Because I have never cared for any sort of regimentation, I could never abide Microsoft edicts or crippleware of any sort. As a compromise, I settled on an Apple iMac, despite my misgivings about their copy protection. I seem to remember you mentioning that your magazine does not have the resources to cater to the Apple line of computers, but that was a while ago. The current Apples are all based on Intel CPUs and do load and run your offerings after a fashion.
Thanks for listening so far! Another big gripe for me is that far too many OSs are locked by design. With the Sabayon disc, I could not even set the time zone. It has a beautiful display but is totally useless for me. The latest Linux Shell Handbook is very enlightening, but at 81 years of age, my mind is no longer as nimble as it used to be. In the section on "Super User" (pp. 54-56), I see some real nuggets. Hopefully it will help me get a fully functioning Linux or Unix running on this "Defective By Design" computer.
Willi Wald
| LM |
Thanks for writing - and for giving us a chance to clarify an important point about our DVDs. Our DVD series has been going for several years now. At one point in the past, we did say we would not include DVDs with ISO images of Linux for Mac PowerPC hardware. Since then, Apple has switched the Macs to the Intel architecture used with other common PC systems. Most of our DVDs will run fine on Intel Macs.
We're glad you like the Linux Shell Handbook, which is still available in bookstores around the world. We're sorry you had trouble setting the time zone in Sabayon. I'm not sure what happened with that. In general, the newsstand economy doesn't support the presence of a full-time help desk. We tend to defer to the help sources for the various Linux distros in such cases. The "Additional Resources" box on our DVD page gives some links for help with the DVD. In the case of Sabayon, you could try the Sabayon forum (http://forum.sabayon.org) or the Sabayon wiki (http://wiki.sabayon.org).
I have been a software engineer for over 24 years - originally on various flavors of Unix (Solaris, HPUX, Sony, MIPS, DEC Alpha, IBM). I have done porting of multiple platform source to "ifdefed" single source, and I provided multi-platform solutions for dynamic compile and module load for many platforms based on the working proof of concept running on a Solaris platform.
Recently (1994) I began working with and installing Linux. Hence, I was interested to hear (read, actually) that Nokia and Intel were developing MeeGo! I might want to forgo a netbook and just wait for a Meego product! Any idea on the timeframe until MeeGo is released to the public? Any chance I could be an "early adopter" to help evaluate how the product is coming along?
Wondering and hoping ...
Willy
| LM |
Thanks for your email. We are also very interested in MeeGo (http://meego.com/), a project that combines the work of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. According to the website, the repositories "now include the operating system base from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer. The downloadable images available now will boot from a CD or from a USB stick, but since the MeeGo user experiences for the usage models are not yet included in today's MeeGo core, these images will boot into terminal."
In other words, preliminary versions of MeeGo are available to users now, but you'll need to be comfortable at the command line. If you have been a software developer for 24 years, you'll probably be a good candidate for helping. In case you're new to the Git version control system used with MeeGo and many other important open source projects, check out our article on using Git in this month's issue.
It isn't clear at this point when MeeGo will actually appear in commercial mobile products.