Letters to the Editor

It's great to see two (count them) of our books reviewed in a single issue. [June, 1997] However, you spelled my name wrong in the “Programming with GNU Software” article by Randyl Britten. I take that as a lapse on my part. I should be in touch with you more often. (I tend to just drop by the booth at occasional conferences.)

—Andy Oram O'Reilly & Associates, Inc .andyo@ora.com

Thanks for being so understanding. Unfortunately—a-hem—I have to take full responsibility for the spelling. It's in my original manuscript and there was no excuse. I offer my apologies.

—Randyl Britten britten@u.washington.edu

Thanks for your seamless renewal of my subscription, even though I had decided in favour of the new UK Linux World magazine, which has now disappeared after one issue.

LJ continues as well as ever, but I'd like to add my voice to the novice lobby—more stuff for us please. After some easily understood articles on RCS, shell scripting and the like, you've become all technical and clever again. I'd like to see stuff on make and gdb—I've downloaded many applications as source archives only to find the authors assume abilities I don't have. Stuff on the startup and shutdown scripts would also be nice. Anyway, great magazine.

—Bob Smith bob@bank.demon.co.uk

For every opinion, there's an equal and opposite opinion. Read on —Editor

I would like to see Linux Journal remain a Linux magazine, and not move towards more WWWsmith articles, as you have done in the last few months.

Also, I would like to see LJ become more technical, and move away from the novice corner type stuff, which can easily be found in more current form in places such as Linux Gazette, newsgroups, etc.

When I say technical, I mean articles like Alessandro Rubini's excellent Kernel Korner columns. Or detailed articles on Perl and shell scripting, hardware ports to alpha or networking (the article on ghosting in June is a nice detailed article). [“Ghosting Onto the Net”, Scott Steadman, June 1997]

I understand that Linux is new in some sense, and you may feel justified in having the “simpler” stuff in there, so I offer my feedback as simply another data point for your consideration.

—Les Schaffer godzilla@futuris.net

We strive to be balanced, offering both a Kernel Korner and a Linux Apprentice column each month —Editor

I very much enjoyed your keyboard article in the June Linux Journal. [“Consistent Keyboard Configuration”, John Bunch] The article as published by LJ had several typos. I was able to get most everything to work as described. Did not have much luck with the arrow keys in Emacs running in an xterm. I have not been able to determine the cause of this. Something to do with the xterm translations?

—W. Paul Mills wpmills@sound.net

Note that on page 54, six lines are broken, forcing “Arrow” onto the following line. These lines should be joined so that “Arrow” is inside the comment. Also note that the escape sequences are incorrect. The double backslashes should all be single backslashes, so for example, the line for F117 should read:

string F117 = "\033\033[A" # Alt-Up Arrow

This type of error is present throughout the article. On page 57, the key translation lines have two problems. First, all of the double backslashes should be changed to single backslashes. Second, the lines were broken improperly. The first seven lines are shown in Listing 1.

Listing 1. Keyboard Corrections

Copy the rest of the lines from the man page for xterm(1). Every line of the translations, except for the last line, should end with either \n\ or \. Typographical errors here are very serious, because they cause problems without generating any error messages.

Let me know if this helps.

—John F. Bunch bunch@ro.com

I have a little big complaint about LJ Issue 37, in particular the native PowerPC article [“Native Linux on the PowerPC”, Cort Dougan, May 1997]. There was a performance listing which compared MKLinux, native Linux-PPC and OSF and some Sun operating systems, but the table was typeset all wrong. Being so cryptic it is almost, if not completely, useless since one cannot tell which digits belong to which columns. If you have so many problems getting your magazine printed correctly, you should probably hire better people, like me for instance.

—Ville Voutilainen vjv@stekt.oulu.fi