So what is the state of the Hurd? Is it vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever? Fortunately not: the code exists, there is still work going on (for instance as part of Google Summer of Code), and there are even some relatively functional Hurd distributions. Let's look first at the code and the current architecture, and then at the Hurd distributions.

Have you ever wanted to look inside a tar.gz file but without expanding it? Have you ever wanted to just dump files in a .tar.gz file without having to organize it and periodically tar and gzip this data?

GSmartControl is a really useful Linux app to check the health of your hard disk drive. GSmartControl is basically a graphical user interface for smartctl, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. Only ATA drives including both PATA and SATA are supported for now.

I had a request this week to check out davfs2. This neat open source utility allows you to connect to a WebDAV server as a regular filesystem, meaning that applications that don't support WebDAV can still access resources shared via WebDAV.

Ultimately, the reason these tutes are on Python is because Python rocks!!, and it rocks in so many ways: For a start, the Python language is extremely, sublimely beautiful.

This how-to will teach you two commands, iftop and nethogs, that you can use to monitor network traffic on a Linux machine. You can use iftop to view traffic by individual connection, port, network segment, or remote host, which gives you a detailed accounting of all packets coming in and out of your machine.

The OpenGL 4.1 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.10 update to the OpenGL Shading language and is accompanied by a number of extensions introducing cutting-edge functionality to the OpenGL standard.

GnuTLS is a modern C library that implements the standard network security protocol Transport Layer Security (TLS), for use by network applications. GnuTLS is developed for GNU/Linux, but works on many Unix-like systems. The GnuTLS library is distributed under the terms of the GNU LGPL 2.1+.