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[tux in the snow]

The end of the year is always a time to look back and maybe forward. To me it seems that this year was one of the toughest for Linux. SCO has tried to spread fear and uncertainty over a copyright issue with IBM. In the past Linux has been mostly immune to those FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) attacks but this one hit hard. Fortunately SCO cheers us up just shortly before Christmas by revealing that it has no other proof than just a couple of header files which do actually contain nothing but widely used definitions.

Linus commented it with "In other words, I think we can totally _demolish_ the SCO claim that these 65 files were somehow 'copied'. They clearly are not."

It was also very worrysome to see that Redhat finally abandoned those customers that helped the company to grow in the first place. One of my first distributions was Redhat. I bought it in a book shop around the corner and it was very helpful to get installation support via e-mail for a few problems that related to my CD-Rom drive. All that is gone now. At least when it comes to Redhat. There are no affordable priced packages any more in the shops and there is no installation support via e-mail for Fedora (http://fedora.redhat.com/). Of course there are still Mandrake and Suse but Redhat was very popular worldwide. As such it is really a good idea to involve the community in the creation of a distribution. Especially when you have seen Redhat's taste less desktop it was clear that something had to be done. The problem is that Redhat presents Fedora as a test system to shake out the bugs before the rpm-packages go into the enterprise products. Let's see what will happen to Fedora in 2004. Either something changes or a different distribution will take Redhat's leading role.

Of course 2003 brought also some very positive changes for Linux. OpenOffice 1.1 became a very good office application getting faster and stable. Mozilla, MozillaFirebird, MozillaThunderbird saw also a lot of improvements in speed, stability and functionality. We have now state of the art browsers that will soon let MSIE look a bit old and dusty. The Linux desktop applications are moving in the right direction and will continue to do so in 2004.

At LinuxFocus we lost Georges Tarbouriech, long time editor of the French section. He wrote a lot of articles and each of them had his very unique and personal side marks. Something that can not be replaced. Despite the loss of Georges LinuxFocus is alive and running with contributions from many new authors and we are looking forward to 2004 with interesting articles and new languages.

Happy new year!

-- Guido Socher

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Applications

• [translated] RPN calculators for Linux , by Guido Socher
  
  This is a presentation of the different Reverse Polish Notation calculators available for the Linux desktop.

Articles at Linux Gazette [] The Mailbag More 2 Cent Tips The Answer Gang News Bytes By Michael Conry Ecol By Javier Malonda Constructive Paranoia at the End of 2003 By Rick Moen Python Simplicity By Mike Orr (Sluggo) Mathematical Explorations with Scilab/Linux By Pramode C.E The Wonderful World of Linux 2.6 By Joe Pranevich Qubism By Jon "Sir Flakey" Harsem

Graphics

• [translated] Going 3D with Blender: Modeling a chest , by Katja Socher
  
  In this article we model a treasure chest with Blender.

Kernel Corner

• [translated] Tracking Linux Internals with Syscalltracker , by Mulyadi Santosa
  
  This article shows you how to "debug" you programs at the system call level.

• [translated] Understanding the Proc File System , by Sandeep Grover
  
  The proc filesystem is a virtual filesystem which provides a lot of information about hardware and kernel internal data structures.

Hardware

• [translated] Let's do some electronics , by Aleksandar Milovac
  
  Software to develop electronic circuits? Yes, it's available for Linux too. This article will show you what you need.

• [translated] Test: pre-installed Linux notebooks from LinuxCertified , by Guido Socher
  
  This is a review of notebooks from linuxcertified.com.

System Administration

• [translated] storeBackup, the unconventional backup tool , by Heinz-Josef Claes
  
  storeBackup is a very versatile backup tool.

The LinuxFocus Tip

Does it sometimes happen to you that you typed a wrong password and you notice while you are still typing? Now you have a couple of options: hit return and wait for the timeout (wrong password) or type Backspace (<-) but that does not always work on all systems or use DEL which has the same problems as Backspace. The best solution is to use Crtl-u. Crtl-u will always delete all you entered so far. It works on all Unix systems.

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