LinuxFocus: “In this article Tux, the Linux mascot will guide the first time tourist on her first tour through his native land. Tux will explain some concepts that
probably are new for the tourists and give them tips and hints on how to go on to explore Linux on their own afterwards.”

Advogato: “California appellate court has ruled that code is code is constitutionally protected free speech, and that the First Amendment’s protections trump trade secrets legislation. The case is DVD-CCA v. Bunner. Bunner published DeCSS on his Web site, the DVD-CCA brought suit against him, and Bunner won. However, a higher court still has to rule on MPAA v. 2600. If you haven’t joined the EFF yet, this is a good time to do so.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, advisories were released for squid, kernel, uucp, webalizer, htdig, util-linux, teTeX, libdb, and the Red Hat printing system. Vendors include
Caldera, EnGarde, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE.”

DaemonNews: “During installation it is important to size filesystems so that we won’t be forced to resize them later. However, it often appears with time that one of the partitions is too small. Until today it was impossible to
expand the size of a filesystem. FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE comes with a new utility: growfs(8). This program permits us to enlarge, in certains conditions, the size of an existing ufs filesystem.”

theHighlander writes: “Comdex appears the latest victim of the combination of a recession, the terrorist attacks and fear of being a terrorist target itself. With companies laying off people left-and-right and in addition to economic concerns and expected low return on investment, companies and people are pulling out of Comdex for an even more basic reason: Comdex itself may well be a target of terrorism. Read on…”

Kelly McNeill writes “In this age of viruses, hacking, terrorism and paranoia, people are becoming more and more interested in finding ways to protect themselves and keep their data private on the Internet and elsewhere. The unfortunate thing is that few people are aware that they are passing their personal information back and forth over the Internet in the clear for anyone to intercept. Securing your network activity is not difficult, but it does require an awareness of how certain protocols work. This article will attempt to address these protocols and situations and suggest ways of adding security.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
“There are far better pages scattered around out there, but this is the page I wish I’d found to begin with; a linux newbie guide based on a RedHat6 workstation install.” That’s lifted right off the front page of this week’s review site, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.There is some good, basic hand-holding information here, stuff that a novice might spend a lot of time either searching for, or asking irritating questions about. Although it is Red Hat specific, those who choose another distribution will still find answers to questions.

“Before You Begin,” for instance, throws out a few hints like, “verify that your hardware is compatible,” (with a link to Red Hat’s hardware compatibility page). Here’s another clue: If you’re installing Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, or the like, they also have lists of hardware compatibility published on their Web sites.

Another clue: “The documentation can be confusing. Some outdated. Even if not inaccurate there may be newer and easier ways to do things. Choose a well reputed distribution and stick to their documentation
before looking elsewhere.” This is true, seems simple, but is not so obvious to a newbie.

Here’s a good, Red Hat specific hint: “The installation does not check for disk space. If you choose more rpm packages than there’s room for, the install simply hangs. If you install a lot of rpm’s, you need more space in /usr than the 500
Mb’s the Guide mention. I stuffed 700 Mb in /usr in no time.” I was surprised by this, and would assume that RedHat has corrected this bug since we’re on the 7.2 release.

And this: “Rule of the thumb says the size of your swapdisk(s) should equal your RAM, and not be smaller than 16MB. Earlier versions of Linux didn’t accept swap disks bigger than 128MB and making several
swapdisks was a solution. Current Linux’es accept swapdisk over one gig. Note: New Linux kernels version 2.4.* should be given a swap-disk TWICE the amount of your physical RAM.”

”
For future flexibility: Do make /home a separate partition.”

Then we move into broader topics like disk naming conventions, being root, users and groups, X configuration, screenshots, and a whole lot more. Like I said, it’s a lot of information. And it’s all on one simple page — no fancy graphics, no intricate page navigation, no java script. Easy to search, easy to read, easy to find what you’re looking for. It really is everything you wish you knew before you started.

As an extra, added bonus, the author of this page has also created “KVirc Stuff,” “Mozilla5 Stuff,” “Games,” and “Hardware” information pages. Like the Linux page, they’re simple, straightfoward, and a pleasure to read. I recommend them.

CNet reports that Lexar has developed compact flash cards which can be written up to 50% faster than current flash cards.

Kelly McNeill writes “If Windows were a new hire, he (or she) would fail every employee review. New employee M. Windows would quickly be recognized as having poor attendance, turning in lousy expense reports and possessing no talent. Pity, then, that today’s information managers fail to recognize the “pot luck” they settle for every time they re-up for another round of Windows. The very same type of manager whose self-centered viewpoint is risk-wary is also the ideal target for the sly, smarmy, slick promotional ploys of Microsoft.”

Daemon News reports: “When there’s a problem on your system, or in your network, the first thing you check are system logs. You identify which system you should check, then locate the logfile. Sometimes you even have to check your syslog configuration, only to discover that what you are looking for is not even logged, due to a misconfiguration. You may also run ‘less’, ‘more’ and ‘grep’, to start digging into it. It’s nice when you find the answer to your problem in the last few lines of log, but what can you do about it?”