Thinking of moving to Linux from boring old Windows? Now why would somebody

want to switch over from a well known and ?easy to use? OS to something used by

geeks, hackers and the like. Well, the answers could be stability, a virus

free (so far) world and good quality software that comes for free.

My favorite answer is choice. In Linux you get what you want. Of course

this also means that you better know what you want. For example: in the

world of Microsoft, if you asked for an ice cream, you would get vanilla ice

This document is written for people who have just installed Linux but

don't know what to do next. Most of the commands discussed here should

work on all distribution of Linux but since I use Red Hat 5.0 some of

them may be specific to Red Hat 5.0. I have also used Caldera

OpenLinux 1.3 and have included some Caldera specific information. If

any of you have any suggestions or ideas to improve this document,

they are most welcome. All commands are in quotes and you need to type

them without the quotes. For example if you see type "ls" then you

Dr. Michael Cowpland, president and CEO of Corel Corporation, hardly needs an

introduction. An engineer by qualification, Dr Cowpland began his career at

Bell Northern Research in 1964. In 1985, he founded Corel one of the largest

software companies in the world. The company is now helping develop the fast

growing Linux platform; in fact, Corel plans to port a majority of its

applications to Linux. Mike Cowpland talks of his plans for Corel and his

views on Linux to FreeOS.com.

What is Corel doing with Linux?

Samba is a suite of applications and daemon processes used on *nix

machines primarily for communicating with win* machines for sharing

filespace and printers. Developed by a Pizza Lover, Andrew Tridgell,

Samba is based upon SMB (Server Message Block) protocol which

describes rules for communication among various machines on a network

(for sharing filespace and printers). If you still don't understand

what SMB protocol is, just launch Network Neighborhood (assuming you

work on windows), and what you see is a live demonstration of SMB

In the past few years, it's kind of become fashionable for Unix companies to

support Linux on their platforms. They weren't abandoning their proprietary

operating systems in favor of Linux, but were adding Linux support on their

hardware. Some of them have also been pumping in huge amounts of money into

Linux development.

The reason cited most often was that customers demanded it. The reason I

believe was that Linux was getting far too popular, and, if they didn't offer

it as an alternative to their customers, probably their customer would have

Manu Konchady

Mitre Corporation,

1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., M/S W431,

McLean, VA 22102.

In 1996, Sun released a version of the Java Database Connectivity

(JDBC) kit. This package allowed programmers to use Java to connect,

query, and update a database using the Structured Query Language

(SQL). The use of Java with JDBC has advantages over other database

programming environments. Programs developed with Java and JDBC are