First, thanks for the great magazine. In the February 2007 issue, however, you made a big mistake: Nokia is a Finnish company - not a Swedish company. It was named after a city, some 180 km north of Helsinki. Earlier, the company was better known by their rubber boots and car tires, which are produced by separate companies now.
Kari Pirkanniemi
| LM |
Several readers noticed our inadvertent characterization of Nokia as a "Swedish" company. We're very sorry for the confusion. We knew Nokia was a Finnish company, but our production process failed to uncover the error. Thanks for keeping us honest. Our apologies to the nation of Finland - a very advanced and prosperous country to which we all owe our livelihood, since it is, indeed, the birthplace of Linux.
I am a newbie when it comes to Linux. My first contact with Linux was when I was waiting for my wife in the mall and I found a magazine at the newsstand that had a demo DVD of Suse Linux 7.5. I bought the magazine, and I have been hooked up with Linux ever since.
I now run a server and host the local fire department's website. I find myself looking forward to your magazine every month and reading it many times.
I download distros from all over the web just to play. I have found that Yellow Dog 3 will work well on the G3s, but not so well on the G4. I am not that good at tweaking the system to make it work. I am now looking at Yellow Dog 5 for the Sony Play Station.
I tend to run both Intel and PPC systems. Almost all of your DVDs are aimed at the Intel-based machines. Can you do a DVD for the PPC once a year?
Bob Phillips
| LM |
Linux has supported the PowerPC chip for several years, and PowerPC Linux distros such as Yellow Dog have had a stable niche in the Linux ecosystem. The stakes have changed recently, now that Apple has decided to forgo the PowerPC and use Intel chips for their latest generation of Macintosh computers. However, Linux has always prided itself in being a system that could stay running on old hardware.
We believe in Linux on the PPC and will continue to cover PPC issues. However, the goal of our DVD is to appeal to the greatest possible number of readers, and the fact is, the number of readers using Linux computers with PPC chips is significantly smaller than the number using computers with Intel chips.
This would probably be a good time to state for the record that, just because we don't highlight a distro with a free DVD, it doesn't mean we don't support that distribution.
Several high-profile distributions will probably never be Linux Magazine DVDs - either because the vendor doesn't allow it, or because we have concluded that the distro would not add value for a majority of our readers.
In the case of the PowerPC chip, keep in mind that several prominent Linux distributions provide a PPC version for free download, including Debian, Suse, Mandriva, and Ubuntu.