Nearly all motherboards have a power management feature designed to power down the computer and put it into suspend mode. In real life, this feature does not always work. Linux has a software-based workaround for the dysfunctional suspend.

Commercial surveillance systems are expensive and typically involve maintenance agreements. I thought there must be a low-budget alternative.

In part two of this three-part series[1],Jason Walsh gets to some details on laying out a newspaper in Scribus.You’ll also learn about managing those tricky CMYK graphics files.

Most admins tend to use the shell, Perl,or Python if they need a system administration script. But there is no need for web programmers to learn another language just to script a routine task. PHP gives admins the power to program command-line tools and even complete web interfaces.

A genuine multitasking system like Linux runs many processes concurrently. Programs must compete for data access. Assigning locks to files ensures exclusive access and prevents the possibility of data.

Most web libraries make 90 percent of the job simple and the rest impossible. Rails,an open source framework programmed in Ruby,is flexible enough to succeed with that remaining 10 percent.

To get past a firewall and into a LAN,you need either a secret backdoor or a cooperative agent on the inside. A Jabber client on the LAN contacts a public Jabber server and wait for instructions trickling in as instant messages from its Internet buddies.

Mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts

add speed and simplicity to PC

operations. Mouse gestures used to

be the domain of Opera and Mozilla

users,but KHotKeys now brings them

to Konqueror for users of KDE 3.2 or

newer.You can even launch non-KDE

programs with KHotKeys.

Even the smallest desktop has room

for a panel. If your choice of a window

manager does not support a suitable

panel alternative,you can always add

a panel like SuxPanel. Suxpanel provides

many useful features for the

desktop,and it even it even supports

plug-ins.

Both KDE and GNOME have display

managers.We’ll look at the features

offered by KDM and GDM,and we’ll

examine how to configure a display

manager for your Linux system.