The Linux Gazette FAQ
These are the most Frequently Asked Questions in the LG Mailbag. With this FAQ, I hope to save all our fingers from a little bit of typing, or at least allow all that effort to go into something No (Wo)man Has Ever Typed Before.
Other archive formats. We need to keep disk space on the FTP site at a minimum for the sake of the mirrors. Also, the Editor rebels at the thought of the additional hand labor involved in maintaining more formats. Therefore, we have chosen the formats required by the majority of Gazette readers. Anybody is free to maintain the Gazette in another format if they wish, and if it is available publicly, I'll consider listing it on the mirrors page.
Zip, the compression format most common under Windows. If your unzipping program doesn't understand the *.tar.gz format, get Winzip at www.winzip.com.
Macintosh formats. (I haven't had a Mac since I sold my Mac Classic because Linux wouldn't run on it. If anybody has any suggestions for Mac users, I'll put them here.)
Other printable formats.
E-mail. The Gazette is too big to send via e-mail. Issue #44 is 754 KB; the largest issue (#34) was 2.7 MB. Even the text-only version of #44 is 146 K compressed, 413 K uncompressed. If anybody wishes to distribute the text version via e-mail, be my guest. There is an announcement mailing list where I announce each issue; e-mail lg-announce-request@ssc.com with "subscribe" in the message body to subscribe. Or read the announcement on comp.os.linux.announce.
Subscribing with "nospam" in your From: address or "dot" instead of "." is not going to get you subscribed. It just makes more work for the list administrator, who must deal with the resulting bounce messages and then unsubscribe the address.
On paper. I know of no companies offering printed copies of the Gazette.
Yes, yes, yes and yes. See the mirrors page. Be sure to check all the countries where your language is spoken; e.g., France and Canada for French, Russia and Ukraine for Russian.
You're probably looking at an unmaintained mirror. Check the home site to see what the current issue is, then go to the mirrors page on the home site to find a more up-to-date mirror.
If a mirror is seriously out of date, please let gazette@ssc.com know.
Use the Linux Gazette search engine. A link to it is on the Front Page, in the middle of the page. Be aware this engine has some limitations, which are listed on the search page under the search form.
Use the Index of Articles. A link to it is on the Front Page, at the bottom of the issues links, called "Index of All Issues". All the Tables of Contents are concatenated here onto one page. Use your browser's "Find in Page" dialog to find keywords in the title or author's names.
There is a seperate Answer Guy Index, listing all the questions that have been answered by the Answer Guy. However, they are not sorted by subject at this time, so you will also want to use the "Find in Page" dialog to search this listing for keywords.
The Linux Gazette is dependent on Readers Like You for its articles. Although we cannot offer financial compensation (this is a volunteer effort, after all), you will earn the gratitude of Linuxers all over the world, and possibly an enhanced reputation for yourself and your company as well.
New authors are always welcome. E-mail a short description of your proposed article to gazette@ssc.com, and the Editor will confirm whether it's compatible with the Gazette, and whether we need articles on that topic. Or, if you've already finished the article, just e-mail the article or its URL.
If you wish to write an ongoing series, please e-mail a note describing the topic and scope of the series, and a list of possible topics for the first few articles.
The following types of articles are always welcome:
We have all levels of readers, from newbies to gurus, so articles aiming at any level are fine. If you see an article that is too technical or not detailed enough for your taste, feel free to submit another article that fills the gaps.
Articles not accepted include one-sided product reviews that are basically advertisements. Mentioning your company is fine, but please write your article from the viewpoint of a Linux user rather than as a company spokesperson.
If your piece is essentially a press release or an announcement of a new product or service, submit it as a News Bytes item rather than as an article. Better yet, submit a URL and a 1-2 paragraph summary (free of unnecessary marketoid verbiage, please) rather than a press release, because you can write a better summary about your product than the Editor can.
Articles not specifically about Linux are generally not accepted, although an article about free/open-source software in general may occasionally be published on a case-by-case basis.
Articles may be of whatever length necessary. Generally, our articles are 2-15 screenfulls. Please use standard, simple HTML that can be viewed on a wide variety of browsers. Graphics are accepted, but keep them minimal for the sake of readers who pay by the minute for on-line time. Don't bother with fancy headers and footers; the Editor chops these off and adds the standard Gazette header and footer instead. If your article has long program listings accompanying it, please submit those as separate text files. Please submit a 3-4 line description of yourself for the Author Info section on the Back Page. Once you submit this, it will be reused for all your subsequent articles unless you send in an update.
Once a month, the Editor sends an announcement to all regular and recent authors, giving the deadline for the next issue. Issues are usually published on the last working day of the month; the deadline is seven days before this. If you need a deadline extension into the following week, e-mail the Editor. But don't stress out about deadlines; we're here to have fun. If your article misses the deadline, it will be published in the following issue.
Authors retain the copyright on their articles, but distribution of the Gazette is essentially unrestricted: it is published on web sites and FTP servers, included in some Linux distributions and commercial CD-ROMs, etc.
