This article first appeared in the June 2001 issue of LinuxUser:

Visual programming tools are relatively new to Linux, and many of the programmers who have learnt their trade in Visual Basic (VB) or Delphi are intimidated by the raw coding environment of Linux where real programmers use vi or Emacs and code in the buff.

Once upon a time the tennis commentary from Wimbledon was a sedate affair. They called it Lawn Tennis. Borg served. McEnroe returned the serve, and Dan Maskell whispered: "Oh, I say" into the microphone. Once in a while, McEnroe's return landed on or about the line, and the redheaded fury wouldn't like the call. "That was in", he would shout and throw his racket across the court. "You can not be serious", he would yell at the umpire, who was an unpaid middle-aged tennis fan from the shires and oozed an aura of quiet disdain.

This article first appeared in LinuxUser & Developer in 2003

This article first appeared in LinuxUser, December 2001

Free software has a great story to tell, from Richard Stallman's lone struggle to free the world of software from its creeping proprietary chains, to the rise of Linux into a real force in the computing industry. A starring role in this story must be reserved for Alan Cox, who has been number two on the Linux kernel tree since the earliest days, and is probably the largest single code contributor to the kernel.