Distros
Windows Vista: The kinda boring, soon to be globally dominant operating system.
Two years in the making, RHEL 5 is finally ready. The result? With Xen, SELinux, the Red Hat Global File System, and more, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 raises the bar for commercial Linux. We break down the new features and walk you through creating your first virtual machine.
Desktop Environments
One of Linux's greatest strengths is that it's easily customized. Although most distributions ship with a variety of standard tools for specific purposes (such as sendmail as a mail server or Vixie Cron to handle repeated jobs), alternative tools are readily available. You can rip out just about any component, either removing it entirely or replacing it with something else. Linux lets you remove or replace more components than most operating systems, allowing the savvy administrator to customize a Linux installation for specific purposes.
With common graphics hardware and some bleeding-edge software, Linux can exceed both Mac OS X and Vista with its gee-whiz desktop special effects. Here’s how to impress your friends, wow your neighbors, and influence the public with Beryl.
Audio & Video
SuSE Linux 10 is the best distribution for power users. Oddly though, it can’t play DVDs — unless you tweak it a little. Desktop expert Jason Perlow shows you how.
Listen up! Need to convert MP3 to OGG, FLAC to MP3, WAV to FLAC, and more? Try the aptly-named SoundConverter.
Learn how to get the most out of your iPod with Linux.
For years now, Linux users have been proud of the fact that their favorite operating system is at the heart of the most popular personal video recorder (PVR) system around: TiVo.
If you listen to Ogg Vorbis files, KRename and EasyTAG makes organizing those files a snap.
Virtualization
If you already have a Windows PC, you can install Linux and run your existing Windows configuration as a virtual machine. Jason Perlow explains how to do it.
Need a system or two to validate a new architecture? When combined with Linux, VMware Server provides a sophisticated and highly adaptable infrastructure that allows you to test complex customer client-server software configurations on a single machine.
What if you have only one computer, and you want to be able to run Linux as well
as Windows? Well, you can -- through something called dual booting. Dual booting is an either/or
proposition. You can't really run Windows and Linux at the same time. This month's column will be of most
use to Windows 3.x/95/98 users. If you're running NT, you should purchase the commercial product,
Why can't the virtualization vendors just get along?
Remember when the hot machine for running Linux was an Intel 486? Or a Pentium III? For most of us, single-chip Intel PCs are still the computers of choice. It's what we play on, what we work on, and what we develop on.
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OpenSolaris: Excellent OS but is the license holding it back?
Scott Granneman referees a technological cage match between Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
Ubuntu’s rich set of tools make system
administration a snap
It's about free code, man. Free, as in speech. Can you dig it?
You don't need a Mac to edit your digital photos. Linux and some free software can unleash your inner Ansel Adams.
Does this situation sound at all familiar? You're a computer hobbyist, power user, or maybe even an IT professional. You have family members that are well aware of your "superior" computer knowledge. So, naturally, when they have computer questions or issues to be resolved, you're the first to get the call.
It took five years, 10,000 employees, and (allegedly) billions of dollars. It contains some 50 million lines of code. Yes, it's Windows Vista, and it's finally here. And guess what? In some ways, Vista has Linux beat.
Novell has been involved with Linux for just a short time — it made its major acquisitions in the area only a few years ago — but the company seems to be trying to make up for lost time. Its deal with Microsoft is controversial, but the company’s new CEO says that customers stand to benefit greatly. Here’s an inside look at how Novell sells Linux.
More than ten years after the debut of the
Apache HTTP Server, and after a number of
years of maintaining the status quo, the latest version of the
world’s most popular Web server contains many exciting new
developments, with even more novelties promised in coming
releases.
Want to blog? Grab XAMPP and WordPress and just add prose!
Listen up! Need to convert MP3 to OGG, FLAC to MP3, WAV to FLAC, and more? Try the aptly-named SoundConverter.
Believe it or not, IT departments shudder at the words "Let's deploy Exchange." Although Microsoft's email server is virtually ubiquitous, that doesn't mean it's popular with those that have to manage it. So before your boss writes a hefty check for Exchange and sentences you to countless hours of hard labor, speak up and suggest one of the many open source substitutes that are just as robust as Exchange -- and are free!
Manage your ocean of images with F-spot
Sharing documents such as papers, reports, and specifications is made easy with Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). Here’s a primer on how to create PDFs on Linux.
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