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Apps that live on a thumb drive are handy. You can carry your stuff around with you and run it wherever you find a suitable machine, without having to tote your laptop or (shudder!) a desktop machine around with you. What about a whole system on a thumb drive?

DSL ("Damn Small Linux") is a full Linux system that will fit onto a CD, thumb drive, or can be loaded onto the hard drive of your computer. Only 50MB in size, this distro will run on as little as a '486 with 16MB of RAM; or it functions as a full system with only 128MB of memory. You can even run it inside of Windows if you are so inclined.

While it's not got all the bells and whistles, DSL comes with a respectable cohort of software, including a desktop GUI, a media player, web browsers(including Firefox), word processor and text editors, and oodles of other stuff.

Linux has always been an interesting way to make use of some of the older machines you've got lying around, since there are many versions that don't require the horsepower of an XP or Vista. DSL takes this to the extreme.

DSL runs on x86 machines.

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Progress is a good thing. It generally makes things better–bigger, faster, stronger. Sometimes, though, things get left in the dust. When was the last time you bought a tape for your Betamax? (Kids, go ask your parents.)

Nowhere does the steady march into the future move more relentlessly than in the computer biz. You can hardly buy a machine or application where it isn't obsolete before you get the shrinkwrap off of it. One of the latest places where this has happened in Apple's change from PowerPC to Intel chips.

Along with all great new capabilities of the x86 architecture comes a great loss–you can't run Classic Mac apps any more. With PPC machines, you always had the option of running the great pre-OS X apps out there (a particular favorite of ours is Symantec's MORE, an outliner from way way back).

SheepShaver is a PowerPC emulator that allows you to run Classic apps on your MacIntel machine. Along with the application itself, you'll need a copy of MacOS and an appropriate ROM image (info on how to get a ROM image is included in the FAQs on the application's website). Once you load it all up, you will be able to run all your favorite Classic apps on your shiny new Intel box.

SheepShaver is a Mac application, but it also has Windows and Linux flavors as well.

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Computers are such a visual medium that your experience can be severely limited if you can't see what's on the screen. Whether because of limitations in your vision, or design choices made by a site’s webmaster, if you can’t see it, you can’t fully understand it.

Virtual Magnifying Glass does exactly what it sounds like: you can magnify sections of your screen to see just what is going on there. The magnifying lens follows your mouse around the display, so to zoom in on an area, you just point with your mouse and you’re there.

Users can adjust Virtual Magnifying Glass to work the way then need it to: the lens height and width can be adjusted, zoom can be set anywhere from 1x up to 20x, and the mouse scroll wheel can be used to zoom. Multiple displays are supported on several versions of Windows.

Virtual Magnifying Glass is available for Windows, Linux, and even FreeBSD.

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PeaZip is a file archiving program which supports many common compressed file types like ZIP and TAR, as well as 23 others. It even has it's own proprietary compression format called PEA. The program will run on Windows or Linux, but Windows users may not find it quite as intuitive as other archiving programs because it doesn't offer features like drag and drop. The program doesn't need to be installed, and can even run remotely, but the Windows version offers an install/uninstall option for familiarity.

PeaZip is an open source project, and as such, makes a special effort to support open source compression formats. If you've run across an obscure archived file and aren't sure how to expand it, you may want to give PeaZip a try.

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Gnome Partition Editor is a very useful tool for handling disk partitions. It allows for all imaginable operations on partitions: add, delete, resize, verify, and copy (when, for instance, mirroring is required). While ordinary system utilities allow for creating or copying partitions, going further is difficult; this one goes all the way, and supports all the major file systems to boot.

While partition handling is really a matter for the expert user (and the documentation, available online, reflects this) in general it can be stated that the program does the hard parts automatically: that is, detecting the operating system, the partition table format, and the file system format, and loading in the particular utilities needed to do the job. All the commands and operations are straightforward enough if you understand the concepts.

The major restriction on GPARTED is that while it works with most of the common file systems, it only runs on a few platforms: GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd, BeOS and FreeBSD.

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AutoScan is a tool in development, the purpose of which is to keep track of what's on your network. It's the brainchild of Thierry LaGarde, a Linux Adminstrator by trade. He has developed it as a result of his experiences and needs.

Autoscan develops a list of all resources on the network, reporting in XML as well as by displays. It scans subnets regularly, detects equipment added (date/time stamping the occurrence), monitors network services, detects the OS, brand and model of all equipment aboard, has an intrusion alert mode (it works by assuming that anything added is an intruder), detects hidden shared resources (a Samba share browser), and has Telnet and Nessus clients. It doesn't need administrative priveleges!

As noted this program is in development. The site is pretty sketchy - I couldn't get the "Documentation" to come up - and the English is obviously not that of an native speaker. It runs on all POSIX-like systems and is available under the GPL. Linux adventurers will find AutoScan worth checking out.

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Linux users — the ones who want total control of their desktop — will want to try the XFCE desktop environment. It’s a fast, lightweight environment for Unix and similar systems, visually appealing and easy to use.

Well, there’s easy and there’s easy. This is not for the casual user, or even for the power user: this is for people who like to operate at the system component level. It consists of a number of components, packaged separately, that the user can pick and choose to create the best personal working environment. The list includes: a settings manager, a window manager, a desktop manager and a control panel; a file manager, a printing helper, and an application finder; a session manager, a notification area, and at least three libraries of various functions and widgets. A sound mixer, a calendar/notification application, “toys” (less serious applications and add—ins), themes and an icon box come with the package.

The system runs on top of the operating system. Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, Cygwin, and MacOS X are OSes that it’s known to compile and run on. If you don't have the time or know-how to compile it from the source code, ready-to-run binaries are available for Redhat/Fedora, Suse, and Mandrake, among other flavors of Linux.

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RealVNC is kind of amazing: it lets you control any Internet-connected computer from any other Internet-connected computer. Say you’re on a business trip but you need a file from your home computer: you can use RealVNC to access your home computer’s desktop and transfer the file to yourself. Or, you can use it to troubleshoot a friend’s computer from miles away. RealVNC is available for many platforms, so it’s no problem to see and control a remote Windows desktop from your Mac, or control a Mac desktop from your Linux PC. If you’re a network administrator or just someone with more than one PC to manage, RealVNC is a useful tool.

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