OSS Solutions

Our preferred free desktop for X (the X Window System) is the GNOME Desktop. There are actually a lot of reasons to prefer it over others [1].

"PHP (recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML." See www.php.net. Using PHP is a matter of precision. ASP can be used to reach the same objectives but ASP has proven to us to be less interesting (see some of the reasons below, one of them being the licensing scheme).

To create and save iptables rules the default Debian way, this is the way to go:

• create your rules using the CLI [1] iptables
• save them on the active rule by issuing a /etc/init.d/iptables save active
• create the rules for the inactive state (when booting, for example) and save them accordingly

That way, the rules will survive a reboot. To delete a specific rule previously saved as above:

• go into /var/lib/iptables/active and take the

An IDS is a system to track any changes not planned to a system. It is often used on sensitive machines where any unauthorized access is purely prohibited but can also act as a fool-proof system, more like a monitoring system. It works by checksumming or understanding the format of each file, and scrutinizing any suspect change to files.

A lot of people use the root account to do anything they need, just because it is easier… This is a really bad idea, as that user can do anything to the system.

If one use the thread-sorting of e-mails, he may fall into the problem that Ximian/Novell Evolution does follow the In-Reply-To: header to understand that two mails are of the same thread. Microsoft Outlook has a different way to do it [1], and it breaks Evolution's sorting.

Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to CiFS [1] clients. It can completely replace whatever CiFS server, as well as authentication services.

Replicator [1] is a set of Perl scripts meants to automate the replication of Debian GNU/Linux installations, ranging from Debian GNU/Linux Desktops to Cluster Computing servers. It allows to install easily and in a few minutes the same software on various machines with potentially different hardware.

CUPS is a free implementation of the answer of the whole computing industry to the never-ending printing problem, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). "There is currently no universal standard for printing. Several protocols are in use, but each has limited applicability and none can be considered the prevalent one. This means that printer vendors have to implement and support a number of different protocols and protocol variants.

Debian GNU/Linux is one of the main and earlier GNU/Linux distribution. You may wonder why it is our preferred distribution.