When I saw the letter by Geraint Williams in the
August 2004 issue of Linux Journal, although I was
glad to see a reply defending free speech, I still
was surprised that a technical article would have been
illustrated by an example containing controversial
political content.
But, then I found that the example in question was an
explanation by your author, Reuven Lerner, of why
he had chosen the name Altneuland for his blog—because the United States seemed different to him
after eight years of living in Israel. I'm sure the page
appeared to many others as it did to me—entirely
innocuous rather than dangerously controversial.
—
John Savard
I'm a Linux fan/geek, from Buenos Aires, Argentina,
and I have been using Linux for more than eight
years. I work as a Network Engineer/Consultant for
Ericsson. I've been a subscriber to Linux Journal for
three years. I'll renew after I go back to Buenos
Aires and will wait every month for this amazing magazine
that makes my day every time I receive it.
Here is a picture of my small Tux fan.
Now she's four years old, but at the time of the picture,
she was 1 1/2. Every time she sees a penguin she says,
“Look daddy, Tux is there! Tux! Tux!” That makes
me laugh.
Keep it up—doing this great magazine.
—
Francisco Puente
I couldn't resist sending a picture of my granddaughter, Savannah.
I have no doubt she'll grow up on Linux and love it as much as
she does my penguins. Thanks for a superb, top-quality journal.
—
Michal Ludvig
Attached is a photo of my one-week-old daughter Sarka
with a penguin slobber-jacket. Enjoy!
—
Michal Ludvig
This costume is property of Linuxhelpdesk.net. We do
an EU project on ease of use of Linux in Finland.
See www.linuxhelpdesk.net, or contact
jukka.penttinen@ncp.fi for more information.
—
Eero
Attached is a photo of young Robert and me planning baby's first
computer before heading home from the hospital after his birth. How
much beefier will the Ultimate Linux Box be when he has the motor
control to use a keyboard or mouse?
—
David
I have been noticing an interesting trend in LJ: it's getting thicker! Congratulations. As a frequent reader of trade journals and hobby computer magazines, I know what that means to the publisher. To my dismay, some of my other trade journals are getting thinner. Some even have embraced Microsoft in order to provide content!
I agree with reader Robert W. Carter that LJ is the
new Byte [see Letters, September 2004]. It is catering to my hobbyist curiosity
and feeding my demand for up-to-date articles and
reviews of Linux software and hardware applications.
What you need now is to get Steve Ciarcia to write
you a monthly column (is he still publishing Circuit
Cellar?), and get Jerry Pournelle a cameo every once
in a while. That will transform LJ into the nurturer
of the new generation of computer hobbyist in the
same way Byte did in the 1980s.
Keep up the good work!
—
Anibal Morales
LJ hasn't gotten thicker or thinner in a while. Circuit Cellar is still around and knocks our socks off with great projects using inexpensive 8-bit processors. Check it out at circuitcellar.com.—Ed.
Why is horizontal scrolling required to read
Don Marti's article “Breaking the Laptop Barrier”
[www.linuxjournal.com/article/7698] posted August 3, 2004? I viewed several other LJ articles
with Mozilla without any horizontal scroll issues,
so I'm pretty sure it's the one article.
—
Scott
Someone posted a long URL in the comments, which messed up the layout. Watch our Web site for a redesign that will fix this and other issues.—Ed.
I regularly buy Linux Journal in the local bookstore with foreign
literature. Although I'm not in the IT business, I find a lot of articles
interesting (my computers are all running either Linux or some variant
of BSD).
My father, who is an active radio control flyer, recently bought a new model
airplane named X-Free. The decision about the painted decoration was
quite easy because of the name, but The GIMP made it even easier. We took a
photo of the unpainted airplane and used The GIMP to apply the finish
and tweak it until we were satisfied. We then printed out the modified
photo and my father copied the design to the real airplane.
—
Tomaz
Solc
Here is a photo of my two boys wearing—back-to-front, of
course—their GeekStuff Linux Tux baseball caps. I have them convinced that
they are the only boys in all of Ireland with caps like these—walking
open-source advertisements! This picture was taken last Easter at a
small fishing village in the southeastern corner of Ireland. The water
looks inviting, but don't be fooled. The air temperature was about
15°C. Brrrrrrr!
—
Paul
The article “Linux on Linksys Wi-Fi Routers” in the August 2004 issue says:
Many similar wireless routers, such as the Belkin F5D7230-4, the Buffalotech WBR-G54 and the ASUS WL-300g and WL-500g, all use Linux in their firmware, and the list expands daily. Unfortunately, none of these companies has complied with GPL requirements and released the source code.
Belkin has released its source code:
web.belkin.com/support/gpl.asp.
Perhaps it was after the article went to press.
More information on hacking the firmware can be found at
www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/Belkin_20F5D7230_2d4.
