Linux is a version of the UNIX operating system that has gained in popularity over the past few years. As an operating system, it is reliable, stable and can be downloaded free of cost. Due to these factors, several Internet Service Providers and other users use Linux as an operating system of choice.

The Linux Kernel (core) was created by a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who named it Linux. Torvalds then made available this code available to the world for free and invited others to add to it provided they kept their contributions free. Thousands of coders from around the world worked on enhancing Linux and it grew in features and the number of users. Today, Linux has evolved to become a full featured operating system and is poised to challenge the domination of Microsoft Windows.

Due to the low cost and reliability of Linux, it has become a popular operating system to host web servers and e-mail servers. Although Linux is harder to manage compared to Microsoft Windows, it offers more flexibility and configuration options.

Several open source e-mail servers are available for the Linux platform. Open source is a term used for software application whose source code is freely available. Coders participating in the open source initiative freely share their source code for applications believing that by allowing anyone who’s interested to modify the source code, the application will be more useful and error-free over the long term. Open source applications are available without any charge. Linux is a part of open source software.

Popular open source Linux based e-mail servers include Exim, qmail and Qpoppter. Exim is a message transfer agent and was developed at the University of Cambridge. qmail is an Internet Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and is a replacement for the Sendmail system bundled with the Unix operating systems. qmail uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to exchange messages with message transfer agents on other computers.

Qpoppter is one of the most widely used server applications for the POP3 protocol. It supports the latest standards and includes a large number of optional features. Unlike Exim and qmail, Qpoppter is not available for free.

By: Marcus Peterson

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Mental Illness News

Damn Small Linux can be an ideal platform for supporting a wide range of programming languages. You can even program directly from the command line via a programming shell such as Bash. Major programming languages used in this environment include C, C++, and Java. If you are developing for the Internet you may want to use PHP, a web programming language and MySQL, a language for database system development. All these programming languages are also available in the Windows environment. So the question arises, why would you want to program under Linux rather than under Windows?

Many web developers and Internet service providers feel that Linux provides a more stable web site environment than does Windows. The most widely used web server, Apache, is available under both these operating systems but its new features, security enhancements, and bug fixes always are made available first on the Open Source (LAMP) version. And then they filter down to the Windows version. At the time of this writing the Windows version of Apache has problems with its cryptographic functions.

While programming languages are essentially the same across these two operating systems, their libraries are quite different. Basically, when you write complicated programs you want to make use of as much prewritten software as possible to reduce your programming and debugging effort. One example is handling the graphical user interface. As programmers often say, why reinvent the wheel? Linux provides a wider choice of libraries and graphical user interface toolkits.

When you program in Linux it is often fairly easy to port your programs to the Windows environment. Unfortunately, the inverse is rarely true. Of course as Linux systems become more popular, you will find more and more Windows-based programming systems that enable you to convert your programs to run under Linux. To do so makes clear economic sense.

Program conversion tools may be fairly difficult to develop. For example, executing programs must access the actual computer hardware. As you may imagine Linux and Windows programs access hardware quite differently. The modules that manage hardware access are called drivers. Linux drivers tend to be of higher quality than Windows drivers.

These two operating systems differ substantially in the way they manage programs during their execution. In other articles we discussed Linux’s increased security compared to Windows. We conclude this article by repeating a point that we have often made; you can run Damn Small Linux and its associated applications on very reduced hardware. You can do Linux, PHP, and MySQL development on old computers, ones that may have seemed ready for the garbage heap. In contrast many Windows competitors such as SQL Server Developer Edition require substantially more powerful computers, the kind of computers that people purchase for one or a few thousand dollars. When your programs will be used by dozens of people simultaneously, you will need powerful hardware. Don’t forget the operating system; can you guess which one we recommend? Our next subject is the graphical user interface.

By: Levi Reiss

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