All of these clients support premove, except Gnome Chess. Premove is a slightly controversial feature that is offered at some Internet Chess Servers. This is the ability to preselect your move whilst it is your opponent’s turn to move. In very short time games this is a distinct advantage because it allows you to move without any time being deducted from your clock. It is important that your client supports premove if only for the reason that your opponent does not get an unfair advantage.

All of the ratings below are scored out of a maximum of 10.

Xboard

I feel that Xboard is more appealing to the experienced Linux enthusiast because it relies so heavily on command line options. A configuration tool that helped the newbie set up Xboard would be a distinct improvement. In WinBoard (the Windows version of Xboard) the options are set from the interface.

In play Xboard is a dream to use, the quality of the pieces and board are superb but the Athena widgets look prehistoric in the days of polished KDE and GNOME interfaces.

Xboard Rating
Features 7
Board 9
In use 7
Communication 5
Overall 8

eboard

In many ways eboard rivals Xboard as the best Linux chess interface. Its options are configured by a polished GNOME interface and whilst it lacks many of the features in Xboard it more than compensates for this with its superb text chat facilities and ’seek graph’. Having channels in separate consoles also makes it much easier to follow conversations than in Xboard. The auhor plans to add real bughouse support in a future version as well as legality checking for variants. This interface is highly recommended for people who don’t like editing configuration files. I would strongly recommend the major distributions to include this program in future releases.

eboard Rating
Features 7
Board 9
In use 8
Communication 8
Overall 8

Gnome Chess

I find it extremely difficult to recommend this software. It has the smallest number of features, the worst board and is extremely buggy. In time I hope it develops into a stable product that represents a real alternative to Xboard and eboard.

Gnome Chess Rating
Features 3
Board 4
In use 4
Communication 3
Overall 4

ics.el

It is worth reiterating that ics.el relies on Xboard to provide the graphical board. Using Xemacs and Xboard is an improvement to the text abilities of Xboard on its own. Although Xboard has long supported colorization of the text, ics.el adds improved font support and buttons. If you are already regularly running (X)emacs it makes sense to use ics.el. But for everyone else I recommend you use Xboard or eboard, because Xemacs is one of the most memory hungry programs available for Linux. It would be a huge overkill to just run Xemacs solely as a text interface to an Internet Chess Server.

Xboard Rating
Features 5
Board N/A*
In use 6
Communication 6
Overall 6
* – ics.el relies on Xboard for the board.

Version: Development version (dated March 2000)
License: GNU General Public License
Author(s): Mark Oakden
Formats: As Plaintext, compressed and gzipped
Size: 50k (Plaintext), 23k (compressed), 16k (gzipped)
Homepage: ics.el website
ics.el is as the name would suggest a Lisp program, to be used with either Emacs or Xemacs. More precisely it is a major mode which allows you to communicate with Internet Chess Servers. It does not provide a graphical user interface itself as it only handles the text portion of an ICS session. Like the other programs reviewed it is released under the GNU General Public License.

To set up the program you first need to configure your .emacs file so that it is loads in the ics.el code. If you are used to editing configuration files this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The author has supplied a HOWTO document which explains how to configure your .emacs file but I found it easier to change the actual ics.el file itself rather than making my .emacs file even larger. Fortunately the ics.el file is well documentated.

To make full use of this program you need to be running Xemacs, rather than emacs. Xemacs is a version of emacs that contains numerous improvements such as extensive graphical support and improved support for multiple fonts and colors.

Once you have configured .emacs and ics.el the program is invoked by typing Esc-x ics. A introduction page appears in xemacs where you choose which server you wish to log into. An Xboard appears and you are prompted to confirm your username and enter your password.

If you liked the hundreds of different options available with Xboard, you may love the configuration possibilities with ics.el. As ics.el uses Xboard to handle the chess based part, we will examine ics.el’s text handling features. The two main benefits that ics.el gives are improved font support with color customization and ‘buttons’. These are not typical graphical buttons but Lisp buttons. Basically this button feature lets you perform certain actions by clicking on specific text. For example to accept a request for a game you move your mouse over the word play. The color changes and by clicking on the ‘button’ you accept the seek and the game begins. It works the same way if you wish to see a player’s notes or launching a URL.