—
Brian King
My husband is a computer programmer and uses Linux a lot. He also
enjoys the game Tux Racer. When he commented that I make special cakes
for the kids' birthdays and not for his, I couldn't resist attempting to
create a Tux cake to surprise him. After seeing the Photo of the Month
winner for September 2004, he suggested I submit this photo.
—
Margaret Haller
Photo of the Month gets you a one-year extension to your subscription. Photos to info@linuxjournal.com. By the way, Tux Racer is now available as an arcade game. Congratulations to the tuxracer.com team.—Ed.
I, for one, would love to see more amateur radio-related articles in
LJ. We are a technically
oriented group. There must be scores of others out
there like myself.
—
Richard (WB2RAR)
Thanks for the September 2004 issue of Linux
Journal.
I truly enjoyed the radio articles. Please keep them
coming, especially articles like the one on PSK31.
I enjoy using Linux to decode different digital
modes on the HF band. With the storms of this
last week, I enjoyed using the Linux program HamFax
to receive Weather Faxes from NOAA—I could have
gotten the images from the Internet, but where is the
challenge in that?
—
Richard
Your September 2004 article on GPS was interesting, especially some of the science behind the technology. I'd like to point out two additional software packages.
1) nmead—written by Chuck Taylor. This reads GPS from your serial port and makes it available on a network port. His site also has a Java-based sample GUI (home.hiwaay.net/~taylorc/gps/nmea-server).
2) ntpd—Network Time Protocol. I personally
submitted patches that add nmead support to ntp. I
think it will be in the next stable release. Until
then, the patches are available at trainguy.dyn.dhs.org/~jminer/gps.html.
Thanks for another month of interesting articles!
—
Jon Miner
I noticed in the Ultimate Linux Box article, August
2004, that future issues will have projects based on
HDTV cards. Are you planning on covering the
Hauppauge HDTV cards as well as the pcHDTV HD-2000
card?
—
John R. Klaus
We'll try to make all our TV projects useful on as much hardware as possible. But, if you live in the USA and think you might want to watch HDTV someday, get an unrestricted card now before the Broadcast Flag regulation goes into effect.—Ed.
Because of the regular appearance of photos of
children in the Letters section of Linux Journal, I
WILL be renewing my subscription.
By the way, I also like the photos of pets very much.
Does the www.linuxjournal.com Web site have an
“About
us” page with photos of the writers and spouses, kids
and pets? I think that would be pretty great too.
—
Rick Deschene
A new look for the Web site is coming soon.—Ed.
Like most Linux users, I always am looking for ways to raise awareness and further the proliferation of Linux in industry and at home. Being an employee of a very large company, I have experienced first-hand what it is like to do battle with an 800-pound Microsoft-Certified gorilla of an IT department. To date, I have lost far more battles than I have won on this front, but I have not given up the cause. As a result of the wins we now run a few Linux servers and have a desktop machine here or there, but it still takes “an act of congress” to get approval from the gorilla to install Linux for general-purpose computing.
My most recent tactic was to purchase a subscription
to Linux Journal and have it sent to an influential
member of our IT department. I cannot think of how I
could get more Linux-proliferating bang for my hard-earned $25. For the
next 12 months, management
will be presented with a wealth of information about
the state of Linux. I honestly believe that if only
one out of every ten LJ readers did the same thing
it would go a long way to growing our very own 800-pound penguin.
—
J. Eric Pipas
I really appreciate these articles [see the September 2004 issue]. I am new to
Linux and was a ham way back when. I was also a
“real” engineer (Electrical vs. Software Engineer now)
when I started.
These articles seem like a good way for me to
get back into what I love and also to learn Linux.
I have been playing around with Linux and see
how the two will fit together well for my education
in both. Thanks, and keep these articles coming.
—
Tom Richards
I enjoyed the article on Linux hacking tools in the September 2004 issue.
strace is an extremely useful utility for getting in between
applications and the kernel to see what's going on. What's missing from
the list is its companion program ltrace. ltrace allows the developer
to monitor library calls made by dynamically linked applications, such
as calls made to the C library or to GTK. This capability comes in
handy when debugging or analyzing other people's code, so ltrace should
fit right into any Linux developer's bag of tricks.
—
Ryan Underwood
I received an e-mail from Mr Lyndon Tynes stating there was an error in one of the Best of Technical Support questions I answered in the June 2004 issue of LJ. The question relates to “Changing Desktop Environments” (page 66), and the correct reply should have been written as follows:
You can change the content of /etc/sysconfig/desktop from:
DESKTOP="GNOME" to
DESKTOP="KDE" or
DESKTOP="WINDOWMAKER", and your
X Window System will start the corresponding window manager.
The file that controls which window manager starts is
/etc/X11/xinit/Xclients; take a look and study it.
—
Felipe Barousse Boué
