Samba performs wonderfully as a file and print server. But did you know that it could be the master of a domain? We'll show you how.

Linux and Open Source have become a key part of Hewlett-Packard's market strategy. HP's chairman, Carly Fiorina, tells us why.

Validating XML documents using schemas will reduce your stress level. We explain what validation is and take a look at four different ways of doing it.

Right now the Philadelphia public school system is being tortured by Microsoft. Acting on an anonymous tip, the software monopolist is making the Philadelphia system go through a lengthy and expensive audit of every computer in all 264 schools within the impoverished school system. Apparently, Microsoft heard that a teacher had illegally copied a Microsoft application onto a school computer. So now the school system must inventory every application on every computer in the system and produce proof of valid licenses for everything.

For all the great things that can be said about the GIMP, one thing that you can't say is that it's a model Unix application. You can't send anything into its standard input, nor get anything from its standard output. The GIMP is a universe unto itself, and this flies in the face of the Unix philosophy, which shuns interactive interfaces and encourages developers to make every program a filter.

Without serious Linux savvy, in- stallation and administration of a Beowulf cluster can be cumbersome and time con- suming, particularly when the cluster consists of more than a handful of nodes. Lack of a single system image -- one operating system controlling all nodes simultaneously -- makes day-to-day administration challenging. The result is that, without software tools, you must maintain each node individually.

These days, interpretive languages, most notably Perl, JavaScript, and Python, have made the barriers to entry for newly-aspiring programmers a lot lower than they once were. Perl, in particular, makes it easy for a newcomer to get his or her feet wet and leave the deeper mysteries that make for industrial-strength, high-performance software for later on. Languages such as C and C++ that typically get compiled all of the way down to real machine code are a different story, however. These languages, designed by professional software engineers for professional software engineers, generally assume that you, the programmer, are able to get down to the gritty details (and often idiosyncratic quirks) of the underlying hardware and the software development tool set you will be using.

Web application security is often an afterthought. You start with the best of intentions -- build- ing a quick prototype which allows your users to get a feel for how the application might work. But the next thing you know, they're using it regularly and you've invested quite a bit of time and effort in the former prototype.

Java and XML complement each other perfectly. "Portable Code, Portable Data," is Sun's tagline for describing how Java and XML work together, and it's right on the money. One of the best reasons for using Java is its portability; you write for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), not a specific platform. Your application will run on any platform that has a JVM. Java supports Unicode from the ground up, so you have internationalization built right into your application; localization, of course, is another issue. It is a clean, easy-to-use object-oriented language that has gained widespread use and acceptance.

Who has time to make those cute little graphic buttons for their Web site -- especially when you're rede- signing it and are changing the text(or, perhaps the text varies sometimes)? Well, I was faced with that issue the other day while contemplating Yet Another Redesign for my Web site at perltraining.stonehenge. com. I wanted to include some "next" and "previous" buttons, but didn't want to spend a lot of time in some bitmap-drawing program coming up with them.

If you are dual-booting Windows and Linux, you may wish to be able to access your Windows filesystem from Linux. For the most part, this is fairly trivial. Basically, it involves ensuring that kernel support is present for the filesystem type that you wish to be able to mount.

Sharp's Zaurus Intrigues

As I write this, many otherwise sane Linux people I know are going gaga over the idea of running Win- dows applications on Linux with Lindows. "It'll make Linux the operating system for the desktop once they can get Office XP running on it," gushes one of my friends.