Whether you're thinking about adding Apache or SAMBA to your Windows network or you're already running them, the trick is making the integration seamless. Here's how to do it.

Cobalt Networks' CEO Steve DeWitt shares his thoughts on the future of network appliances, open source software, and Cobalt's new role as a division of Sun Microsystems.

Dot-NET is Microsoft's next generation framework for developing Internet-centric distributed applications. Why should this matter to Linux developers?

Last month's column explained why text files are so important to Linux users and described how to use filters to process text. This month's column will dive a little deeper into text processing by explaining the basics of using the vi editor. If you think that knowing how to use pico or notepad is all you need to know about editors and editing, read on. You'll soon discover that vi has capabilities as wide ranging as those of a Swiss army knife, providing functions you won't find in most other editors.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the marketplace cannot seem to abide a steady state, especially one that stifles innovation. Not long ago, IT users were doomed to performing superhuman programming feats just to connect one departmental system to another. Then along came the Internet, complete with standards that allowed us to begin connecting everything and everyone -- in the process launching an era of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction."

Some of the recent Intel microprocessors have the capability of correcting specific hardware bugs by loading a sequence of bits called a "microcode update" into the CPU. This feature is available on all processors in the Intel P6 family, including Pentium Pro, Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium II Xeon, Pentium III Xeon, and the newly released Pentium 4. This feature is applicable to both single-processor and multi-processor (SMP) systems.

With any luck, system startup is something that administrators can ignore under normal circumstances. Most of the time the system boots automatically without the need for any human intervention. Of course, once in a while there will be a problem, and someone will have to address whatever glitch has arisen in order to successfully bring the system up.

Last month we looked at using pipes and FIFOs to communicate between concurrently running processes. However, there are occasions when you might want to run two pieces of code concurrently without the limitations of communicating through pipes. Perhaps you have two (or more) pieces of code that need to share a set of data or are constantly updating shared data structures. Pipes and FIFOs are not well-suited to handle this kind of situation because they would require each process to keep its own copy of the data and to communicate with all other processes when that data changes. Such an arrangement would cause a great deal of problems and would be very difficult to debug.

Most Perl scripts aren't doing anything glamorous. They're the workhorse of your system, moving things around and handling those mundane repetitive tasks while you aren't necessarily looking. Those tasks are often on a series of filenames, perhaps not known in advance but obtained by looking at the contents of a directory. Perl has a few primary means of getting lists of names, so let's take a look at them.

The ls command allows file listings to be displayed in a variety of ways. Commonly used options are -a (does not hide dot.files), -l (long/verbose listing format, includes file attributes and sizes), and -color (displays files/directories in different colors depending on attributes). Type man ls to get a more complete listing of options.

Thinhardware Model A1 and A2 Servers

Protect Yourself with Gateway Guardian

Getting to Know MySQL & mSQL

Lexmark Z32 and Z52 Make Printing Easy

Welcome to our "Windows and Linux Integration" issue. Actually, maybe it's more like our "Let's embrace and extend Microsoft" issue :) . Long time readers of Linux Magazine know that I have nothing against Microsoft -- I just like the idea of trying to beat them at their own game. And the thing that struck me as we were preparing this month's issue is that Linux and Open Source software may just have the opportunity to do that.