Stories of compromised servers and data theft fill today's news. It isn't difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of ...

One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about ...

ALSA stands for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It consists of a set of kernel drivers, an application programming interface (API) library and utility programs for supporting sound under Linux.

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly ...

Many Linux administrators and support technicians regularly use the top utility for real-time monitoring of their system state. In some shops, it is very typical to check top first when there is any ...

Although the differences are sometimes made opaque in casual conversation, there is in fact a complete difference between archiving files and compressing them. Archiving means that you take 10 files ...

In the early twentieth century, Heinrich Schenker developed a method of analyzing tonal music that ties a piece's melody, harmony and form to a simple underlying musical idea. To illustrate his theory ...

Robert Young: It is a great pleasure to have an excuse to reach out to you. How are you and your family? Your kids must be through college by now. Nancy and I and our three daughters are all doing ...

iptables is the user-space tool for configuring firewall rules in the Linux kernel. It is actually a part of the larger netfilter framework. Perhaps because iptables is the most visible part of the ...

Jim demonstrates color manipulation with curses by adding colors to his terminal adventure game. Drawing on the screen is all very well and good, but if it's all white-on-black text, your program ...

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the open, multi-vendor replacement for the aging BIOS standard, which first appeared in IBM computers in 1976. The UEFI standard is extensive, covering ...

Editors' Note: This article has been updated since its original posting. Software and hardware engineers who have to deal with byte and bit order issues know the process is like walking a maze. Though ...