What is the NOS of your dreams? Does it have the integration and support of Microsoft Corp. Windows 2000? Sun Microsystems Solaris 8's superior availability? Maybe Novell NetWare 5.1's directory capabilities, or Linux's versatility?

One of the first things newcomers to Linux will notice is the file system. It can be very daunting to see all the directories and wonder what they all mean. Today I'm going to give you a guided tour of the directory structure.

With this review we begin a five-part series on the major office suites in the Linux world: StarOffice, KOffice, WordPerfect Office 9, Applixware Office for Linux, and the GNOME Office Suite. All five are in varying stages of completion: StarOffice, Applixware, and WordPerfect are all fairly mature products with proven track records, while KOffice and GNOME Office Suite are both in relatively early stages of development.

Some Linux distributions aren't optimized for your specific system, so tweaks are necessary. I run RedHat 6.1, and here is how I sped up my disk speed by enabling 32-bit I/O and DMA on my system.

It all started with an annoying bug in KMail, and it has ended with my primary Linux machine running a new version of glibc, the latest XFree86, and the brand-new beta of KDE. In this article, written just a few hours after all this came to be, I'll walk you through the installation process and give a brief first look at the new KDE. (You can take a quick peak at KDE 2 in the accompanying figure; other screen shots can be found later in the article.

In February, Novell introduced NDS eDirectory and NDS Corporate Edition for Linux. NDS is the first Novell product available for Linux, and is further evidence that Linux is playing a more important role in the corporate environment. Such Linux companies as Caldera Systems, Red Hat, Sendmail, and TurboLinux announced plans to support NDS for Linux software.

Until Jabber, there was no way to deploy instant messaging on the Net in the way we deploy e-mail or web servers.

In addition to being a very robust client, Linux makes a great network server, and is also a great platform for a small home or office network.

Open source changes everything. That's what the pundits will tell you. What they mean is that open source isn't just about free or better software. It's a whole new way of thinking about how to solve problems and manage projects.

In this article we are going to look at what you need to know to install Linux, whatever distribution you choose.