Letters

I think it's about time for LJ to cover companies that claim to support Linux with their products, but fail to deliver. InterVideo (www.intervideo.com) claims to have ported their windvd player to Linux, but their web site keeps telling us this:

Cyberlink claims to have ported PowerDVD. Status: same as above.

Bioware keeps telling paying Neverwinter Nights customers that the Linux client will come, but every week the reason why it doesn't come yet is a different one. Last week, the coders were on vacation; this week we can't get status updates because “the PR people will all be at Gen Con.”

—Mathias Homann

Congratulations on your 100th issue! Linux Journal has been for years one of the critically important elements in the value-net that surrounds the Linux development community and is one of the reasons why Linux has become the fastest-growing operating system for platforms ranging from wristwatches to supercomputers. I'm looking forward to the next 100 issues. Keep up the good work!

—Daniel Frye, IBM Linux Technology Center

Thank you for all the calendars! I am extremely impressed with what you have managed to put together from my renderings and proud to hand the calendars out to my friends. I have already been contacted by an American company who had found my web site via the calendar, and they offered me a gig!

—Robert Karlsson

Loved the article on the Ultimate Linux Box [LJ, September 2002]. Just one complaint—no prices anywhere. It would have been great to see what you paid, even if that was super-secret pricing.

—Eric

PC component prices in effect when we write something are usually insanely high by the time you get your LJ. Anybody got a model for predicting them?

—Editor

I'm glad to see issue 100 out. LJ has been a great source of inspiration to many of us all along. You'll keep my subscription for as long as you don't replace the true Linux/Open Source spirit with advertising from Microsoft and, to add insult to injury, come up with some cynical “justification”.

—Renato Carrara

You used 8 Maxtor drives in the “Ultimate Linux Box” [LJ, September 2002] to get 1TB of storage. Now, if these are 120GB drives, 8 of them adds up to almost 1TB, but not if you use RAID-5, because you need to use at least one disk for parity partition, so you are down to 7.

—Fedor

We used 160GB drives and should have said so in the article.

—Editor

“How a Poor Contract Sunk an Open-Source Deal” [LJ, August 2002] is simply wrong. It should be “Sank”, of course.

—Jacob E. Goodman

There is another system for checking for memory overruns and leaks that was not mentioned in Cal Erickson's “Memory Leak Detection in Embedded Systems” [LJ, September 2002]. The bounds checking patches for GCC can check local and static variables in C modules, which makes it much more powerful than a malloc debug library. Check the GCC Extensions page at gcc.gnu.org/extensions.html.

—William Bader

Thanks for the Tux calendar, well done. I've been a subscriber for several years, and have often been surprised and pleased—I think this is the first time I can say delighted.

—Carla

On page 64 of your September 2002 issue you gave the Editors' Choice Award for Communication Tool to the Evolution mailer, saying “We like the idea of being able to compose more than one message at once.” It has been possible to do this for more than a decade using MH, and now nmh. This suite of e-mail commands fits nicely with the UNIX shell, providing separate commands for scanning a mail folder, searching e-mail and composing new messages. Draft messages sit in their own folder giving an effectively unlimited number. Myself, I still have drafts to finish dating back to 1999! For more information on nmh, see www.mhost.com/nmh or www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/.

—Ralph Corderoy

Is there any reason why LJ never writes a word about one of the latest Linux distributions from right here, the Eastside? I am talking about Redmond Linux, now called Desktop Linux from Lycoris. What gives? They have not bought any advertising space?

—Joe Pannon, Bellevue, Washington

I would like to know what accounting program to suggest when I am working with local businesses switching to Linux. I am interested in seeing a review and comparison of accounting software such as Quasar and Appgen MyBooks.

—Robert Tetzlaff

I always read with interest your articles on the Ultimate Linux Box. Each year was more powerful than the last. But I had other things to take care of, so I would read and dream.

Last year was different though, I was actually able to build, albeit slowly, your dual Athlon screamer! Was I happy? No way to describe it. I finally finished it this past summer with the purchase of a couple of fast SCSI drives. What a difference that made! What more could I possibly want except the nice case with all that wonderful cooling. But that will have to wait.

Why wait you ask? It's because in this latest (September 2002) issue you have now written another of these articles, and now I no longer have what you call the Ultimate Linux Box! I can't believe it? Do I go with the upgrade thing again? What is a guy to do? I worked so hard to get up with the rest of the fast crowd, and now I won't be at the top anymore. What a letdown. I'm totally disillusioned. I just don't know what to do. Perhaps next year when I read the article I'll have a chance to upgrade again. Until then, keep up the great work you do for the Linux community.

—Mike