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LinuxFocus January 2001 issue

Happy new millennium! [again :-) ]

World domination? What does it mean? Most people would probably say that this goal is reached when more than 50% of all computers are running on Linux. Which computers? Desktops, servers, embedded systems, all?

Another approach would be to say that the dominating Operating System is the standard Operating System. Hmmm, what is now a standard in this context? How about: A standard is a set of characteristics that everybody tries to implement in order to be standard compliant. Recently I heard a windows fanatic say that there are more similarities between Win2000 and Linux than between Win98 and Win2000. For Linux it could mean that competition has become tougher but it means also that Microsoft is trying to implement features that were previously only attributes of Linux and Unix in general.
Apple's OS X is very similar to Linux, not only from a conceptual point of view.
Last but not least there is this statement from Sun CEO Scott McNealy saying that "Solaris is our implementation of Linux". Think about it! A year ago nobody would have dreamed about such a statement. What is now world domination? I don't know, but I have the feeling that we are on the right track.

You might have noticed the PDA converter buttons in the corner of every new article. This makes it easy to read LinuxFocus at the bus stop, in the Underground, in the bathroom. The generated output should work with most PDA document readers (e.g Freeware iSilo, Open Source Gutenpalm). The converted pages should work on most PDAs, not only with Palm Pilots. Happy reading.

Graphics

• Gimp's tools: selection and color correction , by Yves Ceccone
  
  This article explains how to use Gimp's powerful selection mechanisms.

Hardware

• A shutdown button with LED's to connect to the RS232 interface , by Guido Socher
  
  In this article we design a little push button to connect to your server's serial. It can be used to shut the server down. This is useful for computers without a keyboard.

System Administration

• Automount and Autofs , by Frédéric Raynal
  
  Automount and autofs are powerful tools and ease file systems management.

• Security tools , by Georges Tarbouriech
  
  A good overview over important security tools for Linux.

• Multicast , by Angel Lopez
  
  This article is an introduction to multicast technologies on TCP/IP networks.

• Slackware 7.0 part II: Configuration Guide , by Jeffry Degrande
  
  After the installation in the first part, the author now describes some basic configuration tasks in his now favorite Linux distribution.

Software Development

• Avoiding security holes when developing an application - Part 1 , by Frédéric Raynal, Christophe Blaess and Christophe Grenier
  
  Useful hints to write more secure programs.

Webdesign

• Book review: HTML & XHTML , by Miguel A Sepulveda
  
  Review of a book on HTML & XHTML from O'Reilly.

Games

• Game Review - Tux Racer , by Harald Radke
  
  Tux Racer is a fast pace arcade game.

The LinuxFocus Tip

You want convert your old analog audio tapes into an audio CD? ....or just record your sister playing piano on audio CD-rom?

Here is how to do that under Linux. All you need is a recordable CD, a CDRW-drive, a sound card and the programs nrecord and cdrecord. nrecord is a utility to record analog sound to WAV files at a sample rate of 44100 in 16 bit stereo. This is exactly the format you need to make audio CD-ROMs. nrecord is part of a software package called wavnorm and is available from the author's home page (www.zog.net.au/computers/wavnorm) or from the LinuxFocus server (wavnorm-0.4.tar.gz was at print time the latest version).
With the help of nrecord you record each song into an own WAV file (e.g song01.wav, song02.wav ... etc). It is a good idea to give the files names which sort alphabetically in right order (the order in which you want them on the CD).
Next you just burn an audio CD-ROM using cdrecord. SCSI CDRW-drives are the best and the most easiest to use under Linux. IDE CDRW-drives work as well but the installation is a bit more complicated.
The command to write the CD is:

cdrecord  -v dev=0,4,0 speed=2 -pad -audio song*.wav

cdrecord -scanbus

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