Many people bemoan the unceasing bickering and so called "holy wars" in the Free/libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. The process of repeatedly redrawing battle lines such as vi vs emacs (and emacs vs xemacs), xfree86 vs xorg, KDE vs GNOME, BSD vs Linux, and the Free Software Foundation vs the Open Source Initiative is an essential part of what makes FLOSS into great software. As painful as it may be to watch, the divisions, factionalism, and emotionalism are fundamental to the process of creating FLOSS and can't be excised without diminishing the software itself.

Most rational human beings would agree that the flame wars over operating systems are ignorant at least and pointless at best. A few of them are, I suppose, somewhat understandable. Windows 3.1 versus OS/2, Unix versus Windows NT, Windows XP versus MacOS--these are all givens in a computing environment with room for different perspectives. That said, the battle between aficionados of Linux and BSD is not only silly but hurts both parties with every attack.

Any web developer, designer, or webmaster can benefit from having a local web server. Even if that developer has no interest in securing and maintaining the server his or her websites live on, a local server can act as a convenient mirror for testing updates, trying new designs, and other general sand-boxing activities.

Web developers whose hosts utilize the popular LAMP platform (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) are frequently hit with a dilemma. Since understanding Linux is not a prerequisite for website administrators, many of them lack the knowledge necessary for setting up a LAMP server from scratch (or at least they may think so). But thanks to the improved package management on Linux distributions like Debian, installing a functional web server is not nearly the chore it was just a couple years ago.

There are a lot of people out there that say "You don't need an antivirus program for Linux." I believe that you do. Even though there are very few viruses in the wild that affect Linux there is still the looming possibility for more and more viruses to be created. This tutorial will walk you through the main steps of installing and configuring AntiVir on Ubuntu Linux. The setup will also enable AvGuard, the real-time scanning engine for AntiVir.

Having trouble getting .WMV, .WMA, and .ASF files - the Windows-based media formats - to open on your Linux box? Being forced to dual-boot or switch workstations just to listen to or watch audio and video clips is usually more effort than it's worth. But fortunately, if you are using Xine and one of its frontends like Totem, you can add support for these file formats within Linux.

Looking for a more convenient way to grab an image of the latest Debian installation CD? Jigdo not only makes downloading the image faster, but allows you to customize the image and even update older images without downloading many of the same packages all over again.

Ever since my initial exposure to Linux in the mid-90s, I've tried nearly every distribution I could get my hands on. Whether it meant spending cash for expensive boxed editions or putting my 33.6 kilobaud modem under days of stress to obtain CD images, I was always looking for another one to try out. But nothing ever seemed the perfect fit for my needs.

In all these years, I've been through my share of Linux installs. In fact, my office is absolutely littered to this day with outdated CDs containing and books covering Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, and all of their assorted spin-offs. While I've used Linux distros in a variety of server solutions, I've never found one that I was comportable enough with to consider making it my primary operating system on my laptop and workstations.

At least, that is, until I met Debian.

This is an astonishingly common question with many common answers, most of which are bad. If you have been given an answer that involved a specific distro, you have probably been misled. Here is a more in-depth answer.