The final release of Vim 7 is just around the corner, and it brings a number of new features to the venerable editor, including spell checking, omni completion for several programming and markup languages, tab pages, undo branches, and several other features that are worth upgrading for. To test Vim, I compiled the 7.0f beta release on Ubuntu Breezy and used it for my day-to-day work for several d

� Creating and reading PDF files in Linux is easy, but manipulating existing PDF files is a little trickier. Countless applications enable you to fiddle with PDFs, but it's hard to find a single application that does everything. The PDF Toolkit (pdftk) claims to be that all-in-one solution. It's the closest thing to Adobe Acrobat that I've found for Linux. � � Developer Sid Steward describes pdftk

The multimedia capabilities of the handheld electronic devices we carry has increased over the last few years. Devices such as the iPod and even several cell phones have become music-oozing gadgets for people on the go. While you can copy your favourite MP3s directly into a handheld device, DVDs (if you have the right to copy them) take some effort, due to the fact that the devices have tiny scree

The ubiquitous Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP) combination powers many interactive Web sites and projects. It's not at all unusual for demand to exceed the capacity of a single LAMP-powered server over time. You can take load off by moving your database to a second server, but when demand exceeds a two-server solution, it's time to think cluster. A LAMP cluster is not the Beowulf

I started experimenting with Linux for fun, first with Slackware, but in the last few years more with Debian and its derivative distributions. Lately I've been using Linux increasingly in my job. As I've gotten more experienced with Linux, I've started teaching Linux courses to colleagues. Connectivity and fast package and file management are important components in my administration toolbox. Open

By Peter Enseleit¬�� Before evaluating the Linux audio players, I considered what I wanted from them. I listen to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music files, CDs, MP3 streaming Internet radio stations, and podcasts. Someday I may also want access to FLAC music files, RealMedia and Windows Media streaming radio, iPod compatibility, and Windows audio file formats (WAV, WMA, and ASF). My test system is a Toshiba

Live CDs do a great job of advertising Linux distributions. In addition to general-purpose live CD distributions, there are lots of task-oriented live CDs. Wouldn't it be great if you could carry multiple live CDs on one DVD disc? Nautopia.net has put up a script that you can use to make a custom DVD to boot multiple live CDs. The Nautopia script currently supports Knoppix, Kanotix, Kurumin, Livux

Encrypted filesystems may be overkill for family photos or your résumé, but they make sense for network-accessible servers that hold sensitive business documents, databases that contain credit-card information, offline backups, and laptops. EncFS and Loop-AES, which are both released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), are two approaches to encrypting Linux filesystems. I'll compare the tw

The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest programs. Fedora Core 5 (FC5) is slated for release next week. Like earlier Fedora releases, it includes both recent versions of desktop programs and ma

For these tests, I dug out Igor, an old PC that had been collecting dust in my closet. Igor is a Pentium II 233MHz machine with 64MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM drive, a 3GB hard drive, and an integrated ATI 3D Rage Pro video card with 4MB of video RAM. You can run Linux on older and slower machines, but this is the most under-powered machine I had available. Next, I selected a handful of lightweight Lin

Over the last few years, the number of Linux music players has mushroomed, providing a variety of applications to suit different people. I've tried several Linux music players since I started using the operating system, but none of them were perfect for my requirements. I recently tried out an increasingly popular music player, Banshee, and have found a new personal favourite. Written using GTK# a

Most Linux-based distributions for the masses have either GNOME, KDE, or both desktops, yet the startup times and resources required by both GNOME and KDE make them unsuitable for old or lower-end hardware. My quest for a standards-compliant, fast, lightweight, and extensible window manager led me to Openbox. Openbox complies with both the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) and

User level: Advanced Other system administrators have fantastic toolboxes for their work. My tools consist of two everyday programs: OpenSSH and the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash). No other tool, whether console-based or GUI, has been so consistently useful to me as these two programs. As a system administrator, I have used OpenSSH's piping abilities more times than I can remember. The typical ssh

The response to my recent sysadmin toolbox article has been overwhelming. By far, readers' number one suggestion was to replace Telnet with netcat. Here then is an introduction to netcat for Linux users who may not be familiar with the "TCP/IP Swiss Army knife." In the simplest terms, netcat is a utility that reads and writes data across the network. As you probably know already, you can write to