If you're in the market for a new browser, you're in luck: Linux offers many to choose from. But which is best? We surfed with a bunch, and here's our report.

The Debian Linux distribution introduced apt, a superior way to manage packages and avoid package dependency hell. Now, apt works with RPM-based distributions, like Red Hat. Here's how to use apt to greatly simplify system maintenance.

Recently ratified by the IETF, the iSCSI standard is about to make storage area networks (SANs) much more attractive to small- and mid-sized businesses.

While Red Hat's complaint and IBM's countersuit provided fan-pleasing left and right hooks to SCO on the first morning of the most recent LinuxWorld Expo, the most important story of the show lay underneath the flurry of press releases, swagger, and bluster: for the first time ever, the vaunted GNU Public License (GPL), the constitution of much of the free software world may be put to a legal test.

http://www.atstake.com/research/tools/index.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gallery

For a lot of us these days, "control" of email is more of a sad joke than a reality. New laws may not do much to stop the flood of spam, and viruses and worms keep sneaking in. As incoming messages make your server struggle and users' inboxes groan, what's an administrator -- or a user -- to do?

Sometimes a single operating system just isn't enough. However impractical, many users keep multiple computers on their desk, sometimes dedicating each computer to a very specific, solitary task. But wasting hardware isn't always necessary. Computers are very flexible machines -- flexible enough that one computer can emulate another. Emulation allows a physical computer to pretend to be another one.

A good job queuing and scheduling system is required whenever more than a couple of researchers share a Beowulf cluster. Coordinating with other users about when and where to run jobs on a shared cluster isn't impossible, but cluster administrators quickly realize the importance of having a robust batch system once users begin competing for resources.

Suppose that you want to contact a company that you've found on the Internet, but you don't know where it's located, and the only contact information provided on the "About the Company" web page contains a phone number with the unfamiliar area code of 323. You could call them up, hope to reach a real person, and ask where the company is located. Or, you could look up what geographical region uses that area code. Using everyone's favorite search engine, and within a few clicks, you see that 323 is a new area code for Los Angeles. Problem solved, and time to move on.

Last month, we looked into Smarty (http://smarty.php.net), a powerful templating system for PHP. To recap, Smarty provides a separation of program logic from web site design. Your code does whatever it needs to do to fetch, process, and store data, and when you need to display something, you instantiate Smarty and ask it to render a particular template, passing in any necessary data. Smarty templates are written in a simple markup language that looks a bit like a cross between XML and PHP.

According to the principles of object-oriented design, the most important facet of business software development is for programmers and users to collaborate fully on the creation of the project's object model. If both sets of constituents do a good job, the common wisdom dictates, the objects encapsulate the work being performed, the people who per-form it, and the information that's produced. Each object has all of the attributes and behavior it needs to be able to handle its responsibilities -- but no more -- so that its class can be changed quickly when business requirements change.

Koo, Koo, Ka-KooBox

Koo, Koo, Ka-KooBox

Koo, Koo, Ka-KooBox