It's faster. It handles fonts better. It has better 3D support and every graphics-board manufacturer is writing drivers for it. XFree86 4.0 is finally here. We tell you what it delivers and show you how to install it.

There are a lot of great Linux Web sites out there, but a few of them rise above the crowd. Whether you're looking for the latest software or a Linux-related job, these are the sites you'll want to check out.

Jon "Maddog" Hall is the guy that companies like IBM and HP go to when they want to find out how to do the right thing by the Linux community. Hey, with a name like Maddog, they sure don't want to get on his bad side...

There's some bad blood brewing between the hacker community and Hollywood. But the DeCSS issue is only the opening salvo in a much bigger war.

When a Windows user sits down in front of a Linux system, even one with a decidedly Windows-esque GUI (Graphical User Interface), several differences are likely to make even an intrepid neophyte develop a nervous twitch. But none will cause more consternation than the differences between the filesystems -- Linux has no drive letters, everything is mashed into a single directory tree, and there sure seem to be a lot of directories with similar names.

Pop quiz: Name the one company that will have the greatest influence on Linux's future on the desktop. Red Hat, thanks to their dominant brand? How about IBM (or any of the other Big Companies Who've Recently Discovered Linux™), with their seemingly bottomless pockets and religious conversion to open source? Or can we cheat a little and say it will really be two companies, thanks to the desktop competition that's shaping up between Caldera and Corel, a.k.a. "Linux's Killer C's?" Or will it be Microsoft, in one form or another, a tantalizing possibility?

Have you ever tried printing a complex word-processing document or a Web page in Linux only to have it come out as complete garbage on your printer, with strange characters and all sorts of gobbledygook? That happens because some Linux programs, like Netscape, use PostScript, which is a page-description language that only some printers can understand and handle properly. Why is this so? Maybe this practice was inherited from old-style Unix publishing systems and Macintoshes, which use PostScript. Or maybe not.

Like Unix, Linux system security has traditionally been based on the concept of passwords. But Linux also supports far more flexible authentication components that we'll look at this month, including shadow passwords, password-aging facilities, and its general authentication facility, PAM.

With Linux 2.4 right around the corner, now would be a very good time to discuss the new packet observation and filtering mechanism that were introduced during the 2.3 kernel development, which iscalled netfilter. I discussed the netfilter architecture briefly back in my Best Defense column in October 1999 (http://www.linux-mag.com/1999-10/bestdefense_01.html), and more thoroughly in the January 2000 issue of Linux Magazine.

Several months ago in this space, I talked about how my ISP was looking at the performance of their news server. I wrote a program to see just how bad the news service was compared to the other local ISPs, using Deja as a baseline. Well, the ISP just got bought out by a big national chain. They decided not to fight the spotty news service any more and just convert over to the conglomerate's big service. The problem with moving from one news server to another is that the article numbers are not in sync, so a .newsrc file will have the right newsgroups but the wrong "read" marks. And since I read a lot of newsgroups, I don't have time to reread existing articles, and I don't want to just throw away any new articles.

Files and directories under Linux have access permissions for the individual owner of the file or directory, any members of a group that might own the file or directory, and everyone else who might want to read or write it. There are three types of access permission: read, write, and execute. Read allows you to look at a file's contents. Write allows you to change or delete the file. Execute allows you to run the file as a program. Running ls -l at a command-line prompt will list the file and directory attributes in the current directory. A sample file entry would look like Listing One.

You can add several programs to your GNOME panel without making it look cluttered by putting the additions into a drawer. Right-click on the panel and select "Add drawer." Now you can drag and drop programs to the open spot on the drawer to add them and select an icon that will be displayed on the drawer. You can then open or close the drawer, and run programs from it by clicking on their icons.

Getting Virtual with VMware 2.0

NEdit 5.1.1 Makes Editing Nice

GigaDrive 20: At Your Service

Yamaha's Killer CRW8424 CD-RW Drive

Blender 3.0: Blending 3D with Linux

Still, this whole Microsoft trial has had me thinking....How did Microsoft get to be such a dominant force in the first place? Sure, they may have used some questionable business tactics, but what were the things they did well? Are there any lessons that the Linux community or Linux companies can learn from Microsoft? I think there just might be a few....