DNS, the domain naming service, is what computers use to translate domain names, such as linux.com, to an IP address, such as 216.200.201.193.

Ping is a little tool which lets you test the IP network link between your computer and somewhere else. It tells you the speed of a link, the reliability and in fact whether it works at all.

Now we get into the real meat of the Gimp.  In the last article we talked only briefly about fonts, so let's continue down that road at a little higher level.

Integrating Windows and Linux clients can take many forms. For example, you might want to enable Windows clients to access a Linux filesystem across a network, or vice versa. Or you might want to consolidate your mail system and its mail clients so that users can access their mail from any platform.

Years ago, Microsoft announced a strategy called Windows Open Services Architecture (WOSA). The crowning jewel of WOSA was and is Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), a model in which the Windows platform provides a general set of database-access services, and database vendors provide adaptors for their products.

The grep utility is a handy little tool with which every Unix programmer should be familiar. grep easily matches simple strings, and uses a variety of wild cards and special symbols to create a regular expression to search for more complex strings.

Soundcard support for Linux is in something of a fragmented state these days. The drivers supplied with the Linux kernel source (the OSS drivers) are functional and work well with many sound cards; they are being maintained, but the original developers have gone on to form a company, 4Front Technologies, which supplies enhanced drivers (including drivers for cards which Linux doesn't support) to Linux users willing to pay for them.

Perl is best used to write small programs, specialized for one task. To speed up the development process it is a good idea to have a framework at hand which offers some basic structure and functionality that you would like to have in most programs.

Load balancing is a growing concern for any service that experiences high demand. It is especially important to Web sites, not only because of the nature of traffic growth, but also because of the unusual behavior of the HTTP protocol.

This article is the second "Running Linux on an Athlon" articles, - it is meant to show you the difference between Mandrake 6.1 (and RedHat 6.0) on the same hardware.