Bruce Perens is one of Linux's most visible evangelists. Here he shares his views on everything from open source challenges HP faces to the danger the term Open Source poses to Free Software.

The Netfilter project has brought the 2.4 Linux kernel more powerful and easier-to-use packet filtering and Network Address Translation capabilities.

In the past few months, this column has explored the intricacies of Linux's bash shell. Since we're on a roll, we're going to continue this month by looking at the shell's logical operators and conditional statements -- the ands and ifs. Along the way, we'll use conditional statements to construct a simple archive command that can help you use every available byte of disk storage space.

So you've made up your mind. You are going to flee that confounded cube, cluttered with pictures and toys that desperately tried to make it seem cheery, and get out on your own to do what you love most -- Linux. You dream of meetings with Fortune 500 executives, where you'll stand at a podium delivering the sermon of your life. Casting Windows in the role of the evil giant Goliath and Linux as David, you scream for the deliverance of Corporate America from monopolistic proprietary vendors.

I've been a system administrator for more than 20 years. While many aspects of the job have stayed pretty much the same, some tasks are now very different from what they previously were. One of the latter is administering disk space. In the past, one had to use a lot of tricks to efficiently manage what was then a very precious commodity. Now however, with the advent of relatively cheap disks, having enough storage space is rarely an issue since adding more disk space is seldom a problem.

Last month we introduced a few functions that allow your applications to retrieve the current time from Linux. We discussed how one might implement a simple function that causes an application to wait for a specific amount of time before continuing execution. We also looked at the alarm() function, which keeps time for you, and how you might use alarm() instead of the timing functions to allow a program to wait for a specific amount of time without needlessly executing any instructions while waiting.

The Apache Web server that handles the www.stonehenge.com domain logs its transactions directly to a MySQL database using a mod_perl handler. This is really cool, because I can perform statistical correlations on hits over the past few months, including such complex things as the average CPU time used for a particular URL (to see if some of my dynamic pages need better caching) and the greatest number of referrers to a particular page.

When I add another processor will Linux automatically use it, or do I need to do something else?

Red Hat Workstation Not So Deluxe

No one ever said it would be easy to make money from Free or Open Source Software, and the events of the past several weeks have definitely driven that point home. In late June, VA Linux Systems announced that it would begin another round of layoffs and that it was exiting the hardware business. Considering VA is the company that practically invented the "Linux hardware business," the announcement definitely made for a gloomy day in the open source community.