Much of the attention that Linux has received has been focused on its growing use in servers. However, Linux scales down as well as it scales up, and as a result, Linux has become an ideal operating system for a wide variety of systems. Nowhere has this been more evident than the world of embedded computing. Here's why.

The 2.6 kernel includes many new features and improvements over previous releases. Kernel developer Andrew Morton provides a personal tour, describes what lay ahead for 2.7 and beyond, and explains how others can contribute to the Linux core.

With the recent acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, Novell Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman has transformed a marginalized company into a mover-and-shaker. Look out, Red Hat - and Microsoft - Novell has big plans for Linux.

Back in 1985, in my last year of graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a "real" office, including a door, a lock and key, a telephone, and a shiny, new Sun 3/110 workstation. After timesharing with the general population on VAX 11s for three years, the Sun machine was a godsend: a bitmapped screen, shell windows, and all the processing power of a 16 MHz 68020. (Man, those were the days!)

In case you don't have your map of Linux-related litigation handy, the docket for the SCO Group looks something like this:

My web site is gaining popularity quickly, but I can't afford to upgrade my hardware. What can I do to optimize Apache?

Imagine that:

Much of the magic and convenience of the World Wide Web can be directly attributed to one simple but powerful construct: the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. The shorthand of the Web, URLs provide a succinct and consistent way to refer to all kinds of online resources.

To paraphrase a famous maxim, "Oh, what a difference a decade makes."

RPMs can be a great way to manage the packages you install on your system. Unfortunately, not everything you might want to install is available in RPM form. Perhaps you need a more recent version of a program than the one that ships with your distribution; or maybe it's a program you wrote yourself; or perhaps it's just something that's very obscure. Similar dilemmas can occur with non-program packages, such as font or clip art collections.

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the application programming interface (API) of choice for data exchange among processes in parallel scientific programs. While Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is still a viable message passing system offering features not available in MPI, it's often not the first choice for developers seeking vendor-supported APIs based on open standards. Of course, standards evolve, and the MPI standard is no different.

In the previous two columns, I introduced my templating system of choice, the Template Toolkit. Continuing from where I left off, let's look at some of the other features of the Template Toolkit (TT), including how to configure TT and use it from Perl, from the command line, and embedded in Apache.

Mac OS X Panther Server