Linux on Intel is driving the commoditization of computing. But it's not the only game in town, nor is it the only combination of software and hardware with influence. Linux also runs on PowerPC processors - including IBM's POWER series, Apple's G5, and other embeddable cores - and runs well. Here's a look at the "other" Linux, the one that runs on PPC.

The new open source version control promises to obsolete CVS.

A number of open source projects, including WorldForge and NeL, are redefining the frontiers of massively-multiplayer gaming. Take a peek at the games, the gearheads, and the gizmos that make play work

In the near future, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio will become the first municipality in the country to receive broadband over power lines (BPL). The service, which promises at least one megabit per second download and upload speeds, can be accessed via any electrical socket using an adapter that closely resembles a large cell-phone charger. The technology is proven, the Federal Communications Commission is endorsing it, and unlike DSL or wireless, BPL can go anywhere that power goes. And BPL is cheap: the basic one mbps service is priced at $29.95 per month.

For years now, Linux users have been proud of the fact that their favorite operating system is at the heart of the most popular personal video recorder (PVR) system around: TiVo.

In May 2003, in the midst of its lawsuit with IBM, SCO sent letters to 1,500 Linux users, warning them that Linux contained unlicensed intellectual property. Each of those users received a follow-up letter last December, and SCO recently filed lawsuits against DaimlerChrysler and Auto Zone.

Last month, I touched a little bit on HP's screwed up Linux PDA initiative, but perhaps I was a bit too harsh. Sure, they have a research arm that's completely underutilized and they have absolutely no clue as how to turn those efforts into a product, but HP is in no way unique in their absence from the PDA and Linux device cluetrain. For the most part, the entire industry needs a swift kick in the head to see how to build and market a successful Linux handheld and to learn how to properly support open source PDA developers. I learned how the hard way, and here's my painful perspective on the whole shebang.

Tools with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be easy to learn. All of their commands and options are typically laid out on menus and dialog boxes, making it easy to discover what the tool can do. If "easy" and "intuitive" are your main criteria for programs, then a GUI tool may always be the right choice.

Samba is a file and print server that runs under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Samba is an implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, also known as the Common Internet File System (CIFS), which is a popular file- and printer-sharing protocol on Windows.

A little over a year ago, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI, http://www.sgi.com) announced a new 64-bit supercomputing platform called the Altix 3000. In a break from its tradition of building large machines with MIPS processors running the IRIX operating system, the Altix uses Intel's Itanium 2 processor and runs -- you guessed it -- Linux. Unlike Beowulf-style Linux clusters, SGI's cache-coherent, shared-memory, multi-processor system is based on NUMAflex, SGI's third-generation, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture, which has proven to be a highly-scalable, global shared memory architecture based on SGI's Origin 3000 systems.

With the recent multiple and varied outbreaks of Windows-based worms generating ever-increasing loads of spam, I've been taxed as the system administrator for the company server to maintain a vigil against the attacks. While the actual worms can't infect my box, the onslaught of worm payloads (and the inevitable increase in spam from infected machines) has threatened an ongoing denial of service attack. At one point recently, I was accepting and attempting to process over 2,000 worm payloads per hour (including generating RFC-mandated bounce messages for those), as well as handling the 2,000 extremely false "you have a virus" messages thoughtfully (not!) generated by the antivirus blockers.

The two previous editions of "Tech Support" introduced software to help you monitor the security of your Linux system. March's column showed you how to monitor filesystem changes with Tripwire, and last month's column explained how to detect rootkits and loadable kernel modules (LKMs) with chkrootkit. This month, let's see how to monitor and analyze your system logs with Logwatch.

Let's face it: in the business world, you're bound to encounter individuals who just can't get "the big picture." At the sight of rows and columns of data, their brains disconnect, their eyes cross, their breathing becomes labored, and they pass out. But wouldn't it be nice to avoid all that trauma? Imagine if you could help those poor, spreadsheet-phobic souls grasp what the data actually means with a clear and decisive graph.

In March's "LAMP Post" column, we started to look at MySQL's replication subsystem. We covered how replication works, as well as putting it to use by configuring the master and slave(s). This month, in this inaugural "MySQL" column, let's spend some time looking at the lesser known aspects of MySQL replication, including filtering and log inspection.

You know Linux is easy to run and is as stable as houses. I know that, too. But does your friend Joe Windows know it? Chances are he doesn't.