With the demolition of internal frontiers, the development of an open market and a common currency, Europe is emerging from conflict to become a great place to conduct business. And as Europe's economy grows, so does Linux. Here's the state of Linux in the European Union.

If you need to run multiple distros at the same time, test out new kernels, or just want to test new software in a 'sandbox,' User Mode Linux is perfect for the job. Here's how to get started.

If you want to build a PHP class browser or a PHP debugger, or programatically discover the nitty-gritty details about an object, reflection is a great new trick to teach to your old code.

I am guessing that the news about Novell's intention to acquire SuSE came as quite a surprise to all of you. It certainly surprised me.

Writing documentation for software is no fun. But what do you do when you have to document some code you've been working on, a network you're building, or a database you're designing? Get someone else to do it? Perhaps, but what if you have to do it? Easy. You draw impressive looking diagrams. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

While email may now and forever be the Internet's ultimate "killer app," there was a time when BBSs or bulletin board systems -- electronic equivalents of the neighborhood message board -- ruled cyberspace. Back then, email systems were sparsely connected, and sending email often required you to remember or discover transmission paths. (Perhaps some of you remember specifying routing instructions in email addresses with %, !s, and @.) Instead, computer hobbyists and nascent Internet users dialed-up services like Usenet and The Well to meet, debate, discuss, and yes, flame.

In an editorial a few months ago, Editor-in-Chief Martin Streicher pointed out that, whether we like Microsoft or not, it's a fact that many of us use Windows systems. Some of us use Macintosh computers with OS X. Each of those systems has a different graphical interface. Yes, you can install the X Window System on Macs and PCs, but wouldn't it be great to have the same standard interface to all of those systems, right out of the box?

Samba 3.0 has been released -- it's the latest version of a server that's becomes an essential part of Linux. Samba is primarily a server for the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (also known as the Common Internet File System, or CIFS), the protocol used by Windows computers for file and printer sharing. Using Samba, Linux systems seamlessly integrate into existing Windows networks. Without Samba, Linux couldn't serve as a "drop-in" replacement for Windows file and print servers.

In this column's previous discussions of parallel programming, the focus has been on distributed memory parallelism, since most Linux clusters are best suited to this programming model. Nevertheless, today's clusters often contain two or four (or more) processors per node. While one could simply start multiple MPI processes on such nodes to use these processors, taking best advantage of the hardware requires a different approach. Processors within a node typically share all the memory within that node, and they can communicate much more quickly with each other than with processors on other nodes.

In this third and final installment on introductory Qt programming, let's take a look at two graphical development tools that are part of the Qt framework: the GUI editor Qt Designer and the foreign language translation tool Qt Linguist.

Last month, we left off part way through a data reduction effort with ten million Apache log records in a single MySQL table that was taking up far too much disk space and memory. We analyzed the data, found ways to normalize the schema to reduce the space required, and created the new tables. Now let's finish the job by creating a script that can intelligently move data from the old table into the new ones.

One activity I find myself frequently attempting is extracting bits of useful information from existing web pages that change over some period of time. In an ideal world, everything I'd want would be provided via some RSS feed or "wholesale" SOAP web service, but in the world I still live in, I usually end up parsing the "retail" HTML provided for browser views.

I often see questions from people trying to install IEEE 1394 -- more commonly known as Firewire -- devices in Linux. Some newer distributions support FireWire "out of the box," but not all FireWire hardware is compatible with Linux. This month's column answers some burning questions about FireWire.

What do Marc Fleury, president of JBoss Group, LLC, David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL AB, and Ian Murdock, chairman of Progency, Inc. and founder of Debian Linux have in common? They all agreed at an October technology show that open source software isn't made by thousands of developers, but by small groups of dedicated developers. Usually, according to Fleury, these groups number no more than ten.