Letters to the Editor

Thanks for this superb magazine. I'd find it very informative if you could start a counter for important and/or interesting applications—both commercial and not—that have been ported to Linux. A compact layout might include one line per application: name and a short description of what it does. Also, articles about windows emulation and WWW are very welcome! Cheers, —Veli-Pekka Pulkkinenvpp@vipunen.hut.fi

LJ responds:

As far as non-commercial applications, almost everything has been ported—far too much to include in a counter in a small magazine. Most of the commercial apps that have been ported now advertise in Linux Journal, so a counter for them would be redundant.

Some day, we might be able to provide something like this. We would need to be a larger magazine (more pages) and have a clearer vision of what would be listed and what not.

We will try to keep occasional progress reports about Wine coming, and we arranged for Bob Amstadt, the head of the Wine project, to speak last month at the Open Systems World Linux Conference, as well.

I have been running the Slackware Pro 2.0 distribution at home now for about a month, and I LOVE Linux! It is a fast, well-thought-out OS. Linux Journal is undoubtedly the most useful, well-written magazine I have EVER subscribed to. I look forward to each new issue and read it many times. It's great to have a hacker's OS, instead of being forced into MS-DOS or MS-Windows. —Stephen E. Farlowsefarlow@crl.com KJ5YN

Terry Gleidt's articles on AUIS in LJ (issue #4) got me interested in ez, and I think it's great, but I can't get the equation editor to print equations properly. I'm using the auis63L1-wp package from sunsite with Slackware 2.0, including groff 1.09 and ghostscript 3.01 but the equations look like they have skipped a formatter, and the program won't convert them to other formats. y=x^2 comes out like this:

delim##define above "to" define below "from" define zilch "" define ...
#y=x sup[2]#delim off

How can I fix this?

Also, the help file mentions a “chart” program that isn't included. Where can I find this? —David Jacksonjackson@cfn.cs.dal.ca

Terry responds:

In /usr/andrew/README* it says:“If you print/preview equations, you should modify /usr/andrew/etc/{atkprint ,atkpreview} so that geqn and gtbl are invoked. See the comments in [those shell scripts] for more details.”

Hope this helps. If you have more questions, drop me some mail. —Terry Gliedttpg@mr.net

LJ responds, too:

Although this bug is probably fixed in a newer release of Terry's AUIS packages, I noticed that it exists with the package I have, as well. Try (as root, or some other user with write permissions in /usr/ andrew): cd /usr/andrew/ bin; ln -s runapp chart which worked for me.

I received in the mail today my seventh issue of Linux Journal. Thank you for providing the Linux community with such a fine publication. I started running Linux on a 486DX33 machine just about one year ago. At that time, I was very new to Unix and Un*x-like operating systems. However, over the past 12 months, I've installed and configured several Linux machines, learning more each time than I knew before. I'm now very comfortable administering my own system, as well as offering advice to people who are just starting out with an advanced OS.

Fortunately for me, I subscribed to LJ well before the first issue went to press. I say “fortunately” because your publication has provided me with timely advice and guidance. In fact, I am in your debt for publishing such clear, concise, and pertinent Linux-specific information as that which appears in Clarence Smith's article, “Linux Performance Tuning for the Faint of Heart” (issue #7). Please keep up the good, practical job you are doing.

Moreover, it has been a real joy watching LJ develop. I'm eager to see where the next 9 issues will take all of us. —Louis Dehnerlouis@winter.net.com

I am a regular reader of this wonderful journal. I would like to read some articles on printing, specifically, with the following items: 1) a minimal working printcap for a single machine with a printer and a client machine of a Linux print server; 2) filters for text and postscript files; 3) notes on obvious bugs, if any (for example, when the printer is on everything works fine, but when the printer is off, the print queue empties as if lpd is sending the files through the printer port); and 4) where to find the latest lp stuff. —Genaldo L. Nunesnunes@mtm.ufsc.br

LJ responds:

We have an author who is currently writing an article on printing, although we haven't scheduled it for print yet.