Letters to the Editor

First I want to express my appreciation for the article “GPIB: Cool, It Works with Linux!” by Timotej Ecimovic, March 1998. I have worked with HPIB and GPIB, and I appreciated his treatment of that standard and Linux. I felt a special appreciation for what I perceived as his “spirit of Linux” or “spirit of GNU”. He appeared to me to express profound respect for the efforts of others. He also impressed me with his technical honesty in that he did not attempt to portray Linux as the perfect solution for all situations.

Now a minor critical remarks—I believe that the “About the cover:” is in error in that the screen displayed on the cover is a snapshot of FVWM95, not FVWM (or FVWM2).

Linux Journal is one of the few magazines I not only hold onto, but actually do go back to past issues for reference. Keep up the excellent work—even your advertisements are of superior quality. Linux Journal is a “strange beast” for me as I almost never read advertising in a publication, yet I find myself reading just about all of the ads in LJ.

—Bill Leachbleach@BellSouth.net

First of all, I would like to thank you guys for providing such an excellent publication. In regards to your March 1998 issue, I was surprised to see there was no article on KDE. I've used virtually all of the window managers that are available on the Internet and believe that KDE is the future of window managers. Why? KDE provides the ease of use of those other operating systems while at the same time utilizing the power of Linux/UNIX. Anyone who uses X should give KDE a try. Find it at http://www.kde.org/.

—Jeffrey Lojylo@ucdavis.edu

We did get a KDE article for March, but it was one of the last to arrive and the issue was already full. We will publish it in the near future. In the May issue of LJ there will be a short Linux Gazette column reviewing KDE and GNOME. Miguel de Icaza is writing an article about GNOME for us—Editor

I can't believe just how bad Red Hat 5.0 truly is. I've used Linux since about kernel 0.99 and have used Red Hat since version 4.0 and never have I come across such a terrible release. The bug list is incredible (check the errata page on their web site), and worse still, there aren't fixes for all of them yet. Rather than just post the patches, Red Hat seem intent on forcing RPMs down your throat by making users download multi-megabyte files rather than small patches that users could apply to the source code on the second CD and build themselves.

Well, Red Hat, this is a very Microsoft-like effort from you. Your own standards (RPM, AnotherLevel—heavily bugged) forced upon users, and an operating system that will be a commercial success but a technical failure. On a final note, why won't you answer my e-mail for technical support when I'm a registered user who purchased the package?

—Simon Mauricemaurices@mpx.com.au

My hat is off to Jonathan Walther for an extremely useful article on Linux home e-mail. I had wondered for years how this was done. In the past I would start a PPP connection to my ISP, then use telnet to log in to the ISP in order to use their Pine to read the mail. Printing an e-mail involved exporting to a file on the ISP's server, dropping the TELNET connection, using ftp to transfer the file to my machine and, finally, printing the file.

But no more—thanks to Jon for turning on the lights. The whole process took less than an hour and went exactly as outlined in the article. Everything came up the first time I tried it; no problems with anything. And this e-mail is coming to SSC from my Pine on my machine in my house!

—Bill Cunninghambwc@coastalnet.com

I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed March's article “Linux Means Business: Colleges Using Linux” by Don Kuenz. I'd like to see this view of colleges using Linux become a regular column—one for businesses and one for education and research. I know a lot of people would be interested in this type of article. For example, our school is very big on Linux. Our system is the COE Mosaic Linux Tile program which uses Linux machines connected to our existing AFS system. More information can be found at http://linux.uncc.edu/.

I consider this to be pretty impressive and something that other schools may like to see and try. At the same time I think we could learn a lot about other schools' implementation of Linux in the curriculum and for work purposes. We are very active with Linux at our school. Our newsgroup uncc.Linux is one of the most popular at the University, and we have a Linux users group that includes our trusty penguin mascot at each meeting. I enjoyed the article and hope to see more like it in the future.

—Brandon Perkinsbdperkin@uncc.edu