Showing someone zsh for the first time can be a fun experience because it's a shell with many tricks. Usually, all it takes is a short demonstration of zsh's tab-completion powers to captivate your audience. Being able to type gcc -[TAB] to see a list of its command line options is something that most users could never imagine, but zsh is full of surprises when it comes to making interactive shells as functional as possible.

The CEO of one of the largest software companies in the world plans 50 Linux applications by year's end. Here's why.

It can be a pain to pinpoint trouble spots on your network. Here's how to simplify things.

The Internet is switching to 128-bit IP addresses. What will this mean to you, and how can you upgrade your site to IPv6?

For nearly as long as folks have used the Internet for sending and receiving e-mail, mailing list management (MLM) software has been around. If you're looking to set up a mailing list server, Mailman is probably just what you need. It is popular, fast, easy to use, and easy to hack on.

A large portion of a system administrator's time can be consumed by network-related tasks. Installing and configuring a network can be daunting, especially if you're starting from scratch. But monitoring and managing the network on an ongoing basis can be just as daunting, especially for very large networks. Fortunately, network monitoring and management tools can make this job easier.

In the past two columns, we've looked at the theory and basics of parallel computing. This month we get to the real world with a program that performs matrix multiplication.

For the past few months, we've been learning how the compiler and linker work together to take the programs you write and convert them into executables that the operating system can run. We've followed the process from source code to object module to executable, with static and shared libraries thrown in as well.

Last month began our look at a class of Web-based tools for creating dynamic Web sites. The LAMP-powered tools provide a framework for news and announcements, threaded discussions, weblogs, polls, and dynamic content. This month we'll go through the process of installing and setting up PostNuke, a popular PHP-based system.

What we expect from a Web site has changed dramatically over the last few years. In the early days of the Web, just finding a site with useful information was a thrill. Today we expect Web sites to be highly dynamic with advanced search capabilities, personalization, online ordering, and accurate shipment tracking functions -- all accessible through an easy-to-use, visually appealing user interface. Developing this type of site requires the cooperation of many people with different skills. Perhaps the largest challenge is keeping the request-processing code and HTML markup separate so they can be worked on independently. JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a popular technology that can be used to accomplish this.

Recently, I attended a presentation at the Portland Linux Unix Group (http://www.pdxlinux.org/) by Michael Rasmussen. At one point in his talk, Michael mentioned that he needed to analyze the traffic on his company's Web server and was surprised that many of the commercial and freely available Web traffic tools do not provide satisfactory reports on the amount of traffic, either bytes per second or hits per second, during "bursts" or "spikes" in the load. But, being reasonably fluent in Perl, Michael wrote a quick script to crawl through the text Web log, and got the data he needed.

Kylix 2

Welcome to the all-different, all-exciting, all-new version of Linux Magazine! No, seriously, it's impossible to pick up this issue and not notice that it's undergone some serious renovation. More specifically, we've given the magazine a complete make-over, and what you hold in your hands is the result of a re-design that we've been working on for several months now.

Remember when the hot machine for running Linux was an Intel 486? Or a Pentium III? For most of us, single-chip Intel PCs are still the computers of choice. It's what we play on, what we work on, and what we develop on.