Travis Metcalfe Ed Nather Issue #65, September 1999 Astronomers at the University of Texas-Austin are using the ideas of Charles Darwin to learn about the interior of white dwarf stars—using a minimal parallel Linux cluster tailored specifically to their application. Astronomers worry about how stars work. Our current models describe stars as huge, hot gasballs, bloated and made luminous by ...

Marcel Gagné Issue #65, September 1999 Mr. Gagné provides us with several recipes from his famed French restaurant. Allo, and welcome to Chez Marcel, home of fine French Linux cooking. Please take a seat. If you have not already done so, I would like you to read this article with a somewhat exaggerated French accent since that is the way ...

Best of Technical Support Various Issue #64, August 1999 Our experts answer your technical questions. Problem Upgrading the Kernel I’m trying to upgrade to kernel 2.2.5. When I type mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.2.5.img 2.2.5, the system returns: mount: the kernel does not recognize /dev/loop0 as a block device Can't get a loopback device What should I do? What has gone wrong? —Mun ...

Roman Melnyk Issue #64, August 1999 A look at Linux in the Aerospace Training Industry. Have you ever wondered how full-flight simulators and CATS (computer-aided training systems, Figure 1) are made? The answer, as one might expect, is that they are made with a lot of high-tech hardware and a million lines of code. It is a true marvel of ...

Jeff Wall Issue #64, August 1999 A printing company finds Linux servers speed up their pre-press work. Recent testing of high-performance file-sharing tools for the Graphic Arts industry has shown Linux to be the top performer. We tested Linux against the Macintosh OS X Server, the Sun Solaris and the Windows NT server. Linux came out on top, yielding a ...

Glen Wiley Issue #64, August 1999 A tutorial designed to help you build your own GUI. This article is directed toward those who have spent their time in the pleasant arena of development and are finding it harder and harder to ignore the growth of graphical front-ends. My perspective is that of a developer of commercial UNIX applications distributed largely ...

Michael J. Hammel Issue #64, August 1999 A talk with the company who brings you the computer game Civilization: Call To Power. The sound of marching soldiers thunders through the cobbled streets as citizens bask in the glory of their triumphant leaders. No, this isn’t a post-election day Republican fantasy, it is just one of many scenes from the animated ...

Best of Technical Support Various Issue #63, July 1999 Our experts answer your technical questions. Linux General Question I am new to the Linux world and have what I think is a fairly simple question. I would like to know how to get information from a CD using the X Window System. Can you help me with this? —Anthony, DrexelDG@aol.com ...

Wolf-Rainer Novender Issue #63, July 1999 A look at an automatic circuit analysis program through engineering-based examples. SCEPTRE is an automatic circuit analysis program capable of determining initial condition, transient, frequency and steady-state response of electrical networks and dynamic systems. It is considered a general-purpose tool for engineers and can be used to assist in the design and analysis of ...

Laura Connor Charles B. Connor Issue #63, July 1999 How the geophysical industry is using Linux for processing of magnetometer data. Whether searching for gold or oil, or assessing the geologic hazards of a site, geophysics is a high-stakes business. Geophysical exploration involves learning more about the earth’s interior by making measurements at the surface using instruments such as seismometers, ...