This article covers some of the design decisions that have to be made before creating a firewall, from architecture to various decisions that should be made.

Linux experts at Comdex agree on one thing: Linux is a great enterprise operating system, but it can't become a leading enterprise platform until developers create products that run on it. If the apps come, Linux will give Microsoft a run for the money.

if Linux wants to increase the user base, improvements in the developmental process are needed in the operating system and software. Linux software needs to solve problems by providing solutions not only to the developer, but also to the business and hobby users.

There's always a moment's hesitation when you try out favorite tools in a new environment, and dragging a fairly new laptop off to COMDEX this past week was no exception. As it turned out, though, GNOME provided the perfect environment for everything I needed to do to keep caught up between walks around the convention floor.

About a dozen projects are now underway to produce high-availability versions of Linux, from classic open-source community efforts to proprietary ports of existing applications on other operating systems. For now the best advice is to carefully separate what actually exists from what is promised and to examine the details of each offering carefully in light of your specific needs.

Here's a interesting article that goes through the history of how the early OSes were and what they needed to worry about and then goes through some of the current OSes.

Redhat 7 has recently received a lot of criticism, especially from Slashdot, who in my opinion, grossly misreported the number of reported bugs in it. I have always liked Redhat and I was looking forward to trying this new version since I miss using RPM's, short for Redhat Package Manager files which are self contained archives of software.

In all the excitement and fury that surrounds the Open source movement and in no small measure Linux itself, it is often very easy to forget the origins and beginnings of this unique and often misunderstood development mechanism.

Trolltech's announcement followed within two days of a similar announcement by Century Software, the commercial distributor of the open source Microwindows windowing/GUI environment for Linux, were just the latest two among an accelerating

sequence of Linux PDA developments.

There is an indescribable sense of surrealism in contemplating the next sentence: they're using Linux to make movies. Surely Linus didn't predict this back in 1991 when he started tinkering with Minix. And yet, given the increasing use of computers in film production and the growing use of Linux on computers, perhaps this outcome wasn't so far-fetched.