2.6 is coming, and Andrew Morton, a modest, humble, approachable, and very capable system software developer is leading the charge. Hand-picked by Linus Torvalds for the task, Morton talks about the next production kernel, the kernel development process, and what would happen if SCO won its case against IBM.

Linux's venerable 'read-write-execute' file permissions scheme works well when access rights align with the users and groups on the system. But if you want to grant access rights, say, to multiple users who are not in the same group, or want to grant access rights to multiple groups, the system fails miserably. Access control lists (ACLs) are much more flexible. Here's how to use ACLs -- a much better way to grant permissions.

If you use Linux on your desktop, you may wonder if you're susceptible to those pesky software infections known as viruses, worms, and trojans. Well, like the doctor says, "There's good news, and there's bad news." Read this feature to learn your prognosis.

This past month, I received much more email than usual. The reason? The Microsoft ad and the Microsoft CD-ROM included with the August issue of Linux Magazine.

Every once in a while, we run across a piece of software that assembles technologies in a different way with surprising and impressive results. The Bitflux Editor (or BXE) is just that sort of software: it's a browser-based, WYSIWYG XML editor that runs inside Mozilla. And since Mozilla is a cross-platform browser, BXE is inherently a cross-platform XML WYSIWYG editor. Better yet, BXE requires no Java or ActiveX plug-ins at all. There aren't many other editors that can make that claim.

Let's say that you're a system administrator responsible for a large set of computer systems -- everything from Linux servers to Macintosh desktops. Like most system administrators, you're very busy, tracking down problems, installing new software, monitoring systems, and helping end-users. Sounds pretty typical, huh?

Graphical environments have lots of fun add-ons, such as skins, themes, and more. If you use a terminal or other shell-based applications, it's enough to make you feel left out. This month's "Power Tools" column aims to change that.

World War II saw some impressive acts of deception, some to hide secrets, and some to mislead the other side. The Germans developed the Enigma machine, an early electronic encryption device. The Allies broke the Enigma code, and so learned a great deal about German military actions. And in an effort to mask the D-Day invasion, the Allies launched a project known as "Fortitude." Under Fortitude, the Allies created fake armies, composed largely of inflatable rubber tanks and other "vehicles," carefully placed to convince the Germans that the main Allied invasion would take place at Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy. Fortitude was a great success: it lured German forces away from the Normandy beaches, helping the Allies establish a presence on the European mainland.

Every cluster builder wants to know how fast his or her computer is. After all, speed is the primary reason to build a Linux cluster -- aside from the gains in data capacity and resource redundancy. But how do you measure speed? CPU clock speed is one thing, but using those cycles to actually get work done is quite another. And in a cluster, the network connections between nodes can quickly become a crippling bottleneck.

The Qt (sometimes pronounced "cute") C++ toolkit has been available since 1995, but it entered the mainstream of the computer programming world just a few years ago. Known for its first-class support of Unix operating systems, Qt, from Norwegian company Trolltech, surged in popularity along with the growth of Linux. Developers have turned to the toolkit for its cross-platform features alone: Qt helps you build Macintosh and Windows programs directly from your Linux source code. Qt also received a boost from the ever-popular KDE, which relies heavily on the toolkit to simplify GUI programming. Even the Linux kernel now requires Trolltech's libraries for its xconfig build module. As a result, Qt has cemented a spot among the best-selling C++ toolkits on the market.

Have you ever noticed that some of the features that make PHP so popular and useful are the very same features that come back to bite you as your project evolves and gets larger and larger?

For something that's so simple its creators say that you can "write your own equivalent," the JUnit testing framework has nonetheless become an indispensable part of the development process for many Java coders.

When I first started playing with awk more than two decades ago, I was amazed at the ease with which common tasks could be easily solved through the use of its "array" datatype. Prior to that, I had experienced only BASIC and C arrays, where the only index available was a small integer. But awk arrays could have arbitrary strings as keys!

1. What's the difference between ln and ln -s?