There is now an alternative to Intel that offers more speed and a smaller form factor for Linux users.

Whether you enjoy building your own system

The president of VA Linux Systems shares his views on Linux and what the

Variety is good. More variety is better,

Whether you use your computer to play games or to write letters, chances are you're going to want to connect to the Internet to use the Web or send and receive e-mail. That's the topic for this month: Getting connected.

Some people think of the Open Source community as a Zen-like band of code-warriors who couldn't be bothered with earthly pleasures -- an army of hackers willing to solve any technical problem without compensation. In reality, developers write Open Source software for a reason: sometimes it's to solve a particular problem ("scratching your own itch"), sometimes it's to be associated with a cool project, sometimes it's for peer recognition, and sometimes -- if you're one of the lucky few -- it's for money.

With the World Wide Web now a mainstream phenomenon and computer prices dropping by the minute, there are more machines than ever connected to the Internet. All of this activity has created a bit of a real estate problem for the classic TCP/IPv4 addressing system and those of us who are beholden to it. Assigning a TCP/ IP address to each and every machine on your network today can be tricky -- either because of the cost, or because your network has simply run out of addresses. But don't despair, Linux IP Masquerade is ready and able to come to your rescue.

In my June column, I gave an overview of IPv4 (Internet Protocol, version 4), and described some common problems with its implementation. This month, I'm going to give you the same kind of information for TCP; the Transmission Control Protocol, which makes up well over 95% of unencrypted traffic on the Internet.

This month, I'm going to talk about writing a driver for a simple SCSI controller under Linux. The Linux kernel SCSI layer does most of the work for SCSI device handling, so a simple SCSI driver is relatively painless to write. For more advanced devices, however, the kernel's SCSI code is actually too clever -- there are plans afoot to streamline it and solve these problems.

Last month, I wrote about Linux's file access API. For this month's column, I'm gong to talk about some of the other important file-related system calls, and touch on how the kernel file implementation affects the system call interface.

According to the folks who survey such things, the Open Source Apache server is the most popular Web server on the Internet. And Perl is the language of choice for many scripts running on all those Apache servers. But if you really want to get the most out of Perl and Apache, you need to embed Perl directly into your server using Apache's mod_perl extension.

A GUI installation, automatic hardware probes, and Tetris make Caldera's new

Every month when I try to write this column, I run into the same problem. It's too short. There's always so much stuff going on in the Linux community that I have more to say than fits in this space. This month was no exception.