Letters to the Editor

In the September issue's Best of Technical Support column, I was particularly interested in two of the letters.

John Barnitz wrote that he has problems with up and down-spinning disks. If his disk is a SCSI disk, it can, in many cases (e.g., Adaptec-Controller), be switched off in the controller setup. Another method on modern motherboards is to disable some of the power-saving settings.

Are Tysland wrote of problems with su and security. I tried sudo for a while, but now I am using su1 (also on sunsite). Using sudo, it is only possible to allow or disallow a command for a user or a specified group of users. With su1 you can control the parameters, e.g., user A can only mount CDs while user B or group B can mount disks. You can control nearly every parameter and command with this tool. I don't believe in a separate group for su users because you have to switch the group before using it. If you don't switch back after using su, you will probably have a problem.

—Martin Fuerstenau, Bilm, Germany tomcat@hannover.sgh-net.de

The article Grundig TV-Communications by Ted Kenney in issue 42 contains a small mistake in the last sentence of the last paragraph on page 54. DPT didn't begin to distribute a Linux driver developed by a third party. What they did, was start listing Linux as a supported OS and linking their web site to my EATA web pages. (I am the author of the EATA-DMA driver for the DPT controllers.)

—Michael Neuffer neuffer@trudi.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE

I'd just like to say how much I enjoyed the article by R. K. Owen in the July 1997 LJ, Registering in the U.S. Domain (For Free). Using Mr. Owen's carefully spelled out procedures, I tried to register a domain with the berkeley.ca.us “delegated authority”, Cliff Frost cliff@ack.berkeley.edu. The response was totally underwhelming, and months later I still do not have my requested domain registered.

This whole US domain registration system seems to be operating at the level of the US Postal Service. (Hmm. Wait, that's uncharitable. The USPS is a whiz in comparison to these characters.)

For example, this morning I went to the page: http://www.isi.edu/us-domain/ and tried to use the web-based registration form, since the Berkeley delegated authority is not responding to me. Clicking on the “Web Based Registration Template” and arriving at the URL: http://www.isi.edu/cgi-bin/usdomreg/template.pl, I got a “Not Found” message.

It appears that the San Jose, CA delegated authority that R. K. Owen used is better organized. I hope your other readers have better luck using the article's procedures than I did.

Keep the good stuff flowing from Linux Journal.

—Robert Lynch rmlynch@best.com

The October issue is great, but there is a small error—my e-mail address on page 33 is wrong [Internet Programming with Python book review]. Instead of djohnson@olympus.net, it should be dwj@aaronsrod.com.

—Dwight Johnson dwj@aaronsrod.com

Now you guys have really done it—I mean Issue 42, October 1997.

A smart looking cover, articles packed with answers and numerous relevant reviews, all for five bucks. It's going to take me hours to pore over this thing. Linux Journal keeps improving. Keep it up. I may even get around to subscribing one day.

—John Whipple johnboy@sonic.net

I would like to correct the assertion of the responder who claims that Xforms is not available for Linux in a.out format. [Letters to the Editor, October 1997, John Brown, “XForms Article”]

The FTP site ftp://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/pub/xforms/ contains a linux/ directory with two subdirectories, one that contains the ELF distribution and one that contains the a.out distribution. Both the old release 0.81 and the newer 0.86 are represented in both formats.

Furthermore, the test subdirectory contains the latest test release (0.87.2) in both a.out and ELF formats, thus refuting the assertion that the developers will not support a.out any more.

—Martin John Bartlett martin@nitram.demon.co.uk