. Things get even worse if lots of people are working on the same project: more code to manage, more people to coordinate, more patches to integrate and mainstream. Even if you don’t write software or have never worked on such projects, I’m sure that as an addicted computer user sometimes you felt like “hey, why didn’t I make a backup of that document”, or “hell...
The login prompt is a nice place to be. Poised, fingers on keyboards, ready to send mail, surf the web, or do a little programming. However, from power-on to login prompt there is a long road for our GNU-powered friend to travel.
