Hi all,
Look what I got less than an hour ago - the Premier edition of the UK's first Linux Magazine: Linux Answers.
It's predictably a little thin, but since there aren't a huge number of ads in it, we'll let that pass.
What's rather good about this is that is appears to be breaking a mould in the publishing industry - it *appears* to be fairly well technically proficient, even on the second page giving the reason why they say "Linux" not "GNU/Linux" throughout the mag.
Loads of tutorials (mmm :), RH6.0 and Corel WordPerfect 8 on the cover, plus RealPlayer G2 and WINE bundled too.
Priced 4.99, from Future Publishing.
I'll be giving a fuller review on LNC soon.
James Green
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James Green wrote:
Look what I got less than an hour ago - the Premier edition of the UK's first Linux Magazine: Linux Answers.
It's even managed to appear here in sunny Diss. :-)
It's predictably a little thin, but since there aren't a huge number of
ads
in it, we'll let that pass.
Agreed but who is going to advertise in a Linux specific mag apart from those that that do so here in this issue? I think that Future publishing will struggle with this one purely on advertising revenue, shame.
What's rather good about this is that is appears to be breaking a mould in the publishing industry - it *appears* to be fairly well technically proficient, even on the second page giving the reason why they say "Linux" not "GNU/Linux" throughout the mag.
There have been numerous threads on the uk.comp.os.linux and futurenet.pcplus.linux newsgroups that have been severely critical of the accuracy of technical aspects published in this issue.
Loads of tutorials (mmm :), RH6.0 and Corel WordPerfect 8 on the cover,
plus
RealPlayer G2 and WINE bundled too.
Good choice of distro to put on a cover IMHO, seasoned users will already have their own favoured distro while it's fairly easy to install for the newbie. I do hope however that if they do manage to get the magazine going on a permanent basis, they stick some other distros on the coverdisk and don't go down the route of being a 'we only write about Red Hat' magazine.
Priced 4.99, from Future Publishing.
Par for the course, expect 6.50 per issue if they don't get any advertising revenue. I think it's worth the cover price, roughly the same amount of editorial content as PCPlus for the same cost.
On the whole I am quite impressed with it looking at it from the newbie viewpoint. Couple of goodies on the cover disk, WINE and the wheelie mouse thingy, I learned a few good tips and the open source article was interesting. I'll buy again *if* it gets off the ground, but I fear it won't.
I'll be giving a fuller review on LNC soon.
Best you give us a working URL first James. :-)
Cheers,
BJ
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On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 09:14:12PM -0000, John Woodard wrote:
Agreed but who is going to advertise in a Linux specific mag apart from those that that do so here in this issue? I think that Future publishing will struggle with this one purely on advertising revenue, shame.
The thinness of the mag is, I am told, caused by Future policy on the "Answers" series of magazines. The quantity of advertising too.
There have been numerous threads on the uk.comp.os.linux and futurenet.pcplus.linux newsgroups that have been severely critical of the accuracy of technical aspects published in this issue.
There have been several threads elsewhere about this too. The editor and magazine have since parted company, but apparently he was one of the few at Future with Unix (well, Solaris anyway) experience.
Good choice of distro to put on a cover IMHO, seasoned users will already have their own favoured distro while it's fairly easy to install for the
I would have preferred to see SuSE on there, to be quite frank. I think it's quite easy to install (maybe the SuSE users in the group can confirm/deny that) and the documentation is often streets ahead. Add to that, it normally works!
[...]
don't go down the route of being a 'we only write about Red Hat' magazine.
I'll relay this to them, but I doubt it's a concern.
Best you give us a working URL first James. :-)
"November 8 : ALUG (my local) given URL for BETA preview test" -- http://lists.sourceforge.org/pipermail/lnc-list/
MJR, striking a blow for Open Management [Yeah, my own website team list archives will be open as soon as we start keeping archives. Information wants to be free.]
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On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, MJ Ray wrote:
On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 09:14:12PM -0000, John Woodard wrote:
Agreed but who is going to advertise in a Linux specific mag apart from those that that do so here in this issue? I think that Future publishing will struggle with this one purely on advertising revenue, shame.
The thinness of the mag is, I am told, caused by Future policy on the "Answers" series of magazines. The quantity of advertising too.
Is this content v cost of paper then or what?
I liked the stuff on GIMP and the KDE tips, but quite whether the stuff on Networking problems is of help to the majority of readers (desktops or servers, any guesses?) is up for debate.
There have been numerous threads on the uk.comp.os.linux and futurenet.pcplus.linux newsgroups that have been severely critical of the accuracy of technical aspects published in this issue.
There have been several threads elsewhere about this too. The editor and magazine have since parted company, but apparently he was one of the few at Future with Unix (well, Solaris anyway) experience.
I emailed one of guys in ucol who a staffer on the mag some time ago - he said that the first "few issues" were for newbies essentially. This indicates there will be more to follow...
Good choice of distro to put on a cover IMHO, seasoned users will already have their own favoured distro while it's fairly easy to install for the
I would have preferred to see SuSE on there, to be quite frank. I think it's quite easy to install (maybe the SuSE users in the group can confirm/deny that) and the documentation is often streets ahead. Add to that, it normally works!
Actually, that guy on winntmag.com who did the FUD installed SuSE and everyone told him (afterwards) that SuSE is one of the more difficult to insall. All of which is IIRC you understand :-)
[...]
don't go down the route of being a 'we only write about Red Hat' magazine.
I'll relay this to them, but I doubt it's a concern.
It was the first thing that came into me head when I saw the cover CD actually.
