Linux is all about choice, especially when it comes to

No doubt about it, Microsoft has Linux on its radar. And as

Though his company publishes some of the best Linux books out there, Tim O'Reilly says Apache, not Linux, is the battle ground for the open source revolution.

There are Linux User Groups just about

Linux's graphical user interface is improving, but there comes a time when we all must descend into that scary and obscure world of the Linux command line. Though communicating with your computer via keyboard rather than mouse can be a bit intimidating at first, most people find that picking up just a few simple commands can go a long way toward making them much more efficient and happy Linuxniks.

Open source changes everything. That's what the pundits will tell you. What they mean is that open source isn't just about free or better software. It's a whole new way of thinking about how to solve problems and manage projects. When we launched the project that I'm working on -- the Linux Professional Institute -- a year ago, we knew that we would be able to leverage this open source methodology to make the project stronger and better, even though we weren't developing software.

You've no doubt heard the computer-age observation that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM or hard-drive space. It's true. Particularly the latter part. But in this age of rampant GUI (Graphical User Interface) usage, it overlooks yet another commodity of infinite desirability: virtual desktop space.

One of the most obvious and painful imperfections of Linux systems is the X Window System's cumbersome font-handling facilities. The chief reason that fonts cause so much difficulty -- or at least inconvenience -- is that there is no unified font manager in this environment. Instead, most applications have their own unique font-handling methods and each one must be configured individually.

Last month I began to develop a very simple camera driver as an illustration of Linux's video-capture interface. What we need to do now is to provide the functions to control the use of the device and to query its facilities. As with the radio driver, the major control interface is via the ioctl() function (Listing One). Video-capture devices support the same tuner calls as radio devices, and also support additional calls to control how the video functions are handled. In this simple example the card has no tuners, to avoid making the code complex.

My last two columns talked about the Linux (and POSIX) signal API and how to use it to write programs that handle signals. Now that you understand what signals are and how they can be manipulated by your application, I want to talk about some of the most commonly used signals. For each signal, I'll describe when the signal is sent, what the default action is, and how most programs handle it. Remember that the type of action a particular signal should invoke is mostly a convention. Users will expect a certain behavior, but programs can do pretty much whatever they like.

You need references. Everybody programming in Perl does, since they are one of the basics of the language. A bit like C's pointers, references can be used to refer to all sorts of other things, including scalars, arrays, hashes, filehandles, typeglobs, subroutines, and synthetic data structures. If C calculates addresses and dereferences pointers with & and *, respectively, Perl does much the same with \ and $.

Welcome to this month's Tech Support. This month we have started listing some nifty little Linux applications you may want to check out in our "App Tips" section. If you know of a program that you think we'd like to know about, drop us a line at tech@linux-mag.com. And, as always, keep those tech support questions coming.

Keep Your Strategy on Track to Build an Empire with the Latest Game from Loki

Get Your Company on the Same Calendar with this Java-based Calendar Server

The guy who said "money changes everything" obviously never heard of Linux. Otherwise he would have said "Linux changes everything," because it does. And it could not have happened at a better time.