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In these days of always-on Internet connections, a firewall that protects your network from unauthorized access is indispensable. Though most home routers have some sort of basic firewall capabilities, their rules for incoming and outgoing traffic are often basic and arbitrary. An alternative is to run a Linux-based firewall on old hardware, but configuring this sort of setup is generally not easy. An exception is SmoothWall, a free application you can install on any old machine to convert it to a dedicated hardware firewall. SmoothWall has a friendly interface and more configuration options than standard hardware firewalls.

Jaluna has partnered with Accelerated Technology, a division of Mentor Graphics, on a combined Nucleus/Linux offering that the companies claim allows real-time Nucleus applications to run side-by-side with Linux applications on the same system, without additional hardware, and without requiring changes to the applications.

I think Firefox is the best browser on the planet, but it's not going to stay that way long unless the team behind it gets their act together sooner rather than later.

Greg KH and Chris Wright continue to finalize how the -stable Linux kernel tree will work in an email Greg described as, "everything you ever wanted to know about Linux 2.6 -stable releases."

Wind River has proposed an expansion to make the Eclipse project for open-source programming tools more useful in the domain of embedded computing, which includes devices such as elevators, video recorders and car navigation systems.

While it has carried job listings on its site in some form since 2001, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) launched a newly revived "Jobs in Free Software" page last month to match employers who are committed to the ideals of free software with like-minded job seekers.

NVu, an HTML editor now in beta release, has the potential to be the next great WYSIWYG HTML editor.

Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Several developers use the campaigning period of this year's project leader election intensely on the debian-vote list and ask the candidates to clarify their position. John Goerzen announced that SPI can now accept donations by check from Canada.

We all appreciate well-thought-out slide shows that logically step through a topic, especially when they're not dull and boring. When creating presentations, many of us are tempted to toss in every little feature the software supports. Unfortunately, cluttered slides can be hard to follow, and obnoxious design elements look cheap. One good technique to enhance your presentations is to use the GIMP's mask feature to make interesting text and cut-out objects, and make those objects move on an OpenOffice.org Impress slide.

One of the more popular uses for Linux is as a router/firewall to secure a local area network (LAN) against intruders and share an Internet connection. Several specialized distributions have sprung up to simplify this task. These range from small, diskette-based distros like the Linux Router Project and FREESCO to larger systems requiring a hard disk installation. Among the latter is Astaro Corp.'s Astaro Security Linux (ASL) 5.1, which I recently reviewed as part of ongoing research into content filtering products. ASL is an RPM-based distribution that allows an administrator to easily turn an x86 PC or server into a router/firewall appliance.

So you've decided you want to earn a Linux certification and get trained. The next question you should be asking is "which training institution should I choose?"

The Canopy Group and its former executives have settled their differences out of court.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) took down the Loki Torrent Web site last month, but the open source technology known as BitTorrent -- used by Loki Torrent for free, unlicensed file sharing -- is not a target of the movie industry or other content owners, largely because of its legitimate uses, but also, according to legal experts, because it is open source software.

Over the last couple of years the South African government has become something of a global leader among governments making the move towards open source software. Its much publicised open source strategy and the very public face of the various open source working groups, together with the many open source-based pilot projects being run by the State Information Technology Agency, have done wonders for the profile of open source software in the country and even in the broader African region.

While everyone else praises Firefox's speed and rendering features, some still prefer to do their browsing in text mode.

Need to integrate your Windows and Linux machines over a network? One tool that may help is VNC, a frame-buffer-based client/server application that lets you display desktops on remote networked machines, and which runs on all kinds of platforms, including Linux, Unix, Macs, Windows, and mainframes.

The corporate desktop GNU/Linux distribution is a relatively new invention, having begun with SUSE Desktop, then followed by Sun's Java Desktop System and Red Hat Desktop. But with much less fanfare, Mandrakesoft released a Corporate Desktop product last January. It's cheaper, has no minimum purchase requirement, and has support options of from one to five years. Compared to the alternatives, Mandrake Corporate Desktop is suited more for smaller shops that need a cost-effective and reliable desktop platform with corporate support.

In this tutorial, we'll look at two great utilities: Tuxcards, the ultimate digital notebook and organizer of zillions of tiny bits of information, and how to use SpamAssassin with KMail without having to run your own mailserver.

March's Application of the Month covers KSpread, the spreadsheet program from KOffice. Markus Grob introduces us to using KSpread and we have an interview with its maintainer Laurent Montel.

Even if you have good reasons for sticking with Windows, you can still keep your desktop applications open source. OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, Gaim, and Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are all pretty obvious choices when it comes to software most of us use on a daily basis. There are, however, quite a few other useful applications that can help you to deal with the daily grind.