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Man, the days can slip right on past when you're fully engaged in the world of technology.

Today's issue is, obviously, a day late. There were a couple of reasons for that. One of which everyone knows and will go undiscussed in this forum. The other was the arrival of a new tool to my desktop at work on Wednesday, more than ten days earlier than expected.

And tonight is the culmination of the work of a few nights in putting that new toy in shape. This issue of Penguin Shell is live from the new Dell Inspiron 1100 provided by my employer for their one and only true road warrior.

It's been an interesting few days installing and configuring the Dell to my tastes and needs. It's also been a pretty good lesson in the subtle difficulties of living at the "bleeding edge." The Inspiron has only been on the market for a bit less than a month. Finding the right Linux distro and configuring this "still smells like packing peanuts" tool was a bit more difficult that I expected.

A bit about the laptop first. With a 14.1" screen, a 2 Ghz Celeron processor, 256 Mb RAM, and a 40 Gb hard drive, it's well-equipped for my mobile needs. It also includes a DVD/CD-ROM/CD burner combo, a built-in NIC, built-in modem, and a very stylish iBook-like blue cover. As it turns out, I was mistaken in my belief that I'd ordered the internal wireless card. That become one of the difficult configuration issues of the past few days.

The touch of the Inspiron is a bit clunky. Though it's been awhile since I've spent any time on a laptop, I consider myself reasonably proficient with the smaller keyboard and the touchpad. The Inspiron provides a bit more of a challenge in those areas than I expected. The placement of the touchpad is very close to the keyboard. Close enough, in fact, that I find myself moving the cursor with my palms when typing. That's a bit annoying and inconvenient. The keyboard itself is a bit fragile feeling, even for a laptop. Despite those small ergonomic problems, the Inspiron has the rugged yet sleek feel that I really look for in a laptop. Overall, it's comfortable to use.

The configuration was, as I've noted, a two-day task. I landed on Mandrake 9.1, release candidate 2 for the distro. That was, in part, because of Mary's raves, because of my Dad's good words about what he'd seen in testing, and because I'd had good experience with Mandrake on my last laptop, a Sony Vaio.

Not having ordered the internal wireless, I picked up a Linksys WPC11. Though the Mandrake install went well, the PCMCIA services aren't loaded by default in this release candidate. That seemed odd, as it's a pretty well-known capability.

Not having spent much time configuring PCMCIA, I ran into one brick wall after another. Finally, Thursday night, I came across the answers I needed on LinuxQuestions.org. With a kernel rebuild and a download of the pcmcia-cs package from Sourceforge (including a very careful read of the included HOWTO), I hung the laptop from the wireless network at roughly 9:30 pm Thursday night. That makes four machines on the network at home: Cerebellum, Cerebrum, Cortex, and Callosum. One step closer to a full brain.

Overall, I think both Mandrake and Dell have hit it right with these releases. The Inspiron 1100, configured as above, comes in at just under $1100 - a pretty fair price for the mobile computing power. Mandrake 9.1 has a full range of new and improved features and packages and, (but for my occasional operator head space) the easy installation routine we've come to expect from our friends in France. This full release is scheduled for mid-April. I think it's found a laptop home in my house.

That's it for another week. Enjoy your weekend, and I'll see you here on Tuesday.

Happy just sittin' here in my tux,              
Tony Steidler-Dennison       

GnomeTWEAK

Tweaking Your Desktop Environment

When you get right down to it, the desktop environment for Linux is really the ultimate tweak. Linux's predecessors weren't designed with a desktop in mind. In fact, there was no such thing as a desktop when UNIX was created. There's been much talk about the Linux desktop lately (as there's likely to be for some time to come), and desktop environments continue to make nice strides in look and feel and functionality.

Today's GnomeTWEAK takes a look at some improvements to the desktop environment that's become the most popular in the Linux world - KDE. With the release of version 3.1 in January, KDE added some significant improvements. The 3.1.1 maintenance release from March 20 cleans up a few bugs and makes even more advances in this fine desktop environment.

KDE 3.1 is shot through with improvements starting with the areas related to personal information management. KMail added several critical security enhancements. KOrganizer was released with a new plugin that allowed connections with MSExchange servers. Apps using the common address book picked up vCard functionality. And the Palm syncronization piece added conduits for AvantGo and KAddressBook, among others.

Konqueror, KDE's unified web browser and file manager, added tabbed browsing, session management, a download manager, and secure remote file management.

