Now power users can rejoice! Windows XP Hacks offers tips, tools, and know-how to bend Windows XP to your will. The book delves into XP topics such as controlling the control panel, changing unchangeable icons, removing uninstallable XP components, stopping pop-up ads, taking a bite out of cookies, speeding up file downloads, protecting yourself with firewalls and proxy servers, and more. Users of both Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Pro Edition will find smart, timesaving, fun, and useful hacks for virtually every feature in their operating system. Even if you're not a power user yet, this book will have you well on your way.

Windows XP marks the biggest change to the Windows OS since the advent of Windows 95. It combines the stability of the NT/2000 operating system with the user-friendliness and hardware support of the consumer Windows line—and it does so literally, because those two operating systems have been combined for the first time in XP. Although there are two versions of XP—Home Edition and Professional Edition—the differences between them are relatively minor and have to do primarily with security and administrator tools. Under the hood, they're the same OS.

XP marks several other change as well. DOS is no longer a part of the underlying OS, although it's still available as a command prompt. Multimedia and graphics have been built into the operating system more directly than before and are no longer treated as an afterthought. And, cosmetically, XP has been given a makeover, in both the way it looks (rounded windows and almost cartoonish at times) and the way it works.

All this is good news for would-be operating system hackers. Because of the operating system's greater stability, those who work under the hood of XP can concentrate on actually getting work done and making the OS more effective, rather than trying to fix its shortcomings. Because of the richer interface and greater support for graphics and multimedia, you can more easily change the way the operating system works and looks. And, because the OS offers a variety of tools for recovering from errors, you can hack to your heart's content without worrying that you'll damage the OS beyond recognition.

This collection is based on the hands-on, real-world experience of those who in many cases have been using PCs well before any version of Windows even existed. They have wrestled with each new version of Windows as it was released, and found ways to take advantage of every nook and cranny of the operating system. When XP came out, they applied that hard-earned knowledge to it as well, and came up with ways to take advantage of the myriad new features of the operating system.

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The Red Hat Linux distribution has become one of the major Linux distributions, bringing to the PC all the power and flexibility of a Unix workstation as well as a complete set of Internet applications and a fully functional desktop interface. This book is designed not only to be a complete reference on Linux, but also provides clear and detailed explanations of Linux features. No prior knowledge of Unix is assumed; Linux is an operating system anyone can use.

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When Linux 2.4 was released, most people focused on what it would do to help the average Linux user and talked about the USB support, firewire, PCMCIA and DRI. While these are great additions to the kernel for the majority of people, often one of the major improvements over 2.2 was overlooked, even though it applies almost as much to Joe (and of course Jane) User as it does to a hardened network engineer. This is, of course, the inclusion of the netfilter system into the kernel, which provides packet filtering and other more advanced IP features. Along with netfilter comes iptables, which is the 2.4 equivalent of ipchains, and provides a user-space interface to the filtering, Network Address Translation (NAT) and mangling modules.

We are going to look at building 2.4 with support for netfilter and iptables, then building a production level router out of it. For those of you who just have one machine, and use it to connect to the Internet, then many of the same rules apply. The Internet is one giant, generally unrestricted, network which any reasonable person would have reservations about putting any sort of machine on, never mind their own Linux system.

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This book is intended for a technical audience and system administrators who manage Linux servers, but it also includes material for home users and others. It discusses how to install and setup a Red Hat Linux Server with all the necessary security and optimization for a high performance Linux specific machine. Since we speak of optimization and security configuration, we will use a source distribution (tar.gz) program the most available type for critical server software like Apache, BIND/DNS, Samba, Squid, OpenSSL etc. Source packages give us fast upgrades, security updates when necessary, and a better compilation, customization, and optimization for our specific machines that often we can’t have with RPM packages.

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Not everyone has a halfdozen computers in their office or home so that they can use a separate machine for each OS they want to work with. After all, Tom Watson of IBM once said that he couldn't imagine a need for more than five computers in the entire world.

As a result, setting up a single machine to host more than one operating system is a common requirement. Unfortunately, much of the reference material out there is old or inappropriate for a dual boot of Fedora's latest release and the tried andtrue Windows XP. Here's how to get the two to coexist nicely on the same computer with a minimum of fuss, and not too much Linux expertise either!

