Don Marti Issue #79, November 2000 A $70 CPU may be all that you need for responsive word processing, photo editing, and coding. We take a first look at AMD’s Duron, an excellent choice for midrange desktop Linux machines.           I have seen the future of desktop Linux systems, and its name is Duron. A lot ...

Don Marti Issue #79, November 2000 We went to hardware experts to find the best and fastest components for building your own Linux workstation. Here’s how to make a responsive system with high-performance 3-D, fast disk, lush sound and the little things to keep it trouble-free. In 1996, Eric Raymond wrote a popular article for LJ called “Building the Perfect ...

Don Marti Issue #79, November 2000 If you’re on a shopping trip for PC hardware, and you come across this magazine in your favorite computer store, read the hardware articles before you hit the aisles. A man went to the doctor and said, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “Well, don’t do that, then,” said the doctor. Simple but ...

Best of Technical Support Various Issue #78, October 2000 Our experts answer your technical questions. Dependencies and Libraries Recently, I downloaded a Linux application and when I tried installing it, I encountered an “unsatisfied dependencies” error message in the package manager. Where do you go for missing Linux libraries and how do you install them? —Kelvin L. Barnes, Kelvin.Barnes@worldnet.att.net If ...

Don Marti Issue #78, October 2000 If you read nothing else this month, read Mick Bauer’s article about securing your name server. If you read nothing else this month, read Mick Bauer’s article about securing your name server (see page 92). Vulnerabilities in old versions of the name server software BIND are the number-one security problem on Linux systems. If ...

Mick Bauer Brenno de Winter Issue #78, October 2000 Improve your site’s e-mail hygiene and make life difficult for spammers and hackers. E-mail is easily the most popular and important Internet service today, which has made it a popular target of cyber-criminals and spam-happy miscreants. Adding to the problem is the inescapable reality that configuring sendmail, the most commonly used ...

Michael D. Bauer Issue #78, October 2000 Decreasing the vulnerability of your DNS server is largely a matter of staying current and private. In the SANS Institute’s recent consensus document “How to Eliminate the Ten Most Critical Internet Security Threats” (www.sans.org/topten.htm), the number-one category of vulnerabilities reported by survey participants was BIND weaknesses. BIND, of course, is the open-source software ...

Bobby S. Wen Issue #78, October 2000 Armed with Linux and open-source tools, you can even keep an ISP secure. As an ISP, we are the most vulnerable to attack because of the open nature of our networks. Unlike corporate networks, which can limit access, and can backtrack users, we have to continuously monitor for attacks and, more importantly, successful ...

Best of Technical Support Various Issue #65, September 1999 Our experts answer your technical questions. Adding New Users I am having extreme difficulty adding users on Red Hat 5.1. I’ve used various methods to add them to my system via the adduser command and through various X control-panel programs. When I add them, everything seems to go well, and they ...

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 ...