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Finding things is the #1 problem in this here computerized age. It's easier than ever to squirrel away terabytes of data. But then what? How to sort through all that lot to ever find anything? And why should we have to? In the olden days, file clerks, librarians, and secretaries took care of data storage and retrieval. Then along came computers, and suddenly it was decreed that file clerks, librarians, and secretaries were no longer necessary; that mere mortals like managers and sysadmins and programmers and other ordinary, unassuming humble personages could simply order their computers to do the work.

Oh the weather outside is freezing, but the warmth from your monitor is making it feel like you are in the tropics. Christmas is coming up fast and this blaze of heat is making it difficult for you to get into the spirit of uncontrollable shopping madness. The clock is ticking and you're still at the keyboard looking for inspiration. Well, everyone, I've got just what you need.

Computer Associates International Inc is taking a cautious approach to open-sourcing further products, in the wake of releasing the Ingres database.

I'm not upgrading my Fedora Core 2 machine to Core 3, even though the new version has been out for a couple of months. There's not anything wrong with FC3 itself, it's just that system upgrades are both a blessing and a curse. I guess that's one of those dirty little secrets every Linux user knows, but that none of us talks about.

At this point in the development of SELinux, it's common for policies to contain small bugs that cause operations to fail when applications or programs are used in unusual ways unanticipated by policy developers. As an SELinux administrator, one of the most frequent SELinux policy customizations you're likely to perform is adding permissions to coax the security engine into accepting an operation. Let's consider an actual situation based on Fedora Core 2's SELinux implementation and see how it's resolved. The procedure we'll follow isn't the only procedure or best procedure. Creating new policies typically entails a generous dollop of troubleshooting, which tends to be relatively unstructured. So rather than see our procedure as the universal norm, you should see it as merely an illustrative example.

Mandrakesoft recently made a move into offering pre-configured Linux-based file and e-mail servers to small and midsize businesses. The products are being offered through Linux consulting and services firm Connect Computing, and are aimed at enticing small business users off of Windows-based servers and onto Linux.

As reported earlier, the long-awaited Mozilla Firefox print advertisement appeared in today's New York Times. The striking two-page ad ran a little later than originally planned: the team were not happy with the early designs and a late decision was made to move to two pages. The huge number of donor names (all of which had to be verified) and software rendering problems also contributed to the delay.

Sure, you could just pick up a newspaper or visit a Web site to read your favourite comic strips. But what if you paper doesn't carry all of your favorites? What if you're traveling and don't want to miss a day? In that case, you can turn to an open source application to collect and (re)post online comic strips.

At Red Hat Inc.'s headquarters in North Carolina, a quote from Mahatma Gandhi adorns a wall: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." That seems appropriate for a company which started as a guerrilla movement among technophiles but has now blossomed into a full-blown conflict. Nowhere is that conflict fiercer than China. Red Hat's announcement in mid-November that it was opening an office in Beijing was "three and a half years in the making," according to the Linux firm's CEO, Chairman and President Matthew Szulik, a man who sounds like he's ready to rally the troops.

There are commercial-grade sniffers available from manufacturers such as Fluke, Network General, and others. While these hardware tools can provide a much deeper level of analysis, you can build an inexpensive network sniffer using open source software and a low-end Intel PC. This chapter reviews several open source Ethernet sniffers.

An interview with Bill McCarty, author of a new book on SELinux, about the potential SELinux holds for secure computing.

The platform I currently use daily is Windows XP Professional. Now, before you burn me at the stake for heresy, let me illustrate why it works so well for me, an avid user of open source software.

The SCO Group's high-profile legal actions targeting Linux faded from prominence in 2004, but they left a legacy: scrutiny of the intellectual-property foundations of open-source software.

A new survey finds that Linux is continuing to gain acceptance in the enterprise, especially in the area of messaging. Osterman Research Inc. interviewed IT decision makers at 103 companies and found that 55% would consider switching to Linux messaging over the next two years, as long as there were no major disruptions to end users during the migration process.

Ever since Novell acquired SUSE, the Linux community has been wondering when and how SUSE Linux would change. Novell's release of the Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) struck fear and confusion into many long-time SUSE users and Novell watchers.

For new Linux users, the hardest thing can be trying to get an answer to one simple question: "Which Linux distribution should I use?" Back in the world of that other OS, the choice is pretty simple since you had no choice, or as Henry Ford might have put it, you can have "any color you want as long as it's black". In the Linux world, you can get black, yellow, red, blue, green, and every color in between. I personally think it is a wonderful thing that so many Linux distributions exist. Aside from creating a rich OS landscape, it furthers creativity and fosters innovation in software design. This can only be a good thing. While this makes for a colorful world, it can be very confusing for the new user.

The latest version of NetBSD has been ported to additional environments, including an open-source virtual machine monitor

The Linux Game Tome (LGT), a.k.a. The Happy Penguin, is an ever-growing compendium of computer games that are either specifically designed to run on Linux, or have been ported to Linux.

Here we are, December of 2004. Roughly 6 years after the government brought suit against Microsoft for blatant anti-trust violation. They had gotten into trouble for bolting Internet Explorer into Windows 98, remember?

Last week I was talking with a small business IT consultant who switches clients' servers to Linux (and Samba) all day long without any problems, but finds few clients interested in moving their desktops to Linux. The reason? "QuickBooks," he said. While there are many small business accounting packages that happily run on Linux, including GnuCash, Quasar, SQL-Ledger, and AccPac, QuickBooks dominates this market. And its loyal users don't want to switch to another package even if it's just as good as -- or possibly better than -- QuickBooks.