While most basic hardware support for GNU/Linux is improving constantly, wireless support remains dismal. Few manufacturers make an effort to support the operating system, or to publicize what support they have. Moreover, the components of wireless devices change so fast that one version of a device may offer support while a second version doesn't -- even though both versions share the same model number. And if, in addition to functionality, you also want a device with free drivers and no reliance on proprietary firmware, your choices are even more limited. Fortunately, no matter what your preferences, online resources exist to help you find the card that's right for you or get your existing wireless network adapter to work with Linux.

While desktop search engines like Beagle and Recoll can quickly find any file on your hard disk, they can't help you organize documents and files into neat and easy-to-manage collections. That's why we have tools like digiKam for managing your photos, BasKet Note Pads for keeping tabs on your notes, and Referencer for filing and tagging your documents. The latter is not only a handy tool to herd your documents, it also makes an excellent research and bibliography tool.

With OpenOffice.org 2.4 just released, OpenOffice.org 3.0 (OOo3) has already passed its feature freeze, and is scheduled for release in September. Based on recent development builds, what can you expect? In the Base, Draw, and Math applications, very little change, at least so far. But in the core programs of Writer, Impress, and Calc, some long-awaited new features are arriving. Combined with the improvements in the charting system that are the major feature of the 2.4 release, these new features promise to increase both usability and functionality, although some of the changes do not go far enough.

Last month the TrueCrypt Foundation released TrueCrypt 5.0, which finally introduces a Linux GUI for the cross-platform encryption application. TrueCrypt 5.0's numerous other enhancements include a Mac OS X port, XTS operation mode, the ability to encrypt a system partition or drive under Windows, and the addition of the SHA-512 hash algorithm.

Linux has proved to be much more resistant to malware than Windows, especially when it comes to viral infections, but any remote exploit makes it just as susceptible to worms, trojans, and rootkits as any other platform. Given all the fuss in the news recently about compromised Linux/Apache servers being responsible for infecting Windows users with malware when they visit those compromised sites, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at three of the best rootkit/malware detection tools available for Linux desktop and SOHO users. Here's a brief comparison of three popular choices: Chkrootkit, Rootkit Hunter, and Ossec.

Gnuplot can generate sophisticated graphs and output them in vector or bitmap image formats. It can produce many graph types, and you can customize the way the output will look to a great extent. But the customizability of gnuplot can work against it when all you want a simple line graph comparing two series of data points. In those cases, gplot lets you use gnuplot to create simple graphs using more semantic options to customize the appearance of common graph objects.