Open-source GNU/Linux operating systems, for all their complications and confusing nomenclature, span a universe of alternatives to Windows and macOS worth exploring. Ben has covered consumer tech for ...

Although many people claim that Linux is well on its way to replacing Unix, the reality is that Linux is Unix: a particular stream within a much wider community whose traditions and ideas both ...

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system. "It's terrible," De Raadt says.

One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

Many people have read that post by Linus Torvalds in the comp.os.minix newsgroup on Usenet, or at least heard about it. Many more are aware of how that (free) operating system ended up taking over ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

When considering the issue of best practice as it applies to the administration of Unix servers, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself. They begin with “What is best practice?

On 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) January 19, 2038 (that's a Tuesday), the world ends. Well, not in the biblical Book of Revelations sense. But, what will happen is ...