Version: 0.3.2
License: GNU General Public License
Author(s): Robert Wilhelm and JP Rosevear
Formats: RPM (binary and source) and tar.gz
Size: 115k (binary RPM), 278k (source RPM), 276k (tar.gz)
Homepage: Gnome chess website
Gnome Chess is, unsurprisingly considering its name, a client that uses the GTk+ library. This gives the interface a consistent look and feel. Although it has been developed since 1998 the client is still in its early stages of development.

Out of the reviewed chess interfaces, Gnome Chess has the smallest set of features. On start up you are presented with a small board and a blank move list. The default colors leave a little to be desired but they are easily changed using the Settings menu. Unfortunately the bitmap pieces are fixed in size, and on a large 19″ monitor this was a distinct disadvantage. Setting up the server entries, for automatic login, was simple although having passwords stored unencrypted is not exactly secure. The interface uses timeseal, like the other chess clients, to compensate for ‘lag’.

On logging into the chess server a console box appears under the chess board. All communication goes to this console. Unlike the other chess clients there is no support for colorized text. At least there is a separate prompt to type in text which has buffer support.

In play the interface is simple to use. Moves can be made by the click-and click and click-and drag methods. Although the program has an option to hear a bell when a move is made, this didn’t work. Fortunately the server bell “set bell 1″ compensates for this omission. I liked the move list that sits next to the board, clicking on any move and the board is updated to that position. The program seemed to send lots of spurious information to the console window in play.

If you want to play bughouse or crazyhouse then this client is not for you. Dropping pieces has to be done manually and you then have to refresh the board to see the dropped piece. The program often crashed when playing suicide if you used the move list.

Gnome Chess can read and write PGN. It coped fine with loading standard PGN files although it didn’t handle eboard’s PGN output because of the comment lines that are banned. Hopefully this escape mechanism for PGN data will be handled in future releases of Gnome Chess. The program doesn’t have any other features to speak of although the authors have plans to add lots of features.

Version: 0.2.4
License: GNU General Public License
Author(s): Felipe Bergo
Formats: tar.gz
Size: 339k (tar.gz)
Homepage: eboard website
Author’s opinion of this review
eboard is the newcomer to the scene with the first stable version released in May 2001. For a program that has only been in development a few months this is a remarkable program. On startup you are presented with an attractive chess board. The default colors are well chosen and the pieces are clear (and are almost identical to Xboard’s). The first thing to strike you is that this is a GNOME application. GNOME is a free and easy-to-use desktop environment which rivals KDE as the most popular graphical enironment for Linux. Being a GNOME application you do need a recent version of the GTK+ library. Fortunately the latest Linux distributions (Debian 2.2r3, RedHat 7.1 and Mandrake 8.0) have at least the recommended version of this library.
Although eboard is under heavy development it already has a good feature set. Besides regular chess it supports chess variants such as suicide, crazyhouse and bughouse. Other variants are supported, with some exceptions. The program can observe and examine games and the vast majority of the features available in FICS are already supported.

The most important question is how does eboard function as a chess interface. eboard supports both click-and click and click-and drag and was both a pleasure to play and watch chess with. Response was good which helped ensure that few mouse slips were made. The piece sets, supplied with eboard, are a little sub-standard but this is not so important as the standard vectorised pieces have great clarity.

Eboard has a number of features which sets it apart from the other chess interfaces on review. The two features that are particulary worth mentioning are the colored FICS output and the seek graph. Colored text makes it much easy to identify channel tells, shouts, chess shouts, personal tells etc. Combined with scroll locking on the text pane and a bash like history this makes eboard a pleasure to have a conversation with other players. Of course there is room for improvement. I would like to be able to customise the fonts and colors of channels to my own personal preference.

The seek graph – or should I say seek table, shows all available requests for games which match your formula. What makes this feature better than the server’s “sought” command is that it updates automatically and by clicking on an entry you automatically accept the seek. I imagined the “seek graph” was going to show a graphical representation of seeks, like the Windows client BlitzIn does. Maybe this will come in a later release?