Thank you for your interest. We look forward to hearing from you.
Certainly. The Gazette is freely redistributable. You can copy it, give it away, sell it, translate it into another language, whatever you wish. Just keep the copyright notices attached to the articles, since each article is copyright by its author. We request that you provide a link back to www.linuxgazette.com.
If your copy is publicly available, we would like to list it on our mirrors page, especially if it's a foreign language translation. Use the submission form at the bottom of the page to tell us about your site. This is also the most effective way to help Gazette readers find you.
) To recognize and give thanks to our
sponsors, we display their logo.
If you would like more information about sponsoring the Linux Gazette, e-mail sponsor@ssc.com.
This section comprises the most frequently-asked questions in The Mailbag and The Answer Guy columns.
Check the FAQ. (Oh, you already are.
)
Somewhat more seriously, there is a Linux FAQ located at
http://www.linuxdoc.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ.html which you might
find to be helpful.
For people who are very new to Linux, especially if they are also new to computing in general, it may be handy to pick up one of these basic Linux books to get started:
Mailing lists exist for almost every application of any note, as well as for the distributions. If you get curious about a subject, and don't mind a bit of extra mail, sign onto applicable mailing lists as a "lurker" -- that is, just to read, not particularly to post. At some point it will make enough sense that their FAQ will seem very readable, and then you'll be well versed enough to ask more specific questions coherently. Don't forget to keep the slice of mail that advises you how to leave the mailing list when you tire of it or learn what you needed to know.
You may be able to meet with a local Linux User Group, if your area has one. There seem to be more all the time -- if you think you may not have one nearby, check the local university or community college before giving up.
And of course, there's always good general resources, such as the Linux
Gazette
Questions sent to gazette@ssc.com will be published in the Mailbag in the next issue. Make sure your From: or Reply-to: address is correct in your e-mail, so that respondents can send you an answer directly. Otherwise you will have to wait till the following issue to see whether somebody replied.
Questions sent to answerguy@ssc.com will be published in The Answer Guy column.
If your system is hosed and your data is lost and your homework is due tomorrow but your computer ate it, and it's the beginning of the month and the next Mailbag won't be published for four weeks, write to the Answer Guy. He gets a few hundred slices of mail a day, but when he answers, it's direct to you. He also copies the Gazette so that it will be published when the month end comes comes along.
You might want to check the new Answer Guy Index and see if your question got asked before, or if the Answer Guy's curiosity and ramblings from a related question covered what you need to know.
An excellent summary of the current state of WINE, DOSEMU and other Windows/DOS emulators is in issue #44, The Answer Guy, "Running Win '95 Apps under Linux".
There is also a program called VMWare which lets you run several "virtual computers" concurrently as applications, each with its own Operating System. There is a review in Linux Journal about it.
Answers in either the Tips or Answer Guy columns which relate to troubleshooting hardware, might be equally valuable to Linux and Windows users. This is however the Linux Gazette... so all the examples are likely to describe Linux methods and tools.
The Answer Guy has ranted about this many times before. He will gladly answer questions involving getting Linux and MS Windows systems to interact properly; this usually covers filesystems, use of samba (shares) and other networking, and discussion of how to use drivers.
However, he hasn't used Windows in many years, and in fact avoids the graphical user interfaces available to Linux. So he is not your best bet for asking about something which only involves Windows. Try one of the Windows magazines' letter-to-the-editor columns, an open forum offered at the online sites for such magazines, or (gasp) the tech support that was offered with your commercial product. Also, there are newsgroups for an amazing variety of topics, including MS Windows.
The usual command to ask for a help page on the command line is the word man followed by the name of the command you need help with. You can get started with man man. It might help you to remember this, if you realize it's short for "manual."
A lot of plain text documents about packages can be found in /usr/doc/packages in modern distributions. If you installed them, you can also usually find the FAQs and HOWTOs installed in respective directories there.
Some applications have their own built-in access to help files (even those are usually text stored in another file, which can be reached in other ways). For example, pressing F1 in vim, ? in lynx, or ctrl-H followed by a key in Emacs, will get you into their help system. These may be confusing to novices, though.
Many programs provide minimal help about their command-line interface if given the command-line option --help or -?. Even if these don't work, most give a usage message if they don't understand their command- line arguments. The GNU project has especially forwarded this idea. It's a good one; every programmer creating a small utility should have it self-documented at least this much.
Graphical interfaces such as tkman and tkinfo will help quite a bit because they know where to find these kinds of help files; you can use their menus to help you find what you need. The better ones may also have more complex search functions.
Some of the bigger distributions link their default web pages to HTML versions of the help files. They may also have a link to help directly from the menus in their default X Windowing setup. Therefore, it's wise to install the default window manager, even if you (or the friend helping you) have a preference for another one, and to explore its menus a bit.
It's probably a winmodem. Winmodems suck for multiple reasons:
So, yeah, there can be good internal modems, but it's more worthwhile to get an external one. It will often contain phone line surge suppression and that may lead to more stable connections as well.
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