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It’s not that difficult just needs a bit of patience and someone who has been there before to guide you through the pitfalls. This is not a ‘how to use Ubuntu’ guide. My ThinkPad T40 is a standard model the only noteworthy items are that my T40 has:
● Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB (opposed to Radeon 9000 or the T40p)
● Intel ‘Centrino’ 2100B 802.11b wireless card
● XGA Screen (1024x768)
I am not aware of issues with other wireless cards such as the Intel 2200BG card. The only requirement is that you have some form of Internet connection preferably over wireless in order to get some of the updates and applications that I have included here.

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This free pdf ebooks has been many release cycles (and many titles) in the making. The authors hope to continue building on this work for the life of the Edubuntu distribution of Linux.

The Edubuntu Handbook is a collaborative effort from many individuals within the community. It is intended as a guide and a
reference to help the new Edubuntu user and administrator with their system whether it is a standalone system or in a thin-client
configuration.

The community has been busy at work finding ways to make Edubuntu meet their practical needs, and the solutions they’ve provided may be just what you are looking for to meet your needs as well. This is the spirit of open collaboration upon which Edubuntu thrives.

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A Beginner's Guide to Gambas is the first definitive reference for the Linux-based Gambas programming language. Gambas ships with a graphical development environment based on the Basic programming language. It supports object-oriented programming and is similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic product. Gambas uses the Qt toolkit and supports other toolkits like GTK+. With Gambas, you can quickly design a user interface, access databases from MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL, or remotely pilot KDE applications using the DCOP protocol. Rittinghouse masterfully describes the details of this new language with plenty of examples and illustrations that make it easy to understand.

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Systems that support virtual memory virtualize the available physical memory such that the applications running on them operate under the assumption that these systems have a larger amount of memory available than is actually present. The memory managers of these systems manage the virtual and the physical address spaces and are responsible for converting the virtual addresses used by the applications to the physical addresses used by the hardware. The memory managers assume that the amount of physical memory is constant and does not change during their period of operation. Some operating scenarios however, such as the power conservation mechanisms and virtual machine monitors, require the ability to vary the physical memory available at runtime, thereby making invalid the assumptions made by these memory managers.

In this work we evaluate the suitability of the Linux Memory Manager, which assumes that the available physical memory is constant, for the purposes of varying the memory at run time. We have implemented an infrastructure over the Linux 2.6.11 kernel that enables the user to vary the physical memory available to the system. The available physical memory is logically divided into banks and each bank can be turned on or off independent of the others, using the new system calls we have added to the kernel. Apart from adding support for the new system calls, other changes had to be made to the Linux memory manager to support the runtime variation of memory. To evaluate the suitability for varying memory we have performed experiments with varying memory sizes on both the modified and the unmodified kernels. We have observed that the design of the existing memory manager is not well suited to support the runtime variation of memory; we provide suggestions to make it better suited for such purposes.

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Hack Proofing Linux: A Guide to Open Source Security is designed to help you deploy a Linux system on the Internet in a variety of security roles.This book provides practical instructions and pointers concerning the open source security tools that we use
every day.

First, we show you how to obtain the software; and then, how to use the Bastille application to “harden” your Linux operating system so that it can function securely as it fulfills a specific role of your choice (e.g., as a Web server, as an E-mail server, and so forth).You will also learn how to use your Linux system as an auditing tool to scan systems for vulnerabilities as well as create an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), which enables your Linux system to log and respond to suspicious activity. From virus protection to encrypting transmissions using Gnu Privacy Guard and FreeSWAN, you will be able to configure your system to secure local data as well as data that will be passed along the network. After reading this book, you will be able to identify open source and “for-fee” tools that can help you further secure your Linux system.
We have also included chapters concerning ways to sniff and troubleshoot network connections and how to implement strong authentication using One Time Passwords (OTP) and Kerberos.Tools such as Squid proxy server and Ipchains/Iptables will help you use your Linux system so that it can act as a firewall.With the tools on the accompanying CD as well as the advice and instructions given in this book, you will be able to deploy your Linux system in various roles with confidence.

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