Ultimate Is in the Eye of the BogoMip Counter

In this year's Ultimate Linux Box article, LJ Technical Editor Don Marti explains how you too can be the first on your block to build a machine that develops over 9,000 BogoMips. But now that machines with processor speeds of 1-2GHz, and even multiple processors, and gigabytes of RAM are quite common, building the Ultimate Linux Box isn't only about sticking the fastest and the biggest together (although that's still a lot of fun). Therefore, in addition to making recommendations on cards, motherboards, hard drives, etc., Don takes a look at some of the finer points of box building, such as box real estate, the advantages of building over buying and cooling. Though it's certainly a labor of love, Don has been working with vendors and others for many months now in order bring you building advice that has real value, whether you're building a computer from top-of-the-line components or one that represents a more modest budget.

Speaking of modest budgets, in Cooking with Linux this month, Marcel takes an alternative view of the idea of the Ultimate Linux Box, showing how you can obtain greater speed from humble resources by lightening the software load. He samples some lightweight software that includes a window manager with abundant features, a web browser and office software that manage to run all together in less than 32MB of memory.

Last month we ran an update to Charles Curley's November 2000 article on bare metal recovery. This month, Joey Hess shows how to avoid conscious backups all together by keeping not only your projects, but your entire home directory, in CVS. Joey admits the idea is a sure sign of an unbalanced mind, but that it also has many advantages, not the least of which is distributed backups.

Also in this issue, we have a report from John “maddog” Hall on his recent visit to the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil to attend the Fórum Internacional de Software Livre. Jon discovered that in Brazil they are taking the concept of world domination quite seriously, and the state of Rio Grande do Sul has had laws favoring the use of open-source software by government and business for some time now. His article points out a number of highly worthy free software projects.