Linux Format Blog

We've just put online some Linux Format cover backgrounds over at TuxRadar. They're free to download, modify, redistribute, etc, so go and enjoy! If there are particular cover backgrounds you'd like to have as a wallpaper, let us know and we'll see what can be done. If a cover image builds upon an image licensed from a third party then we can't give it away, but if you don't ask you'll never know!

In months gone by we've put PDFs of Linux Format articles online for conversion to different formats and, thanks to the excellent work of the community, we've been able to expand our wiki with more guides and help for all Linux users. Cheers to everyone who got involved!

Now we're looking to do something similar, but with the Answers section of the magazine. Each month, we print problems and solutions in Answers and we'd love to be able to share the fixes with the internet. So we're starting a new project -- The Answers Archive -- and you'll find all the information here:

We're just about to record the TuxRadar podcast #4, and this episode our Open Ballot question is: should distros make it easy for users to install proprietary codecs/drivers/apps on Linux? Please give a yes or no answer, and show your workings to get all the marks available for this question. The best/funniest/most Morrissey-referencing posts will be read out on air.

Surprisingly enough, the spreadsheet folks behind LXF have agreed to let us put online LXF116 for everyone to download. Yes, that's the current issue. No, it probably hasn't even reached Australia yet. So yes, we're probably going to lose a few sales. But we're hoping we'll make up any lost sales in community goodwill - we promised we'd thank everyone for our ABC rise by giving something back, so here you go.

Well, it's now been four weeks since we flicked the switch on TuxRadar, and so far it's been going pretty well. I know some of you probably think "darn, I saw that content months ago..." (or, in the case of our insanely popular Linux tips every geek should know feature, years ago - it's from issue 58!), but for the rest of the internet there's such a lack of quality Linux tutorials and features out there that TuxRadar seems to be quite a surprise to people!

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.