Gary Maxwell, who's no Linux or UNIX guru--just a small-business owner looking for stability in his working environment. He's now running his whole commercial writing firm on free software. Find out how he's doing on page 48.

If you don't like the fact that applications written with different toolkits often don't work well together, now there's something you can do about it. Check out our cover and read Marco Fioretti's ``The Grand Unified Desktop'' article on page 38. Marco received a lot of comments on our web site when he praised Red Hat's Bluecurve desktop for mixing the best of GNOME and KDE, and now he's taking an in-depth look at standards for things like drag-and-drop and configuration files. Don't take sides in the desktop war--follow standards so you can use the applications you like.

Page 44's article comes from the "stuff the editor wanted to learn" pile. Chris Schoeneman has invented what you might call a software KVM switch. It's Synergy, a program that lets you move the pointer to the edge of one system's display and start working on another system. Set your laptop down next to your desktop system, and automatically get more work space without switching keyboards.

Setting up Linux for desktop use still has some tricky parts, and scanning certainly qualifies. On page 54, Michael J. Hammel goes through the intricate dance of setting up a scanner. If you can do this, buy yourself a beverage and consider yourself ready for most Linux tasks.

• "Linux in the Workplace" to be released under Gnu FDL license