Not unexpectedly there are many bugs in eboard, this is after all a development release. Some of them are easily avoided. For example eboard will crash if you try to use a chess engine that is not installed. There are also many features that I would love to be added includinga graphical seek window, buttons (for common commands), smart boards, hyperlinks in the console, PGN showing completed event and site fields etc. But what with the scripting support, the on the fly board resizes and the aforementioned features there is already an excellent foundation for future development.

Version: 4.2.3
License: GNU General Public License
Author(s): Tim Mann
Formats: RPM (binary and source) and tar.gz
Size: 1,562k (binary RPM), 1,040k (tar.gz)
Homepage: Xboard website
Author’s opinion of this review
Xboard is the most mature of the chess clients on review here, with Version 1.1 being released way back in 1991. The program was originally written by Chris and Dan Sears and has been maintained for many years by Tim Mann. Because xboard has the largest user base out of the Linux clients under this review, it has undergone real testing and is a mature product. It has been ported to run under Windows and on the Amiga.

Learning about all of Xboard’s features does warrant investing time in reading the excellent documentation, which is available as a Info file, man file and plain ASCII text file. The documentation runs through, in great detail, all of the options that are available to the user. Xboard has a huge number of options that can either be set at the command line or by setting them as X resources. The latter option involves editing the .Xdefaults file. One disadvantage is that most options cannot be changed when Xboard is running. For example it is only possible to change the size of the board by restarting Xboard.

I fired up Xboard with the following command

xboard -ics -icshost 64.71.131.140 -icshelper timeseal -boardSize medium -colorize

The “-ics” option makes Xboard run in ICS mode and the “-icshost 64.71.131.140″ instructs xboard to connect to this IP number (which is the IP number for freechess.org). At the time of writing it is not possible to enter freechess.org when using xboard, presumably because of the recent relocation of the FICS server. The “-icshelper timeseal” instructs xboard to connect with the timeseal program (timeseal is a lag compensating program). The “-boardSize medium” instructs Xboard to use 64×64 pixel pieces. There are a further 16 different sizes ranging from titanic (129×129 pixel pieces) to tiny (21×21 pixel pieces), one of which should suit just about every resolution/monitor size. The last command line option that was specified, “-colorize” instructs Xboard to color the various types of ICS messages. On a standard white xterm some of the default colors are hard to read, but they were easily changed by editing the .Xdefaults file and restarting the X server.

This leads me to my first criticism of Xboard. Although these options can be specified on the command line or by .Xdefaults entries, this is rather old fashioned. It would be much easier if all of the available options could, in addition, be set directly from the client itself, with your preferences saved to a file. This would be helpful for someone new to Xboard and/or new to Linux/UNIX. Then we would have the best of both worlds.

Xboard uses an xterm/rxvt to display the text and a separate window to display the board. To aid text chat there is the facility to use a separate Input box, although having three different windows isn’t the ideal solution. The chess pieces are first class and the default color choices for the board are very good. Unlike eboard and Gnome Chess, Xboard does not use a fancy toolkit. The menus look very dated as X Athena Widgets are being employed, which takes away a little of the professionalism of this software. Still I would rather sacrifice a little gloss than lose the gorgeous chess board.

It is not difficult to see why this chess interface is so popular; with its wealth of options it caters for just about every taste and can be tinkered to your requirements. It is a real pleasure to play chess with Xboard.

It has to be remembered that Xboard is far more than merely an ICS client. It is also an excellent interface to play chess against your own computer and for electronic mail correspondence chess. Included with the Xboard distribution is a program that lets GNU Chess and crafty acts as a computer player on FICS. Lots of users run computer accounts on Internet Chess Servers using this Zippy program.

Read the author’s opinion of this review.

It used to be that to find human chess opponents you had to visit your local chess club for a game. With the creation of the first Internet Chess Server (ICS) back in 1992, chess against humans could be played from the comfort of your own home. Linux users need a break, from their daily system administration, wordprocessing and programming chores, like everyone else. What better way of having some fun by playing a friendly game of chess with someone who lives in a different continent. Nowadays ICS is extremely popular with hundreds of people to play chess ranging from Grandmasters to absolute beginners.

