M-Audio has supplied hardware and software to computer-based musicians for 20 years. Its new "make-music-now" line of products, aimed at musicians just getting into computers or PC users with an interest in music, includes a microphone, speakers, drum machine, and DJ mixer deck. Unfortunately, its bundled software, called Session, is for Windows only. Our challenge was to try out this hardware -- specifically the KeyStudio MIDI keyboard and Fast Track audio interface -- with Linux applications. We were half successful.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client. Meanwhile, Instant Messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via computers connected over a network such as the Internet.

The /proc directory is a strange beast. It doesn't really exist, yet you can explore it. Its zero-length files are neither binary nor text, yet you can examine and display them. This special directory holds all the details about your Linux system, including its kernel, processes, and configuration parameters. By studying the /proc directory, you can learn how Linux commands work, and you can even do some administrative tasks.

I am a fan of affordable technology. I like relatively cheap gadgets, and I like open source. When I heard about Asus’ Eee PC, I took it with a certain grain of salt. I thought that maybe it was just another company trying to take a piece of the pie from the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

They say that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and if you want to make a good impression with computer lovers with artistic pretensions, a fancy wallpaper is a pretty good place to start. It can be a real ice breaker. Why stop there? Why spend fruitless hours dredging through the art galleries of cyberspace to retrieve a few hard-won digital morsels to decorate your miserable desktop? Just automate the tedious process with Webilder and free up some valuable time to hone your other more valuable Unix skills. Webilder won’t make you rich, improve your productivity or make you irresistibly attractive to the opposite sex (much) but it’s clever, fun and cool. What more reason do you need to use it?

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night, for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release fixes some important X server bugs, such as:

So kind of out of left field, I decided to install Ubuntu on my laptop at about 1 AM. I got the newest version, 7.10, and resized my Vista partition so using Computer > Manage > Disk Management > Shrink Volume so that I had 10 GB of unallocated space for Ubuntu (I wanted more, but it wouldn't let me). Then I popped the disc in, restarted, and installed with ease.

Today’s experiment was to get Ubuntu Linux running in a virtual machine on my Mac. It gave me the opportunity to play with two things — Ubuntu Linux and VirtualBox, an open source alternative to VMware and Parallels.