Stories by: Alastair Cousins

Much more powerful than a Windows batch file, shell scripts can be used to run multiple tasks. Here's a brief introduction.

Taking Linux and installing it on an alternative hardware platform may not be easy, but you can learn a lot from the experience.

It may lack an all-in-one solution like Apple's iPhoto, but there are tools that make using a digital camera with Linux easy.

Keeping your Linux system up to date with the latest security fixes and software updates can be a real pain. But it doesn't have to be.

Microsoft Exchange is a standard groupware platform in many corporate environments, but it needn't be limited to just Windows.

Not all digital TV cards are sup­ported by Linux, but the Hauppauge NOVA-T is. What's more, it's the only one to allow digital TV streaming across a network.

Changing your operating system from Windows to Linux can be a traumatic process. Not only is Linux a completely new system to learn, but many mainstream applications won't run on it. A solution to this is Codeweavers' Crossover Office, a tool that allows you to run many major Windows applications, such as Microsoft Office, on the Linux OS. Based on WINE (www.winehq.com), Crossover Office uses the WINE compatibility layer to run Windows applications natively - rather than in an emulation mode - so you don't need Windows installed. A 30-day trial version is available for download from www.codeweavers.com.

Lycoris Desktop/LX is a distribution of Linux aimed firmly at desktop users, especially those migrating from Windows to Linux for the first time. The distribution fits on a single CD and includes all of the basic applica-tions needed for day-to-day desktop use.

FNS (Network File System) is a protocol used by UNIX/Linux computers to share disks across a network. Similar to the Common Internet File Services (CIFS) protocol used by Windows, NFS is older and more light-weight, and performs much more efficiently on UNIX and Linux systems. This month I'll be showing you how to share a directory on a Linux server using NFS, and how to mount the directory on a Linux client.

ZipSlack is a tiny Linux distribution designed to fit on a single 100MB Zip disk and is based on one of the oldest Linux distributions, Slackware Linux. It feels a lot like an older version of UNIX, which means that it is missing the user-friendly GUI configuration tools included with most modern distributions. However, attention has been paid to organising the system in a simple, easy-to-configure state. ZipSlack doesn't hold your hand, but it's great to play around with in order to learn how a Linux system is built.

Open source software gives you the ability to compile your own software, something not possible with other operating systems such as Windows and the off-the-shelf software that runs on it. Compiling software allows you to optimise it for your own hardware — improving performance and ensuring efficient use of system resources, such as memory. There is one drawback to compiling software, however: it takes a long time. For example, compiling a large program such as XFree86 can take several hours, and if you’re a software developer, you could potentially be wasting a good part of a day waiting for the latest compile of your source code to complete.