To play chess over the internet you need to obtain a chess client which logs you into a chess server. There are a wide range of servers on the net, ranging from the commercial Internet Chess Club, to numerous free chess servers. The focus of this review is to compare and contrast the four main Linux chess interfaces on the Free Internet Chess Server. Although no longer released under the GPL, FICS is the most popular non-commercial chess server on the net.

We also wanted to review two veteran chess interfaces, xics and cics, but they no longer work with chess servers. The FICS server is constantly being updated with new features and bug fixes so under these conditions it is almost inevitable xics and cics would stop working as an internet chess client, especially as development of these clients ceased many years ago. So for this review we will examine four Linux Internet Chess Clients: xboard, eboard, Gnome Chess and ics.el. It is also possible to connect to FICS with the telnet program but this is not recommended; a graphical interface is an absolute necessity.

All of the interfaces under review can use timeseal, which is a separate program that compensates for the transmission times of moves. Without timeseal you can lose games solely because your connection to the server is slow. That’s simply not cricket
The table below shows which of these interfaces are included in the mainstream Linux distributions (Debian, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake). The number in the bracket represents the version of the chess software that is supplied with the distribution:-

Interface Distribution
Xboard Debian 2.2r3 (4.0.5), RedHat 7.1 (4.1.0), Mandrake 8.0 (4.2.2), Slackware (4.0.2), SuSE 7.2 (4.2.3)
eboard None
Gnome Chess Debian 2.2r3 (0.2.4), Mandrake 8.0 (0.2.4)
ics.el None

FirstLinux Review
(10/30/01)
By Steve Emms
Introduction
SuSE is billed as a complete easy-to use Linux package providing users with a large set of programs. SuSE 7.3 is available in two editions: a Personal Edition and a Professional Edition. The Personal edition is primarily for Linux beginners and has a ‘relatively’ small set of applications included in the package. This review will focus solely on the Professional Edition.

Currently SuSE Linux 7.3 is only available for the x86 family of processors although it shouldn’t be too long before the Alpha and PPC editions are released. SuSE doesn’t limit itself to producing Linux distributions. Also available from this software developer is VMWare, a program which lets you run multiple operating systems, and VMware GSX Server. SuSE also provides their own range of training courses, consulting from their 100+ Open Source in-house developers as well as support services ranging from installation support to full business and advance support.

So what do you get in the package?

SuSE 7.3 Professional consists of

* 2,300 applications in RPM format spread over 7 CDs (a DVD is also provided) including software from IBM, Sun, Netscape and Borland. Security: Built-in personal firewall, OpenSSH, email encoded with self-generated PGP keys, PAM password protection all with a crpyto file system;
* two floppy disks: a bootdisk and a modules disk;
* 5 manuals: Quick Install Manual, Configuration, Applications, Network and Reference Manual totalling over 1,000 printed pages of documentation;
* 90 day installation support by phone, fax and email.
* and some attractive stickers.

Many common graphic cards are supported including ATI Radeon, nVidia GeForce 3, Matrox G400, G450 and 3Dfx Voodoo-5. SuSE includes several OpenGL drivers (nVidia GLX, DRI, Utah GLX and Mesa/Glide) in addition to Mesa software rendering. OpenGL support is also provided for the Diamond FireGL 1/2/3/4 boards. All of these OpenGL drivers are still in an experimental stage.

The 5 manuals cover the following areas:

Quick Install: a colorful introduction guiding you through the installation of the Linux system. (64 pages)

Configuration: provides a basic introduction to the world of KDE and GNOME, a thorough analysis of YaST2, setting up the graphical desktop, scanning, OpenGL configuration, printing, together with lots of tips and tricks for the Bash shell. (195 pages).

Applications: gives an overview of some of the more important packages that are included in the distribution covering word processing, KDE applications (Konqueror, KMail), faxing with Linux, sound, CD burning, multimedia, scanning and graphics. (183 pages)

Network: devoted to network configuration (TCP/IP, DHCP, Samba, Netatalk), modems, ftp, Apache, proxy servers and network security. (171 pages)

Reference: covers installation (YaST and YaST2), booting, X Windows, hardware, notebooks, the kernel and kernel paramteters, updating the system, printing and lots more. (351 pages)

Installation
With so many applications being included in the SuSE distribution, installing from the 7 CDs would have reminded me too much of my first steps with Linux (a 50 floppy SLS distribution). Thankfully a DVD is also included in the package, so with this inserted in the DVD drive, the machine was booted.

