LinuxFocus May 2000 issue

Everyone goes free! Major operating systems vendors are releasing their systems for free. Free does of course mean different things here. When BeOS says free (www.be.com/products/freebeos) then that means free of charge. For the Realtime Operating System QNX free is more than free of charge. Their OS is now open source (www.qnx.com/news/pr/apr24_00-openpl.html). At Sun Microsystems it was since some time already possible to get a copy free of charge (solaris 7 for free) they will continue that and make also the source code for solaris 8 available (see www.sun.com/developers/tools/solaris). Apple seems also to have plans to open "a very small" part of its code (see e.g Darwin Open Source SDK).
Is this a new way of "selling" software? .... or is it just a fashion? Are these firms really hoping to improve their code by making it available to the public or is it a means to get new customers? In any case this new "free" is certainly a result of the growing importance of Linux.

The Articles

Applications

Mastering the VI editor , by Ben Y. Yoshino
The VI editor is a screen-based editor used by many Unix users. The VI editor has powerful features to aid programmers, but many beginning users avoid using VI because the different features overwhelm them. This tutorial is written to help beginning users.
Arkeia, a commercial and professional network backup solution , by Georges Tarbouriech
Arkeia 4.2.3-1 is the latest version of a commercial and professional network backup solution from Knox Software.
Making PDF documents with DocBook , by Egon Willighagen
This article describes how you can use DocBook to generate PDF documents. It shows how to edit DocBook articles and translate them into PDF documents.

System Administration

Sendmail and Fetchmail: A local mail server , by John Perr
Sendmail is a powerful but complex software. This article explains how to configure sendmail and fetchmail for use on a typical home computer.
Building DHCP automatically , by Eric Seigne
This article explains how to easily configure a DHCP server.
Setting up IP-Masquerading , by Guido Socher
IP-Masquerading provides the possibility to connect several computers to the Internet using a computer running Linux with just one public IP address.

Webdesign

Apache I , by Charles Vidal
This article is an introduction to the HTTP protocol it takes also a look at thehistory of the World Wide Web.

Directory index for persons translating this issue.