Going Embedded and Going Old School

Welcome, everyone, to a new monthly column that will highlight and point to articles, reviews, HOWTOs and other useful and fun features on the Linux Journal web site.

We recently established a new Embedded article category for web articles that coincides with the new Embedded section that debuted in the August 2002 issue. The first article to post in this new web category is Guylhem Aznar's “Applications for the Sharp Zaurus”, which offers an extensive discussion about installing software on the Zaurus PDA. Guylhem also explains how you can sync data, flash the ROM and get on the Internet. For the full story, go to www.linuxjournal.com/article/5902.

Although the DeCSS legal battle over DVD encryption left many people believing DVD playback applications for Linux were nonexistent, in “GNU/Linux DVD Player Review”, Jonathan Kent provides an overview of four applications for this purpose: Xine, VideoLAN Client, MPlayer and Ogle. In addition to DVD playback, some encrypted and some not, several of these applications are extendable to much more than DVD formats; a few plugins or downloaded libraries can get you far. Learn how at www.linuxjournal.com/article/5644.

On a more old-school note, Jim Hatridge undertook the project of adding his wife's “new” Compaq DeskPro 386/25e (to be fair, it is new compared to the 1987 XT it replaced) to their home network. The challenges were numerous—she runs MS-DOS 5.0, but wanted only open-source software used—but using XFS and pcnfsd, some batch files and Samba, Jim was able to set up his machine as a fileserver to her machine. Then it was on to the next challenge—getting the 386 on the Internet. To see how that turned out and how you could set up something similar, go to www.linuxjournal.com/article/5837.

When it comes to putting articles on the web site, it's hard to gauge how readers will respond. Therein lies the beauty of the Comments section, where readers can post their opinions about the article's topic, debate some detail, point out something that was overlooked (or wrong) and add their own experiences. We were a bit surprised to see how Paul Barry's article “Perceptions of the Linux OS among Undergraduate System Administrators” took off with comments. Maybe we all felt a little dismayed that the next generation of programmers and system administrators were recycling the same “Linux is too hard to install” recitations. Take a look at what readers' responses were at www.linuxjournal.com/article/5650.

We get a lot of submissions for Linux Journal, and due to space limitations in print, many helpful tutorials, reviews and news items appear on the web site instead. Articles are available on the site dating back to 1994, and new ones are posted every day.