As the main test machine exceeded the minimum requirements for YaST2 (64MB of RAM and a 120 Mhz processor), we did not have to resort to a text based installation. YaST2 is a graphical central configuration tool that aims to make installing Linux as easy as installing Windows.

The installation was very automatic with very few decisions needing to be made. First we selected the language for the system and the timezone. We chose a new installation, on a fresh hard disk which did simplify things a little. Once we had accepted YaST2’s suggested partitioning of the disk all that was left for us to do was choose the scope of the installation; whether to have a minimum system, a default system with or without office, or all the packages. LILO was installed onto a floppy for convenience. A root password was chosen and a non-root user set up. The partitions were formatted by YaST2 and it then proceeded to install the software.

The main test machine had the full installation installed, although we later installed the default system onto another disk. The complete installation took about 90 minutes to install the packages, taking about 6GB of hard disk space, whereas the default installation took only a little over 20 minutes.

The system rebooted the basic system; now it was time to configure the various hardware in the machine. YaST2 chose a fairly conservative 1024×768 @ 60Hz refresh rate for the desktop setting. This was a sensible precaution as it is possible to damage a monitor by driving it beyond its limitations. We reconfigured the monitor setting to a more reasonable 1280×1024 @ 99Hz resolution/refresh rate. YaST2 correctly identified the network card, printer, modem, sound card and tv card in the main test machine which was very impressive. Although the mouse was configured for use we did had to manually enter the line

Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″

into the XF86Config file to get the wheel to function.

During the installation we followed the Quick Install manual which made the whole process extremely easy to follow. If only other Linux distributions had such clear documentation included!

On a Tyan Tiger S1692D dual PII motherboard the SuSe 7.3 installation proceeded smoothly. The sound card wasn’t picked up but it was a cheap 10 quid board so that is not surprising. However more seriously after a few minutes of inactivity the machine appeared to hang. This isn’t a problem with the machine as far as we know – it works fine with Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat 7.0. It appears to be a problem with the hard disk powering down which may be connected to the 2.4.10 kernel – we are currently investigating further.

SuSE also found the correct Linux partitions on which to install on the dual PII machine (which also boots to Windows ME and Windows 2000). These held a previous Mandrake 8.0 installation and so no re-partitioning was necessary with SuSE 7.3.

What’s New
There are a number of important improvements that SuSE 7.3 offers. Included in the release are updated versions of important components, the kernel, XFree86, KDE, GNOME and glibc. In addition SuSE 7.3 now provides a smoother installation than in previous releases.

YaST2 now has more modules included which helped make the installation of the Hauppauge WinTV/PVR card child’s play. It wasn’t that long ago that configuring a tv card for Linux was pretty hairy! Furthermore SuSE 7.3 automatically recognised the Yahama CD burner which was particularly impressive as it is a recent model. Other improvements that have been made to YaST2 include a configuration tool for the SuSE firewall, LVM and scanner configuration. Unfortunately many scanners are still unsupported in Linux, although this isn’t a criticism of SuSE. As always it is very difficult to write device drivers for hardware where manufacturers refuse to release the specs.

SuSE have also added support for Soft-RAID which increases data security and performance. JFS and ext3 are featured in addition to the standard filesystems and YaST2 now even lets you partition the filesystem while the system is running.

From an applications perspective the latest KOffice, Samba 2.2, XFree86 4.1.0 are included. SaX and SaX2, SuSE’s Advanced X Configuration Tool, lets you configure XFree86 3.3.x and 4.0 respectively. SaX2 now boasts support for cloned multihead graphical displays. Graphics tablets and touchscreens are now also supported by this tool.

There are many other minor improvements to SuSE 7.3; this is after all an incremental release.

