It's bigger and better, but Linux vendors will only slowly be bringing the hot new Linux kernel, 2.4, to market in their commercial Linux distribution packages. Even SuSE, the most gung ho 2.4 supporter of the Big Four Linux distributors, isn't already burning new CD-ROMs with the latest and greatest Linux.

"We in the Linux world take for granted that Linux will be a player in the consumer-electronics space, if only for the fact that it has many attributes that make it a good choice for embedded systems, speed and reliability being among them. But judging by the vendors at CES, Linux isn't close to breaking into this space."

The demand for more memory is only going to grow as Linux moves higher up on the enterprise computing chain. Fortunately, the Linux 2.4 kernel promises to expand the memory capabilities of Linux. The question is whether that expansion will be enough for memory-hungry enterprise systems and applications.

Opera is a lesser-known web-browser, available for various platforms

(beta4 for LinuxPPC was unavailable at the time of this writing).

I took the statically linked RPM for simplicity, but it's 2.27 megs. The

dynamically linked version is of course, smaller -- around 1.2 megs. The

difference? Dynamic linking requires you to already have the Qt 2.2

library.

It's simple enough to install the RPM -- there's nothing to do but ``rpm

-i opera*''. Run it from the command line with `opera'. The license

agreement, which pops up right after the rpm installation, gives a 30 day

"This will be the year Linux-based appliances gain more notoriety, although you won't see a flood of them quite yet. In future years, we'll see Linux-based microwave ovens that read the bar code on your frozen dinner and program themselves for optimum cooking. Eventually, frozen dinners will include disposable smart chips that communicate directly with the oven."

"Here's how I turned an unused PC into a packet-filtering firewall using a package called floppyfw. The firewall boots off a single floppy, runs completely in RAM, and uses ipchains for the filter rules. It also does IP masquerading, port forwarding, and can log to a remote host using syslog. All this in a machine with as little as 8 MB of RAM and no hard drive!"

Hard on the heels of Linus Torvalds' release of the Linux 2.4 kernel, Lineo has announced the availability of the uClinux 2.4 kernel. uClinux is designed to run on processors without memory management hardware and with a typical kernel footprint of only 512k bytes or less.

"I found that it was possible to boot Linux from a software RAID-1 device, along with a few LILO and mkinitrd tricks, and this little hack could potentially give your Linux Web server a performance boost. In addition to doubling the reliability of your hard disk, RAID-1 configuration also gives your IDE or SCSI bus a break, providing two different paths from which to read the disk."

At this time, there are two options for a good packaging system with all the commonly-needed features: RPM and deb. The Simple Packaging Kit, or SPK, is on a quest to make a third option. An SPK package is simply a bzip2ed tarball with data and a configuration file inside. This has its pros and cons, but seems to work well in the end.

This article walks you through using the command line tools for package management under Slackware. It looks at explodepkg, installpkg, makepkg, removepkg, upgradepkg and some other things every Slackware user should know.