Most of us have heard of BitTorrent, the highly scalable peer-to-peer file sharing technology designed to reduce the bandwidth strain on content distributors. With BitTorrent, the challenge is not in finding content to download, but in installing BitTorrent on your computer and finding a good, user-friendly client to manage them. We took a look at BitTorrent itself and the excellent Azureus client, and can offer you some tips on how to install them on your system.

Read the full article at http://www.linux.com/feature/113973

Every user whose client connects to the Internet should configure his firewall immediately after installation. Some Linux distributions include firewall configuration as a part of installation, often offering a set of defaults configurations to choose from. However, to ensure that your machine presents the minimum “attack surface” (a measure of the number of vulnerable ports, user accounts, and sockets exposed to attack) to the predatory inhabitants of the Internet, you may need to do some manual configuration of your firewall. Here are three tools that can help.

Read the full article at http://www.linux.com/feature/44818

DemoStudio is a GPL-licensed screen capture application for Microsoft Windows that can record single screen images, a series of screen images on a set interval, or screen video and audio. Whilst the screen capture functionality of DemoStudio amounts to little more than an organised version of Ctrl-PrintScreen, the audio/video capture functionality is superb, most notably for the software’s ability to create live screen annotations and to convert its initial AVI format output to Flash.

Read the full article at http://www.linux.com/feature/47886

Drupal is a content management system (CMS) built on the PHP and MySQL combination (detailed requirements here). I’ve been working with the latest version since its release at the beginning of this month. Drupal 4.7 is a significant upgrade that brings major short- and long-term benefits to users and distributors of the system. It brings Drupal back to the cutting edge of CMS development.

Read the full article at http://www.linux.com/feature/54310

LAMP installations (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) are a staple of many intranet and Internet open source applications. The “L” component in LAMP is perhaps less important than the other components, since many LAMP applications will run just as happily on a Windows platform as they will on Linux. Consider, for instance, EasyPHP, an “out of the box” Apache, MySQL, and PHP installation for Windows.

Read the full article at http://www.linux.com/feature/47083

The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser is without a doubt an open source software success story. One of its strengths is the active development community that works to expand and improve the browser’s functionality through the development of Firefox extensions — small applications that add functionality to Firefox. Here are a few of my favorite extensions, all tested with Firefox 1.0.1 on Windows XP and Mandrakelinux …

Part 1: http://www.linux.com/articles/44131

Part 2: http://www.linux.com/feature/44159

Part 3: http://www.linux.com/feature/44160

Google News presents a wealth of historic and up to the minute news syndicated from a wide range of trusted news sources. Is it, however, more than just a glorified news syndication site?

Read the full article at http://www.helium.com/tm/775762/google-presents-wealth-historic

If your chosen search engine is your map of the Internet, complete with areas marked “here be dragons”, then your bookmarks (or “Favourites”) are your carefully placed map pins on that ever changing map. Lose them, and may have lost the information that they point to indefinitely. If, like me, you have several hundred bookmarks covering a diverse range of topics, you may never find all of that information again.

Backing up your bookmarks and favourites should be part of your “disaster recovery” scenario irrespective of whether you are a casual Internet user, consider yourself a “power user”, or like me, you are someone for whom hitting the Internet day-in-day-out is part of your job. Nobody likes the guy who doesn’t get his work done because he can’t find the office anymore!

Read the full article at http://www.helium.com/tm/776375/chosen-search-engine-internet

eCommerce is a 24×7 business, especially when you are delivering digital content such as eBooks. With no shipping or handling required, there is no reason that a customer who buys your eBook at any time of day or night should have to wait more than a few minutes to receive it.

Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that you have to be in front of your PC 24 hours a day waiting for the orders to come in!

Read the full article at http://www.helium.com/tm/777233/ecommerce-business-especially-delivering

There are almost as many blogging tools out there as there are bloggers. In addition to closed source vendors such as Movable Type and Blogger, big players are entering the field, including Microsoft with its MSN Spaces offering and the lesser-known .Text ASP.net toolkit. But even among both these, and the vast array of open source blogging tools, Wordpress rises above the others for being open source as it should be done.

Read the complete article at http://www.linux.com/articles/43358