Most IT people seem to have a really bad habit: reinventing the wheel. While sometimes this is “justified” by ethical requirements (see the big Gnome vs. KDE mess), often the problem is caused by ignorance.

It’s the year 2006, and installing applications in GNU/Linux can still be a nightmare (especially if they are not available in your distribution’s repository). Simon Peter is the developer of klik, a piece of software that tries to resolve this problem. Simon kindly accepted to answer a few questions for FSM.

TM: Hello Simon! Please tell our readers about yourself…

Getting started with Knoppix Linux doesn’t have to be costly. Chances are you already have everything you need. The requirements are simple. Any computer newer than 5 years old with a working bootable CD or DVD drive should be able to run Knoppix.

Many consider Knoppix to be the most popular live CD. Knoppix has at least one of everything, configures automatically, and is a great way to get your feet wet in Linux.

Numerous office suites and word processors support the OpenDocument format (ODF). ODF is an open standard for saving and exchanging office documents. The standard has been developed to provide an open alternative to proprietary, for example Microsoft Office, document formats.

If you don’t like using the command line, and you want to manage your program installations without typing a command, then read on: this article is for you!

Ladies and Gentlemen: Synaptic!

Synaptic is a graphical user interface (GUI) for managing software packages on Debian-based distributions. If you are using Debian or Ubuntu you will easily find Synaptic in the System Tools menu or in the Administration menu. Synaptic uses the GTK graphic libraries (GNOME’s ones) . So, if you are using GNOME on your debian-based distro you will probably have Synaptic installed as well.

Free software games have long ago evolved from the command line. In this article I’ll describe one thoroughly addictive, turn based, graphical online game named “The Battle for Wesnoth”.

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

Pre-requisites

In order to develop Linux device drivers, it is necessary to have an understanding of the following:

• C programming. Some in-depth knowledge of C programming is needed, like pointer usage, bit manipulating functions, etc.
• Microprocessor programming. It is necessary to know how microcomputers work internally: memory addressing, interrupts, etc. All of these concepts should be familiar to an assembler programmer.

Creating custom markup with XML is pretty easy to do, but making it look good is another feat entirely. Fortunately, a little knowledge of cascading style sheets can go a long way toward making XML easier on the eyes.

Basic XML

I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.—Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the visible front of the current standards battle royale: in this corner, at 220 pounds, Open Document Format (ODF)! In the other corner, the 800 pound gorilla, Microsoft Office 12 XML format! Hopefully, we won’t get caught in the explosion.

The day my father blew himself up