Real World Computing
All tooled up
There's even a move afoot for people to put Linux distributions onto USB flash drives (look at www.slax.org), but we've found that support for booting from USB is still spotty at best, so we'll stick with the CD approach for now, at least.
Mozilla Firefox
Last, but definitely not least, if you're a system administrator who has to deal with users on Windows machines, install Mozilla Firefox on every one of them and then remove the shortcut to Internet Explorer. Firefox, as you probably already know, is a standards-compliant, super-quick, extremely powerful web browser that works exceptionally well as a replacement for Internet Explorer, while having far fewer security vulnerabilities. The standards-compliant bit is particularly important if you're developing an intranet for your company, as IE is just plain broken in all sorts of ways when it comes to supporting Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Firefox complies properly with the CSS standard and works identically on all platforms. Another plus is that its plug-in architecture has allowed people to create some truly fantastic add-ons: the Developer Tools extension, for example, is indispensable if you're a web developer.
Go on - dump Internet Explorer and put Firefox on all your users' machines instead. They'll thank you for it, and you'll thank yourself too when you don't have to install updates on every machine in the company after yet another security hole is uncovered. Incidentally, if you have users who are comfortable only with Internet Explorer, you can always replace Firefox's icon with the standard IE one and your users will probably never notice what you've done.
Where to get it
Amanda: www.amanda.org
ClamAV: www.clamav.com
Ethereal: www.ethereal.com
Firefox: www.getfirefox.com
Knoppix: www.knoppix.org
Nagios: www.nagios.org
Windows Inventory: winventory.sourceforge.net
VNC: There are several versions of VNC; try www.tightvnc.com, or for Macs try www.geekspiff.com for Chicken of the VNC.
I Fink, therefore I am
The more observant among you may have noticed that the screenshot of Ethereal was created on a Mac. But how did we manage to compile and install this ex-Windows-dependent program without spending hours of time and effort? It was quite simple, actually, thanks to a package manager called Fink, which has been around since the early days of Mac OS X and which is now even better than ever. The goal of the Fink project (which can be found at fink.sourceforge.net) is to port as many open-source packages as possible to the Mac. Sure, you can just download the source code yourself and try to compile it, but the folk behind the Fink project almost certainly have a lot more experience at doing that sort of thing than you and, anyway, why spend hours battling with recalcitrant Make files and other Unix arcana when it's all been done for you?