What’s Good
The most apparent feature of SuSE that sets it apart from other distributions is the sheer number of programs that are included in the distribution. This has the advantage for people who are on metered net connections; almost all the software you would ever want to download from the net has been included on the 7 CDs and DVD. In addition, having 2,300 applications in binary RPM format potentially saves some headaches that can arise when trying to compile Linux software. The range of the software included is impressive although there is a lot of duplication. Demo versions of commercial software are also included in the package, which are particularly useful as they generally are large downloads.

Having so many packages has meant that the distribution is spread over 7 CDs, which would be mildly inconvenient when installing the software if it were not a handy DVD that is also included in the distribution.

SuSE has developed an extremely polished installation, and with the Quick Install Manual should mean just about anyone can install this distribution. Almost all the hardware in the main test machine was correctly identified and configured, with the only minor blemish being the wheel mouse. A nice touch, when choosing the default installation, was that YaST2 recognised that there was a TV card in the machine and installed kwintv automatically, even though the default installation wouldn’t have automatically installed it.

Even though SuSE Professional 7.3 has only just been released the system update feature, in YaST2, identified a number of patches to be installed via the internet. The power of this feature should not be underestimated; having an up to date system with the latest security patches with minimum effort is a definite advantage. SuSE YOU also makes system upgrades very straightforward.

SuSE have made an intelligent choice making KDE 2.2.1 the standard desktop. However, if it’s not to your taste there are more than a dozen other alternatives available on the DVD including GNOME. KDE has developed into a mature desktop environment and SuSE have configured it so that there are shortcuts on the desktop for all readable disk partitions and key programs.

The amount and quality of the printed documentation with the distribution is also very impressive. With over 1,000 printed pages, the 5 manuals provide an excellent reference, which is further supplemented by the comprehensive online documentation.

The Yamaha CD burner was automatically installed by YaST and we were burning a CDRW within minutes after installation. The hardest decision to make was which CD writing software to try first (we plumped for KOnCD).

What’s Not so Good

Maybe the biggest failing with XFree86 is still the poor fonts support. Although anti-aliased fonts are supported by KDE, they are second best to the fonts that are included in Microsoft XP. A shell script, fetchmsttfonts, is supplied with SuSE 7.3 which does automate the installation of some nice anti-aliased fonts but these are obtained under license from Microsoft! Some might see this as rubbing salt into the wound! This isn’t really a failing of SuSE directly; other Linux distributions have the same problem. But it certainly takes away a little of the polish away from the attractive desktop environment. Maybe this is an area that SuSE might want to invest some time into it?

Although automount is supplied with SuSE 7.3 it has not been configured so that partitions are mounted and unmounted, on demand, seamlessly in the background. Mandrake already supports this feature which, although not critical, makes the distribution a little less newbie friendly, especially for windows users where the concept of mounting and umounting is an alien concept.

YaST2 is an excellent control center application being both simple and intutitive to use. However it is, and always has been been, sluggish in operation. It also requires a machine with at least 64MB of RAM to use this graphical configuration tool. This will mean that the text based installation tool will have to be used on many lower spec machines; fortunately RAM is so cheap these days.

Conclusion
SuSE Linux Professional 7.3 is an excellent distribution and comes with our strongest recommendation for anyone who has ever installed Linux before. As the Professional edition has so much software, a Linux newbie may feel overwhelmed by the choice on offer; for this reason we recommend that a Linux beginner try the Personal edition first.

SuSE did a great job of making the installation as easy as possible and with the slick KDE makes for an extremely usable system. The DVD is a welcome extra, the documentation is excellent and the sheer range of programs awesome. The review was a little delayed by SuSE’s insistence on including Tux Racer in the distribution . We managed 55 frames per second from the Radeon card when running this game which was fairly impressive from the DRI OpenGL driver.

For die hard windows users, the WINE system is included and we successfully run many Windows applications with this software including Quicken, Corel Photopaint and Agent.

We would want to test this distribution for a longer period before recommending using this to be used in a corporate environment; many of the fundamental components are the latest versions. But from the limited tests carried out it functioned perfectly well as an Intranet server running Apache, MySQL and DB4Web. Overall this is SuSE’s best ever distribution and looks like being our favorite Linux distribution, at least for now.

