This nice warm October month has been subject to an unusually high concentration of Linux conferences -- all at the same time. It started with the www.LinuxWorldExpo.de in Frankfurt, Germany, from October 5th to October 7th. Linus was there but he did not give any key note speech. Next was www.linux2000.nl in Ede, the Netherlands (9/10th of October). Here the key note speech was given by Eric Raymond. The last one in the row was the Atlanta Linux Showcase & Conference, www.linuxshowcase.org October 10-14, 2000. Shortly before these three was the linuxtag.de, at the beginning of July.
Each of them attracted quite high number of visitors. LinuxFocus was at the linux2000.nl, probably the smallest of these 3 October events. I made some photos which you can find >here<. It was the first time that I saw Eric Raymond. His speeches are really good. If you have a chance to hear him somewhere ... I can recommend it. What I really love about these events is not so much the big business that you can find on every commercial fare, but rather the passion and enthusiasm of all the Linux fans coming to these events. The news papers concentrate these days a lot on the "drama and conflict" between Windows and Linux, but dramatic stories are just an old recipe for writing articles in the papers. Linux is not just another operating system. It is much more. It's a whole community of fans and users. I hope that we are able preserve this enthusiastic spirit and the community.

Software Development

• An introduction to Tk , by Charles Vidal
  
  Tk is the graphical toolkit from Tcl. It is very popular and has been ported to many other programming and scripting languages.

Applications

• Dicovering Ted , by André Pascual
  
  Ted is a very nice and light weight word processor.

Forum

• Once upon a time... or commercial Unix vs free Unix and more , by Georges Tarbouriech
  
  Some interesting thought about the history of Unix and Linux.

System Administration

• xinetd , by Frédéric Raynal
  
  xinetd is an advanced version inetd and can improve the security of your Linux system significantly.

• NFS - Network File System , by Frédéric Raynal
  
  This is an introduction to NFS, a network files system which became over time the standard network files system for Unix.

• High Availability systems under Linux , by Atif Ghaffar
  
  How to build High Availability into a mission critical systems running Linux

UNIX Basics

• GNU file utilities , by Manuel Muriel Cordero
  
  Manuel presents the commands from the GNU file utilities, a set of standard commands available with every Unix system. The article shows how you can be very productive using these commands.

The LinuxFocus Tip

Where was this web page? Hmmmm, I had a link to it in my Netscape bookmarks ..... but I have 250 book marks. ... It was something like "focus" and had to do with Linux....
Has this ever happened to you? Here comes a little perl script called showbook.
Save it as showbook and type chmod 755 showbook to make it executable.

showbook focus