Best you give us a working URL first James. :-)
MJR, striking a blow for Open Management [Yeah, my own website team list archives will be open as soon as we start keeping archives. Information wants to be free.]
Providing you get permission from the owners and there is some perceived benefit, I guess so. Quite what that benefit could be from lists on a specific web site's development I have no idea. But let's not start a war on this one :)
jg@cyberstorm.demon.co.uk wrote:
[SNIP]
I would have preferred to see SuSE on there, to be quite frank. I think it's quite easy to install (maybe the SuSE users in the group can confirm/deny that) and the documentation is often streets ahead. Add to that, it normally works!
Actually, that guy on winntmag.com who did the FUD installed SuSE and everyone told him (afterwards) that SuSE is one of the more difficult to insall. All of which is IIRC you understand :-)
FWIW, I use SuSE, and it is a piece of piss to install, manage and administer...
Cheers, Laurie.
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On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Laurie Brown wrote:
FWIW, I use SuSE, and it is a piece of piss to install, manage and administer...
Cheers, Laurie.
Providing you don't want to connect to Demon with ISDN ;-)
James
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On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Paul Russell wrote:
On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 04:22:01PM +0000, Green J M K wrote:
FWIW, I use SuSE, and it is a piece of piss to install, manage and administer...
Providing you don't want to connect to Demon with ISDN ;-)
From what I've seen, suse is not at all bad. As you no doubt know, I'm a debian devotee myself, but I was genuinely impressed with SuSE when I tried it about 9 months ago. RedHat however, is Evil - 180 MB base system, and a package management system that doesn't manage packages. Weirdness.
I quite liked RedHat when it came to 5.2. Disk Droid needs taming, but it's better than some text-based stuff about. I've still not had time to upgrade 6.0 to 6.1 yet...
I just plain didn't like the Debian installation. Those dotfile installs didn't give me much help or choice and the supplied kernels didn't work with my SCSI card (known problem).
As to RPM - I've never had a problem with it.
James
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As to RPM - I've never had a problem with it.
Yeah, you're right, it works fine. The thing is that it's not nearly as elegent as apt (advanced package tool - the debian equiv.). As Andrew, Mark and I have said on several occasions, you know a system is good when you can do the equiv of going from redhat 5 to redhat 6 by typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and watching it go (including downloading the packages, replceing them, reconfiguring when necessary, restarting daemons etc).
Absolutely superb. Debian: it's a little more difficult to install, yes, but once you have, you'll *never* look back.
Paul
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James Green wrote:
Providing you don't want to connect to Demon with ISDN ;-)
LOL :-)
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On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 12:46:53AM +0000, jg@cyberstorm.demon.co.uk wrote:
The thinness of the mag is, I am told, caused by Future policy on the "Answers" series of magazines. The quantity of advertising too.
Is this content v cost of paper then or what?
I don't know. I'm not involved in LA and not involved in dead trees at all.
It was the first thing that came into me head when I saw the cover CD actually.
...so I'd imagine it has already occurred to them.
[Yeah, my own website team list archives will be open as soon as we start keeping archives. Information wants to be free.]
Providing you get permission from the owners and there is some perceived benefit, I guess so. Quite what that benefit could be from lists on a specific web site's development I have no idea. But let's not start a war on this one :)
Well, if you need me to tell you the benefits of open working practices, then what on earth are you doing with Linux? The major problems with community projects are getting enough people motivated to help and avoiding creation of a clique which ceases to be relevant to the community it wants to help. Having the development of the site open helps to make it a community propery and knowing their peers are able to see them curbs the excesses which quickly lead to cliques.
If you want to look at the two main website development projects I'm involved in, you can see this at work. TSW has an announcements mailing list that all potential contributors can join (where the work is dished out -- this is the one that's not archived yet), open drop-in meetings and a public discussion forum. It's run by the editorial team and private emails fly around between various people to co-ordinate and discuss minor points on specific projects, but it's open and appears to be quite efficient. I'll let you know once we relaunch how successful it's being.
IceWM.themes.org was born from a public mailing list http://www.egroups.com/lists/icewm/info.html, is run by the members of a public mailing list (currently quiet as we're all knackered and the site works for now... expect more activity soon) http://cip.physik.uni-bonn.de/icewm-themes/ and all themes.org maintainers appear on IRC in #themes.org on openprojects.net. The higher-level t.o staff lists are closed, but that's not my policy and one I disagree with.
Oddly enough, with two large scale web projects underway, I didn't want to be heavily involved with another, but I thought it was agreed that I'd have odds and ends to contribute, which was fine, as I could read the mailing list from the web archive and email stuff in, but you bounced every single piece of email I ever sent to the list and singularly failed to respond to everything I said. I would have thought that the resignation of James Andrews, a generous perl guru who I have encountered a couple of times, because of your team's behaviour should sound major alarm bells...
LNClique anyone?
It might not happen, but it's a real danger. I'd suggest you open the main mailing list, give public or general access to your CVS along with instructions on how to mirror the site setup and Open Content and Open Source your site. That would be a major step in the right direction, as well as a major talking point come launch day. ["LNC, like Linux itself, is developed in an open way and is freely redistributable..."]
[Probably best to reply to me rather than list on this, as I doubt many people care. I just thought ALUG, who you want to help beta-test the site, might like to know why they're only allowed to see the end product and not how LNC is developed.]
MJR PS: Apologies for poor grammar.</rant> :)
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George Rowley -
Green J M K -
Green, James M K
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jg＠cyberstorm.demon.co.uk -
John Woodard -
John Woodard -
Laurie Brown -
MJ Ray -
Paul Russell