In multimedia applications, KDE 3.1 introduced users to KDEMultimedia, a video decoder based on xine. Noatun, the KDE media player, added a lyrics plugin. And KView, the image viewing program, added slide show support.

The heart of KDE is the desktop. This is the place where the most significant advances were made with KDE 3.1. With significant changes to the Panel, the search functions, Konqueror, and the Control Center, the KDE desktop became both more functional and easier on the eyes.

It's the ultimate tweak to your Linux system - a well-oiled and highly functional desktop environment. KDE certainly presents that and more. Gnome is still out there and making great strides but, for now, KDE has become the leading desktop in the Linux world. I've become a convert myself.

Recommend It!
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GnomeCORE

Get your favorite Linux flavor on CD: Pick your favorite Linux flavor and get it on CD for as low as $1.95. Find Linux gear, books, and software for Linux at Linux Central . Check out the selection today!

Sometimes it's tough to realize how much is going on behind the scenes in you Linux system. The processor churns away. Instructions are shuffled in and out of RAM. Your every keystroke and mouse movement is processed. Aside from all the obvious processes, it's interesting to take a look at the "stuff behind the scenes," like the real core Linux functions of services.

Linux services start when you boot your machine. They provide such computing-critical functions as scheduled operations, card bus processing, keyboard mappings, network services, sound, and power management, among many others. Let's take a brief look at some of the many services that start when your Linux system boots.

• apmd : Advanced Power Management Daemon
• atd : daemon for the at command. Runs "one-off" scheduled operations outside the cron daemon, as set by the command line.
• crond : provides a daemon to perform scheduled operations without user interaction
• daytime : provides the system's notion of the time of day
• echo : displays a line of text
• fam : the File Alteration Monitor. This server tracks changes to the filestystem, passing the information along to the appropriate application.
• keytable : provides the appropriate keyboard mapping
• partmon : monitors the contents of a partition, preventing writing 0 byte files when the partition is full
• random : random number generator
• syslog : a system-wide logging utility
• xinetd : the Extended Internet Services Daemon

Many of these services are part of the System V set of tools. System V was yet another UNIX flavor. System V was developed by AT&T. It's best features were later incorporated into both the SunOS and Linux, among others. Many of these services were among the best of System V.

So, when it looks like your system is just sitting there doing nothing, don't be fooled. The services are chugging away, providing critical features and functions.

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GnomeFILE

SpamAssassin 2.51

http://spamassassin.org/

"SpamAssassin is a mail filter that uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering. It provides a command line tool to perform filtering, a client-server system to filter large volumes of mail, and Mail::SpamAssassin, a set of Perl modules that implement a Mail::Audit plugin -- allowing SpamAssassin to be used in a Mail::Audit filter, a spam-protection proxy POP/IMAP server, or almost anywhere."

Recommend It!
Send us a GnomeFILE suggestion

GnomeVOICE

New Zaurus
Scribbled by Josh Morris

"The 5600 actually has less RAM (32MB) but a lot more flash (64MB). From what I've heard at the Zaurus boards, the ROM will be divided in half. Half will be unwriteable and reserved for the OS while the other half will be what the RAM disk was on the 5500. Overall, the same room to install apps and the same RAM to run them in. The advantage is that you won't have to reload everything (from backup of course) after you let your battery run down. If it turns out it has more than 32MB of writeable ROM, then I might look into upgrading my 5500, but otherwise I'll stick with what I have. Crow's ROM (or OZ if I'm feeling frisky) makes up for the lack of installable space without having to worry about symlinking to the SD card and such.

"Here's looking forward to the next version of tkcMail with profile support so I can use more than one SMTP server!"

Recommend It!
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GnomeCLICK

The Trusted Debian Project

http://www.trusteddebian.org/

"The Trusted Debian project aims to create a highly secure but usable Linux platform. To accomplish this, the project will use currently available security solutions for Linux (like kernel patches, compiler patches, security related programs and techniques) and knit these together to a highly secure Linux platform."

"This project was started because I was not content with the current state of Linux security. New security breaches are published every day. These breaches are mostly caused by human mistakes. Every human makes mistakes and there is no way to prevent these mistakes from happening. So security breaches are here to stay. Auditing and patching source code, like the OpenBSD folks have been doing for years now, is good and necessary, but it is not sufficient. Audited and patched code contains less bugs, but still contains bugs. So besides code audits and patching you need other security measures, to decrease the impact of these remaining bugs."

Recommend It!
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