Issue 26: Network Ninja: Run Safe and Smooth Networks

Free software – everyone's a critic.

In an age of perpetually interconnected devices, keeping your network and its services safe and running smoothly is a high priority whether you're an admin or an end-user.

Web page loading time relies on a complex interplay among the web server, the web page, and the web browser. Learning a few tricks can help speed up load times for the pages you create.

Users who want to surf the Internet anonymously need to consider the Tor network. The Tor browser package offers a simple solution for protecting your personal privacy.

Finding weak points and problematic configurations in an intranet typically takes a lot of time and effort. Thanks to careful integration into Kali Linux, the OpenVAS and Nmap tools can be genuinely helpful.

The continued rapid growth of the Internet is placing ever-increasing demands on web servers. Does the venerable Apache HTTP server have what it takes to keep up?

Many Linux beginners stumble over the fact that you need to precede any calls to your own scripts or programs with a ./ combination. What's up with these dot-slashes?

GDevelop, Godot, and jMonkeyEngine simplify game programming with pertinent libraries, game engines, and developer tools. They make it possible for both beginners and advanced programmers to create nifty games with minimal effort.

The IPython Notebook environment offers much more than just the interactive execution of Python instructions. It can seamlessly integrate documents, programs, and tools with ease.

Both init and systemd can be used to start, monitor, and shut down services on Linux systems, but these utilities differ in terms of configuration and operation.

If you don't have the right tools, comparing PDF documents for differences can be very cumbersome. We discuss five nifty tools that can help with this task.

In the past, publishing a book meant sending it to a publishing house. With Amazon's CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing, you can now publish on your own. This article will guide you through the process.

We take a look at the new features that have been added to the digital audio workstation, Ardour 4. Although not exactly eye catching at first glance, a closer examination shows the changes to be well thought out and extremely useful.

USB sticks and external hard drives can easily be lost or stolen. You should therefore protect these storage media against loss and misuse. UsbCryptFormat lets you do this without much effort.

Opera changed course with version 15, giving up its status as independent software and dropping many of its features. Vivaldi seeks to offer a new home to fans of the old Opera.

Xfce 4.12 has been under development for almost three years and is now ready to take over for Xfce 4.10. This article looks at improvements found in version 4.12 and what the long release cycles mean for the user.

Ubuntu 15.04 offers nearly no changes to the installation process. But, just in case you are new to Ubuntu, we'll walk you through upgrading or installing the latest release.

With NetworkManager, you can access the Internet during the Ubuntu installation process. The first step is to download updates to make your system more secure.

Ubuntu's Software Center lets you install just about anything, including free software, purchased apps, and games.

You can watch movies, play music and place calls over the Internet with ease with Ubuntu. You just have to load the right software packages onto your computer. We present some of our favorite multimedia apps.

We show you how to use VirtualBox to set up a Windows XP virtual machine on your existing Linux system.