The growing popularity of the Internet has made many of the proprietary protocols dry up. Both Microsoft and Novell have, with the latest incarnations of their networking schemes, adopted TCP/IP as their standard. The protocol of focus in this article will be TCP/IP.

The miscellaneous utilities on BSD-type machines range from "[" (yes that's a command) and ac to znew and zzz with strange names such as zic, atactl, vgrind, chrtbl, usbhidctl, lookbib, crunchide, hpftodit and fsirand. This article briefly explores a few uncommonly-used commands.

Between its record-breaking IPO, its new position as the No. 2 provider of Linux servers in the U.S. , and its four successive quarters of incredible sales growth, VA Linux might be content to look ahead at clear sailing and a strong path to profitability in the near future. But in this industry, to sit still is to slip behind, and VA surely knows that as well as anyone else.

The number of applications when we went public, commercial software applications that ran on Red Hat Linux, were less than 50 on August 11, 1999. Now, there are over 6000 applications and growing by the hour running on the Red Hat Linux platform. So, I definitely think you'll find it in the consumer market.

In a market overflowing with Internet-enabled applications, vendors increasingly are counting on the magic words "open source" to attract venture capitalist, partner and customer interest.

When I got SuSE 7.0 on my doorstop, I found out that Linux distros could be chock-full of apps and utilities and still be hugely user-friendly. This week, I discovered that Linux-Mandrake 7.2 can just about join this elite category--provided you install it correctly.

There are two words which don't get much play in Linux development projects: Requirements and Design. Not surprisingly, it is the lack of these two things which causes most of the problems in open-source software. Too many developers in the Linux space start programming before they have a good idea of what their project functions and capabilities are. In other words, they start in the middle, not at the beginning.

More and more, software is being released as open source. When are you going to take advantage of the riches?

LDPS does nothing to encourage distributions to take the simple steps necessary to fix a problem. LSB is simply kow-towing to existing distributions with this specification when it should be pushing distributions to become more compatible. LSB needs more guts than that.

VMWare is truly impressive as it is the first product to take the next step, emulating an entire computer, on which you can install the operating system of your choice. As a result, "guest" operating systems are able to access all the hardware features of your (real) computer, including Intel's MMX and AMD's 3DNow! technologies.