Linux Format Blog

Our podcast is released every two weeks, and in our regular Open Ballot section we ask you, our readers, what you think - and there's no room for sitting on the fence, because your answer needs to be either "yes" or "no" along with any explanation you feel like attaching.

We printed a Linux Starter Pack this time last year, giving folks a hand-holding walkthrough on how to get started with Ubuntu. Well, we've put all the PDFs together into one file and released the whole thing online for everyone to read for free - go to www.tuxradar.com/linuxstarterpack to snag the zip.

As we transition into this age of instant content delivery, our collective ethos as webizens has to be put under scrutiny. How do we communicate ideas effectively? Will the intrinsic power of the connected masses be able to destabilise the established media and lead us into a new era of networked e-democracy? Is it now time for inter-governmental institutions to step aside as the strength of social networks proves to be more forceful in enacting global change?

Yesterday was my birthday and, as a pressie, my lovely wife got me a batch of Wii points. Just enough, it turned out, to bag a pristine copy of the Master System classic Fantasy Zone and the incredible World of Goo which, if you haven't seen it, is a masterful physics based puzzle game. Amazingly, my purchase has coincided with the release of the game on Linux.

By now most of our readers will have seen LXF116 and, all being well, marvelled at what could well be the finest subscription offer we have ever run: Linux poetry magnets. You get a box of about 400 magnetised words that you can re-arrange to your heart's content - make silly geek phrases, make command lines, make whatever you want because it's great fun.

Ciao!

The awesome debut episode of the TuxRadar podcast has been brightening up the interwebs at www.tuxradar.com/podcast for a while now – so long in fact that we're about to produce episode 2.

I'm thinking of creating a Q&A database on the TuxRadar site, to help people find answers to Linux problems that are archived away in our old magazines - because, let's face it, problems such as compiling the kernel, fixing Grub, etc, are just as important today as they were last year or even longer ago.

If you've been reading LXF for a long time, using Linux for a long time, or are just curious about what life with Linux was like at the turn of the century, we've put online the very first Roundup from Linux Format. Click the link to read Mike Saunders's original words guiding you to choosing the right distro. Then leave a comment flaming him for not including Slackware.

If you're curious to see more ancient LXF stuff see the light, just let us know.

Forget the credit crunch, the environment, corruption in the House of Lords and badly punctuated protesters outside oil refineries: IT'S SNOWING!

Yes, it's snowing, which means that all national news broadcasts are dominated by pictures of children having snowball fights and crazy estimates from GCSE-level economists about how the weather has cost Xmillion pounds in lost production. Unless the snow falls outside London, in which case we just wear an extra pair of socks and get on with it.