Ten years ago, most PC users believed that UNIX was the domain of hackers and

caffeine drowsed programmers. UNIX and even Linux machines tend to conjure up

images of reams and reams of green colored text pouring out of an 80x25

resolution text mode! While many newbies unknowingly continue to remain in the

dark ages of the text mode, most Linux users can today confidently setup the

free XFree86 environment to provide a user-friendly graphical interface to the

once arcane world of Linux.

Unfortunately 'user friendly' takes up a new meaning in the world of Linux. If

SuSE 7 has been out for a while now but I was able to obtain a copy for

myself only a few weeks back. SuSE is one of the leading Linux

distributions. SuSE does lag in market share as compared to Red Hat but

that is definitely not a function of it's quality. This is a very

high quality distribution that you must definitely check out.

SuSE 7.0 comes in two different editions, the Personal and Professional

Pack. I worked with the latter whose box (which by the way weights 2.5

kgs!) is loaded with software and manuals. The professional edition,

The Open Source movement is an extremely powerful model for software

development and advancement, and emerging economies like India particularly

have a lot to gain from adopting it, according to John Perry Barlow,

self-styled "Net prophet."

Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) and

an outspoken proponent of free speech in digital media, gave an address at

the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, as part of a two-city tour in

India which also included Bombay.

Ever since Linux has been gaining in popularity, there've been several

occasions when the issue has surfaced: is Microsoft planning an Office

version for the Linux platform?

The media has been talking a lot about the possibility at every

opportunity that they've got. A few months ago, this issue was widely

discussed when a senior executive of a Linux distribution company said

Microsoft was working on it. The topic drew media hype, while many

believed it was just another rumor. Rather than idly speculate on the

possibility, we'll look at both sides of the coin.

The dusty old machine lying in the corner can be revived with Linux. But

when it comes to more memory hungry apps like Netscape and StarOffice then

you're at a loss. If however, you have a Linux machine on your network

with bigger hardware then you're in luck. Make that the X client and

designate the low end machine as the X server.

The X-terminal concept is essentially like telneting into a machine and

then running some application there. All the working is done on the

machine that you are connecting to but the display is shown on your

KDE Utilities

Acrobat Reader: Adobe Acrobat Reader ships with Caldera. Use it for

handling PDF files as you would in Windows.

Ark: It is a program for managing and quickly extracting archives. Has

drag and drop features.

Kclipper: Keep track of your cut & Paste history with Kclipper. Sits as an

icon on your taskbar.

KJots: A program for writing and organizing small notes.

GV: Postscript Viewer

KHexedit: This is a small and simple editor for binary files.

Lets use the most commonly available proxy server for Linux and the most

stable one around, Squid. Installing and configuring it is a breeze as

you'll soon find out. To make things simpler I would suggest that you get

the Squid RPM from any of the download on the net for your distro.The

latest Stable release of Squid is squid-2.3.STABLE1-5.i386.rpm. If you are

not able to find it on your distro's CD then i would suggest you try out

www.rpmfind.net. After having downloaded the RPM install it with the

following command.

RPM stands for Red Hat Packet Manger. The traditional way to install a

package was to take an archive and then just extract the files off it into

the required directories. This worked fine but then the administrator

faced a problem when it came to updating the packages. He must locate the

files from the previous install and then make sure they are removed from

the system. RPM helps here. It is a easier and more flexible way of

installation and maintainence of packages. Upgrades are easy. RPM

maintains a database of the packages installed on your system as well as

What is open source and how did it originate?

Open source is software which is freely redistributable and can readily be

evolved and modified to fit changing needs. The Free Software Foundation

founded by Richard M. Stallman supported a great deal of open source

development from the early 1980s. They successfully released Emacs and GCC

(Gnu C Compiler) which form the core for all unix programmers. Excluding the

actual presence of the source code, the software license is the most

important part of open source software. There are many such licenses

Windows based machines use the SMB protocol to share files, printers and

communicate. This is a proprietary protocol and Windows doesn't integrate

as well with non-Windows networks using other protocols. It is possible to

share files between PC's running Linux and Windows using FTP or HTTP but

it isn't as transparent a process. Print services are also a problem.

Samba is a terrific software that bridges the gap between Linux and

Windows PC's on the network. File sharing and print services are a lot

more transparent though it's a lot easier from the Windows end.