This month, let's talk about e-mail. E-mail really is a huge subject, and there are lots of books written about what it is, how it works, and the underlying software involved. Luckily, as a newbie, you don't need to know about most of the information contained in those books. For now, we'll leave the details to the gurus and just cover some of the basics.
When Corel first began working with Linux three years ago, we considered it to be one of the most significant technological advancements in computing this decade. Today, Linux is rapidly becoming the next tidal wave of technology and is causing huge excitement in the computer industry and investment community.
Iomega Zip drives are so ubiquitous in the PC hardware universe that I expect to see a report soon that archeologists have discovered an Egyptian tomb with mummified Zip cartridge instructions. It'd probably be in Mac format, though.
LILO is the most commonly used boot loader for Linux on Intel-based/compatible systems. A boot loader is a program that loads the operating system into the computer's memory from its hard disk when the computer is first started up. When a computer is booted, the first thing it does is to look at a fixed sector of its hard disk; the "master boot record" (or MBR). The program it finds there (in this case LILO) is responsible for loading and starting whatever operating system the computer is going to run. LILO, which stands for LInux LOader, is a very efficient boot loader, and it may be used to start other operating systems in addition to Linux.
Building on last month's column on host security, I'm going to meander into an area that has bugged me for some time: those damned eight-character Unix passwords. Linux is burdened with this unsightly legacy, but it's fairly simple to fix, and I describe the problem and the solutions in this column.
Video4Linux is the Linux 2.2 interface to TV- and radio- related cards. Prior kernels had a jumble of incompatible add-on modules. This made it very hard to write a general-purpose video application for Linux. A wide variety of radio interfaces are available for PCs, and these are generally very simple to program. Usually, the biggest problem with supporting such devices is extracting documentation from the vendor.
One of the nice things about being a programmer is that you get to work in a simplified world. Computers are designed and built to do exactly what you tell them to do (even if it's not what you mean), and to do the same thing over and over again, yielding nice, reproducible results. The reason programs are so well behaved is that they normally execute sequentially. One step follows another, and nothing happens in between, so your data will stay the same as it was when you last touched it. Your program's flow becomes obvious and any bugs that you may have are reproducible.
Many of us make the mistake of limiting our own vision. We put tools or people in boxes that are too confining. Even experienced Perl programmers sometimes believe, "Perl is great for text filters," or "Unix system administrators should use Perl to automate their work," without seeing that Perl can do much, much more. The fact is that Perl's virtues of expressiveness and concision apply to more than simple text manipulation or sysadmin automation.
Welcome to my monthly installment of tech support questions and answers. This time I focus on basic system tools, including PPP dialup support, downloading e-mail, and some networking issues.
Just got back from the Atlanta Linux Showcase, and I have to say it was a blast. Nearly 4,000 people and about 70 vendors showed up, which is about double last year's attendance... Not bad for a volunteer-coordinated event. My hat is off to the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, the group of people who make ALS happen every year.
