Rush of stories from Linux Magazine

Booting Up, by Martin Streicher
To hear Microsoft tell the tale, Linux is developed by geeks for geeks that use the free operating system to develop yet more software for geeks. If you run a business, they say, the only choice is Windows. Of course, that's a tall tale.

Do It Yourself, by R. Scott Granneman
Last month's column showed how to create Ogg Vorbis (OGG) music files. Raw WAV files were "ripped" from compact discs with Grip, and were then converted to OGGs with the command line tool oggenc. The end of that column mentioned two additional programs: KRename (http://www.krename.net), a batch-mode file renamer, and EasyTAG (http://easytag.sourceforge.net), which adds and edits the hidden metadata your music players use to display song information. This month, let's take a further look at those two tools.

Extreme Linux, by Tom Quinn
Certainly, speed significantly affects productivity, but there are many other factors to consider. For instance, a machine with record-setting performance does little good if its uptime performance is poor. To be optimally productive, a cluster must offer peak performance throughout its entire lifetime. Here are ten things you can do to boost the productivity of your cluster -- from procurement to installation to operation.

Guru Guidance, by Roderick W. Smith
Today, users expect their computers to display text in a variety of appealing fonts. Linux has long supported fonts, but Linux's font handling has historically been decidedly inferior to that on other platforms. Fortunately, a Linux program can help you overcome these problems. The tool is called FontForge, and it's headquartered at http://fontforge.sourceforge.net. (FontForge used to go by the name PfaEdit, so you may find older versions of the program under that name.) FontForge is a full-fledged font editing program. If you have the skill, you can use it to design a font from scratch. For the rest of us, though, the tool is very handy for making more minor changes to fonts. All in all, it's worth learning about this program.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Man in IBM's On Demand
For more than thirty years beginning in 1970, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger has been turning great IBM ideas into great IBM products. Most recently, Dr. Wladawsky-Berger led IBM's company-wide On Demand initiative to help IBM's customers fuse business processes with advanced information technology to achieve orders-of-magnitude increases in productivity and innovation. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Wladawsky-Berger explains why IT should be more than the sum of its parts.

LAMP Post, by Michael Bordash
If you're into MP3, you probably have twenty gigabytes of music stored on a Linux file server in your living room. You can access the music from your desktop, laptop, and perhaps even from your stereo. But what happens when you go to work or have to travel on business? Portable digital audio devices typically have enough diskspace to mirror part of your collection or a few playlists, but still don't have a great mixing interface like your core audio players at home. So, unless you're willing to shell out a few hundred bucks for a large, portable hard disk, it's going to be tough to take your entire music collection with you wherever you go.

MySQL, by Jeremy Zawodny
While it may seem a long way off, MySQL 5.0 is already in alpha testing and most of its major features have either been completed or are close to being done. If you're planning to build a application on top of MySQL in the next 6 months or so, you'd be wise to look at what 5.0 has to offer: stored procedures, views, new storage engines, and more.

On the Desktop, by Jason Perlow
On a network of just Windows machines, connecting to file shares is a fairly easy process: just click on the "My Network" or "Network Neighborhood" icon, click on a nearby server or workstation with a file share, and away you go. However, on a network of Linux and Windows machines, connecting a Linux box to a Windows server can still require some manual configuration to get file sharing between the two operating systems working just the way you want it to. KDE 3.x has some nice, built-in, multi-protocol network browsing features, but, unfortunately, chances are that your Linux distribution doesn't enable or configure those features automatically. So, this month, let's dive into KDE and get connected.

On The Docket, by Nicholas Wells
Copyright laws are designed to balance ownership and public access. On one hand, an author should retain ownership of his or her creative work and should be able to profit from his or her own ingenuity. On the other hand, an author cannot profit without granting access to the public, which implies that the work must be widely distributed. And because it's unlikely that any author can completely control distribution or how the work may be derived from, the author relies on copyright. Copyright, in a sense, provides rules for content creation and consumption.

Perl of Wisdom, by Damian Conway
The Perl 6 design documents are called apocalypses for two very good reasons. First, as a linguist, Larry Wall -- the creator of Perl -- was well aware that "apocalypse" actually means "revelation," which is what the design documents are intended to be. Second, as a humorist, Wall was well aware that changing such a beloved programming language in any way was bound to unleash some seriously negative emotions from many Perl programmers.

Power Mozilla GUIs
Can't remember the difference between some utility's -this and -that option? Don't worry. If you have a little bit of XML and programming experience and Mozilla, you can create a graphical user interface that's easier to use. This month, discover why Mozilla is so much more than just a browser.

Power Tools, by Jerry Peek
If you're more of a Linux user than a programmer, you may not have given much thought to how the operating system handles files. As a user, you simply give a filename to a program (from the "Open" command on a menu, as a name on the command line, and so on) and the file is (hopefully) accessed however it's supposed to be. However, programmers who perform low-level access of files -- for instance, to seek to a particular point in a file or rewinding the file to its start -- have to understand more about Linux file handling. That's where we're headed this month: seeing how Linux handles files that have been opened by a program, and learning how you can take advantage of this even if you don't usually write programs that handle files. Along the way, we'll look at tail -f, MultiTail, and less +F. These three programs can show you what's happening to a file as it grows (as data is added to end of the file). They're handy for viewing log files and monitoring a long-running process.

Shutdown, by Jeremy Zawodny
The push for Linux on the desktop is a lot less about Linux and more about freedom, attention to detail, and open source tools. Apple is famous for the their attention to detail, and I think most Mac users appreciate that. The user interface is simple and more consistent than Windows or any Linux desktop product produced to date. If we think of "Linux on the desktop" as "open source on the desktop," it captures the state of the world much more accurately. Desktop users, even hard-core, open source hackers, tend to care less about the operating system and more about the applications and tools. This is no surprise, really. The rest of the world has always been this way.

Sound Garden: Tux, can you hear me?
Sound can enhance many computing tasks, so audio hardware and software has become almost universally available in computer hardware and operating systems. But configuring sound on Linux can be a tricky job. Tune in here and learn all of the secrets.

Tech Support, by Jeremy Garcia
Everyone in IT knows that a good backup strategy is critical. The unfortunate reality, however, is that all too many users -- from the home to the enterprise -- don't yet have an adequate backup system in place. If you can count yourself among that group, consider this New Year's resolution: "I will back up my data." When formulating your backup plan, ask yourself these questions: What do I need to back up? How often does it need to be backed up? How long will I need the data for? What medium would I prefer to backup to? Armed with answers, you can begin to search for a solution that fits your needs.