Carla Schroder

The Linux kernel is a restless beast, and must continally evolve and change. Especially in ways that mystify us poor end lusers. A recent wrinkle, as of kernel version 2.6.20, is changing the /dev names for ATA devices, so that all ATA and SCSI devices are named /dev/sd*. This is a result of using the […]

There are a number of good, albeit expensive, commercial intrusion detection products, but the open source world offers a number of high-quality applications for free. In fact, chances are the expensive commercial product you’re thinking of evaluating is based on one or more of them, such as Snort. Snort has long been a popular and […]

Linux has always supported Thinkpads pretty well, though the onboard modems and sound are chronic trouble spots. In fact, these days the modem is the sound chip. Two troubles for the price of one! But, as always, Linux coders make these things work despite the best efforts of all those innovative proprietary vendors to thwart […]

I like SATA hard drives. I like them a whole lot. While SCSIdrives are still the toughest and most reliable, SATA drives have many advantages. They don’t need expensive controllers. They use nice skinny cables that come in many pleasing colors; they can be hot-swapped; and you get a whale of a lot of gigabytes […]

Last week we learned how to make pages of labels, business cards, and form letters using OpenOffice Writer and Base. The steps for setting up any mail-merge document in OpenOffice are easy; the one potentially gnarly bit is creating your contacts database in the first place. Your contacts list must be in Base, which is […]

ZFS, the space-age filesystem developed by Sun, is now available for Mac OS X Leopard. You can get the binaries and source code from ZFS on OS X. Be warned that this is a beta version — fun for testing and learning but not ready for mission-critical systems. ZFS, all by itself, replaces the herd […]

Open Telephony Training Is a Hit The folks who maintain FreePBX, the popular Asterisk graphical interface and management system, held their first-ever Open Telephony Training Seminar last month in Charleston, South Carolina. It sold out early and was a big success, so there will be another one this May in Las Vegas. The course covers […]

Last week we learned how to configure soundcards for playback with ALSA. It’s easy, it works on all Linuxes, it doesn’t create conflicts or introduce latency, and it doesn’t require the X Window System. Today we’re going to use ALSA for recording, and learn how to test our sound system. A quick and horrid way […]

Commercial IP Address Management (IPAM) products are odd beasts. They offer comprehensive feature sets, but most are Windows-only and priced in the five-figure range, with a license cost based on the number of managed addresses. Unix and Linux admins who don’t have five-figure budgets are used to writing their own IPAM tools using standard applications […]

Part 2 of “Webcams in Linux” is going to appear later, as there are a number of kinks and roadblocks to work out. So today we’re going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, because I think it’s the best tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It’s good for managing multiple sound […]