Linux is blessed with an abundance of Window Managers. We compared eight of the more popular packages side-by-side to help you choose the one that suits you best.

If you thought Dell Computer Corp. was all about Windows, think again. Michael Dell gives us the inside scoop on his company's Linux strategy.

Don't know what a journaling filesystem is? You may wish you did the next time the power goes out in your machine room. We explain what they do and walk you through installing the reiserfs journaling filesystem.

Wanna make your Website really cook with fresh, up-to-the-minute data? A dynamic Website could do this for you without breaking a sweat. We show you how.

If Microsoft Windows 9x has one good feature, it's the installer -- the program that helps you install and remove programs. The installer is a significant improvement over earlier program installation facilities. In the days of MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, software installation was something of a hit or miss proposition. For exam-ple, if you installed a program to a specific folder, rather than accepting the default folder, you often found that the program failed to work.

It's easy to pontificate about what computer users do and do not need, but nothing beats the real world when it comes to providing an education. I got mine many years ago, when I worked in tech support for a software company. One day, two old ladies working at a garbage dump in Washington, DC asked me to solve a major problem they were having. The problem turned out to be a loose ISA card, but to discover this the two ladies had to first open their computer. These women were not only oblivious to the operating system they were using (Dell Unix, believe it or not), they didn't even know you could open a computer. Still, they happily followed my instructions and removed cables, screws, and casing parts to fix this basic bug. They were great; I've worked with doctors who had much less patience than these two.

Have you ever had the horrible sinking feeling that you just deleted a file you didn't want to delete? As fate would have it, it's usually something incredibly important to you, like your entire year's worth of personal financial data that you forgot to back up, or in my case, my last three months of On The Desktop columns. (Jason, don't worry. We've got them. ­Ed.)

This month, we'll look at the process of building a Linux kernel in detail. We'll be using a Red Hat system as our example. Although the kernels that are included with the various Linux distributions do in fact work well in most circumstances, there are several situations in which you might want to build a customized kernel:

Last month I gave an overview of the USB kernel subsystem, but I didn't have the space needed to show real code at work. This month we'll fill the gap by looking at sample drivers implementing input devices in the USB framework. The code being introduced has been developed and tested on version 2.3.99-pre6 of the Linux kernel, running on an Intel x86 machine.

Have you ever gone out into the workshop to make something interesting, only to find that the workbench you want to use is too short or long or not high enough? Or maybe it doesn't have clamps in the right places or it's just too uneven? So then you sit down and spend some time first creating a good workbench, in the hope that this will support (literally) your work in creating the thing you had started out to make.

I just purchased Mandrake 7.0 and got it running on a new computer. I have a home network of five workstations and would like them to be all configured to use DHCP. Can you help me do this?

ApplixWare 5.0 is Suite

Comanche Helps Apache Serve

Helix GNOME Preview 2

CodeWizard 3.1 is Spellbinding

The Dynamic DuOS Addendum

Mandrake 7.1: The Magic is Back

This past month was pretty intense here at Linux Mag. Lots of travel. Lots of places to go and people to see about Linux. What did I learn? Forget about whether the stock market is up or down, or whether people think Linux is the best thing since sliced bread, or the worst thing since the black plague. As far as I can tell Linux is spreading like wildfire -- everywhere.

Are everyone's favorite Microsoft apps coming soon to a Linux box near you? Between a potential government breakup and a newly-announced .net strategy, that possibility seems more and more realistic...

The Linux market is exploding with all kinds of great new (and old) products. We decided it was time to round up our editors and pick our favorites. Here are the results.

Three core members of the original Apple Macintosh team are building the next generation GUI for Linux. And reinventing the open source business model along the way.

Is managing the host name and IP address information on your network getting to be a hassle? We explain configuring the Domain Name Service (DNS) in plain English.

In case you missed it, last month we looked at software packages and package managers, which are tools that make it fairly easy to install new applications. However, many great applications are distributed as source code, which makes them somewhat more difficult to install. So this month we're going to look at source code and the tools used to work with it. Next month we'll take this a step further and actually go through the process of installing some software distributed as source code.

As a Canadian entrepreneur operating in the US, I have become a huge fan of this country. Like any other observer of American society, I am fully aware of the problems that America faces. But, the problems, regardless how grave, do not change the fact that America is the most dynamic society today.

If you've been reading this column for the last few months, you've probably noticed that we've been putting a lot of emphasis on Linux's GUI environments, in particular the KDesktop Environment (KDE) and the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME).

Although I understand the importance of keeping careful records of various sorts -- financial records for the IRS, hardware configuration records for my key computer systems, clothing size information about close relatives, and so on -- I am the type of person who continually forgets to note down such information when it is easy to do so or file away associated paperwork so I can find it again later. I do much better when I set up a system which collects and stores the relevant information automatically. That way, I set things up once and then forget about them until I actually need to use the information for some reason.

In this column, Alan Cox has written many good introductions on how to write kernel drivers for various types of hardware, from mice to SCSI boards to radio interfaces to video cards. However, it's not just the kernel that needs good drivers for new hardware -- with the increasing focus on Linux on the desktop, hardware support for XFree86 is just as important.

In last month's column, I presented a framework to allow many parallel tasks to be performed efficiently, in anticipation of using that framework as-is for this month's program: a parallel web-site link checker. Well, wouldn't you know it? After writing the rest of the code, I found that I had left out some of the needed hooks. And, while I was on a boat for Perl Whirl 2000 (the first Perl conference on the high seas), I thought of more things I could add to the process manager for the forked-off processes. So, after much gnashing of teeth, I used all of my skills of random feature creep and cut-n-paste, urgh, I mean, code reuse to create the monster in Listing One (pg. 94).

Two pieces of software cause me to use Win95/98 more than Caldera 2.3: MS FrontPage 98 and Eudora Pro 4.22. Does Linux have any software that can replace these two applications? Note that neither program was free and I don't expect the Linux 'versions' to be free, either. -Maurice

PartitionMagic 5.01: A Great Divide

StarOffice 5.2 is a Stellar Suite

PHP WebLog 0.3.0 Means Easy News

PHP: Essentially Using Data

The July 8, 2000 edition of the New York Times contained a very interesting cover story. The headline read "Fearing Control by Microsoft, China Backs the Linux System."