No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are you’ll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories, but if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Of course, you can always use the good old ftp command, but lftp takes the task of managing files and directories using the FTP protocol to a new level. To see what I mean, let’s use lftp to write a script that creates a local backup copy of a Web site.

A handful of Red Hat engineers are excited about a new tool they’ve developed called Func, short for Fedora Unified Network Controller. They’re pretty sure that once the rest of the community catches on to just how useful Func is, they’ll be singing its praises too. Red Hat Community Development Manager Greg DeKoenigsberg says, "This is the kind of idea where everyone kind of nods and says, ‘I meant to write that.’"

When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.

Linux.com ran an article headlined GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement on November 23. Jeff Waugh, the press officer on the GNOME Foundation Board, was prominently mentioned in that article and in several others to which it links. So was Roy Schestowitz, who wrote a post titled Anti-symbiosis: ODF, OOXML, Mono, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org on the Boycott Novell site, where he is a regular contributor. We thought getting them together might be illuminating.

Two recently released text-to-speech extensions can transform Firefox into a talking Web browser suitable for users with visual impairments — and anyone else who can use a speech interface to the Web. Fire Vox is designed to be a full-fledged "screen reader in a browser," usable for daily browsing even for unsighted users. CLiCk, Speak provides point-and-click screen reading, which can be helpful for partially-sighted users or sighted users who have written language difficulties (such as dyslexia).

IPCop is a specialized Linux distribution whose sole purpose is to safeguard the computers and networks it is installed on. The distro proudly claims, "The Bad Packets Stop Here!" I recently installed IPCop 1.4.16 on my SOHO LAN, and found that it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Even if you work only in Linux, you’ll likely have to use Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files at one time or another. Several open source projects use this common format, including Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, and PHP.

Creating a high-quality chart for the Web can be a challenging task, but open source software like Open Flash Chart (OFC) makes it a cinch. As you might guess from its name, the core engine of OFC is written in Adobe Flash. Although this means that users need a Flash browser plugin to view charts created with OFC, this approach has a significant advantage: it allows you to produce professional-quality graphs with minimum effort, because the core engine does all the heavy lifting, and all you need to do is to specify configuration options for your chart and feed data into it.

Slackware Linux today features a powerful and easy-to-use package management system, but making Slackware packages has not always been straightforward. Now Slackware application developers have a tool for easily making Slackware packages from source code and precompiled binaries. Src2pkg, now in version 1.6, very nearly lives up to its author’s tag of being Slackware’s "magic package maker."

For many average users, GNU/Linux support for PDF files may seem reasonably advanced. They can create PDF files in programs like OpenOffice.org, read them with programs like Kpdf, and edit them in programs like pdftk or PDFedit. But that’s not the whole story, says José Marchesi, founder of the recently created GNU PDF project. "Unfortunately, there are a lot of missing features in the existing free implementations," he says. That’s the main reason why the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has declared GNU PDF a high priority project, and is actively seeking donations to speed its progress.