Surprisingly even with a full installation many of the programs on the DVD are not installed. Most of these are minor tools and utilities, but there are some heavyweights. Opera is one of the most promising applications for Linux and is fast becoming a contender for most popular Linux web browser, but even with the full installation option it isn’t installed. Of course it’s a simple operation to install Opera with YaST2. Other heavyweights are that on the DVD but are not installed include Kylix, Borland’s Rapid Application Development tool, and the System and Reference manual.

Although there are 2,300 applications included in the distributios there are a new notable omissions from SuSE 7.3. Pan, a popular GNOME newsreader, hasn’t been included in the distribution; neither has gqview, an image browser that features single click access to view images and move around the directory tree. Other notable absentees include ftape, elm, majordomo and kruiser. However it is inevitable that many free Linux packages have to be omitted and tough choices made solely because of the huge number of programs that are now available; LinuxLinks.com lists over 10,000 Linux software packages.

ADSM is a network-based backup system, sold by IBM, in use at many organizations. There are clients for a large variety of systems (different UNIX brands, Windows, Novell, Mac, Windows NT). Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is no native Linux version.

You will have to use the SCO binary, and install the iBCS2-emulator for running ADSM. This description is for ADSM v2r1.

At the time if this writing, I am only aware of a version which works with the i386 version of Linux.

Installing the ADSM client

The SCO binary is supplied as three tar files, or disks. Change to the root directory, set your umask according to your policies, and unpack them from there (as root). In your Directory /tmp, you will find an installation script; execute that.

You will then have to hand-edit /usr/adsm/dsm.sys and /usr/adsm/dsm.opt. In dsm.sys, important lines to specify are:

Servername

The name of the server
TCPServeraddress

The fully qualified host name of the server
NODename

Your own hostname

In dsm.opt, you will have to specify

Server

As before
Followsymbolic

Wether or not to follow symbolic links (not a good idea, in general)
SUbdir

Wether to back up subdirectories (you usually want that)
domain

The file systems to back up

You will then have to create a SCO-compatible /etc/mnttab from your /etc/fstab. You can use the following Perl script, fstab2mnttab, for this.

FirstLinux has started a new series of in-depth reviews covering the latest major Linux distributions and software themes. Currently you can explore:

* SuSe 7.3 – the latest release from Europe’s leading Linux Distributor.

* Chess Interfaces – A comparison of the ways to play chess on a Linux box.

First for Beginners

There are a number of resources FirstLinux provides specifically for beginners. Your first questions might be ‘What is Linux ?’ and ‘Why use Linux ?’ Next, you might want to look at some essential links for Linux Beginners and raise a question in the Beginners Discussion Forum. Are you confused by the Linux jargon – try the The Linux Guide – a glossary of Linux information.

FirstLinux has started a new series of articles written for beginners:

* Checklist for Newbies – a starting point for the complete novice.

* I’ve installed Linux: What Next ? is a collection of articles giving suggestions and ideas for exploiting your newly installed Linux system.

Linux Smart Cards

The latest content provided by the FirstLinux team is a series of smartcards. These enable beginner and intermediate Linux users to understand in greater detail particular features of the operating system. The following smart cards are currently available:

* The Linux Directory Structure – explains the reasoning behind the Linux directory organisation.

* Understanding permissions – explains the significance of permissions and how to change permission settings.

Databases

* Linux Reviews: Short capsule reviews of Linux software are available here. We welcome your reviews of Linux software to supplement our own.

* The Linux Package Guide: The package guide contains information on the core packages of the RedHat, Suse, Caldera, Mandrake and Debian distributions for the Intel platform. The database is fully searchable allowing you to find out just what each distribution offers.

* The Linux Guide: The guide is a compendium of essential linux information consisting of terms, definitions and documentation with entries sorted alphabetically.

* The Linux Product Guide: The Linux product guide is a database of information on commercial products available for Linux.

* LinuxLinks A collection of approximately 12,000 links to essential Linux web pages. Reviewers at Linux Links list the latest Linux sites through exhaustive searches on the net. Additional links are also provided from Linux enthusiasts.