"I'd advise paying Rebel a few hundred bucks more and get a system set up and ready to install. On the other hand, if you do that, you won't have heavy pressure to learn Linux fast because the NetWinder will be doing the crucial jobs while you get around to it," continues Jerry Pournelle.

Your Network's Secret Life, a series by Marcel Gagné, offers an overview of network management and visualization tools. Here he says, "One of the single most effective (and overlooked) network discovery tools is netstat. It comes bundled with every Linux distribution, and it can tell you a great deal about what is happening on your server. For instance, by using the program with the -a and -p flags, you can find every connection (or port) open on your system and what programs are using those ports."

XFree86 4.1 has been released. Currently, the project has made only source tarballs available: binaries and patches will be made available over the next few days.

An introduction to Linux for newbies with detailed, step by step instructions to partitioning a hard disk and installing Caldera e-desktop 2.4 along with Windows.

Here are bare bones guides to administering the common services that your a likely to have in your system. Samba, DNS, mail and NIS are some of the services covered here.

Looking for Apache and Linux in a 3" Stackable Aluminium Cube? Designed in partnership with Intel and pre-loaded with Linux, the CerfCube is a high-performance, low-power design for developing Internet devices. It has a high-performance Intel StrongARM 1110 processor

32 MB RAM and 16 MB Flash.

Matrox PowerDesk for Linux is an open source GUI-based utility, providing users with a faster more efficient means of managing their desktops. Now, Matrox Linux users can easily configure Matrox DualHead features such as Multi-Display, Clone, and TV Output, as well as make monitor adjustments to resolution settings, pixel depths, and refresh rates. Using this they can now avoid the errors that can occur when configuration files are entered manually.

"2001 is not going to be the year of the Penguin for home or business users that have yet to adopt Linux. Although Linux has grown by leaps and bounds during the last few years, it is still plagued with a lot of issues that will keep it away from being a 100 percent viable alternative to Windows for a long time. At the top of the list comes the simple fact that Linux, by design, is not a common person's operating system. Linux, like Unix, was designed with networking in mind and network security. Still, I hold out hope for Linux.

The real cost gap is in software--but, consumers don't really perceive this (yet). They don't realize that they've paid for the Windows operating system that's shipped with their computers. They do realize they haven't paid for the version of Office they're using-and that's because they know perfectly well that it's pirated. So Linux doesn't have much pull as yet. And it's not because the desktop environment is incomplete, or that there aren't enough applications, etc. It's because people haven't yet perceived that Linux is cheaper. But the pull picture is about to change.

GNUstep Launchpad 1.0.1 is a minor update to version 1.0.0. Improvements include a change in the backend directory layout to support GUI backend bundles and some bug fixes to work on newer kernels and BSD machines. Its a collection of libraries for creating non-graphical tools and applications using an API based on OpenStep and the MacOS X API. Developers have noted that GNUstep allows faster development time and more flexibility than with other common application development libraries.