Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

Renaming Ethernet Devices

RE Mandrake UNIX : --or--

Mandrake has what's needed...
to get rid of it.

about Unix command rm

Comments to "A rather unique query (I hope)" --or--

/usr/src/linux symlink considered harmful

ess1869 sound card modual --or--

The Creed of The Querent

IP Forwarding

ess1869 sound card modual

Greetings from Heather Stern

This month I improved my little scripts so that it does about half the work (the part that becomes the mailbag and Tips) much more efficiently. I even managed to get things back to a level where I can split the messages back out as seperate files again.

Outside of this stuff, one thing on my mind is, how well supported will those new slim Apple notebooks be under Linux for the PPC platform? I hear they finally have a decent battery life, plus, they've got a really nice tough shell. I need that. I'm pretty hard on my stuff. Just ask my Magio.

Oh yeah. Can't do that, I haven't finished making it use Speak Freely yet. Sigh. I'm sure it's not supposed to be very hard, but there's no decent checklist out there. So, it can't talk to you quite yet!

Earlier this week, Mike asked if I could have my script format the Gazette Matters section, since I was doing 2 of the 3 other parts, and he's got an armful of articles. We've both had to defer some of the items until next issue ... Next month is going to be pretty tasty! Meanwhile we hope you enjoy what we've got in here for you.

So, since I didn't have time for a cool editorial (and I missed LWE) here's the backside scoop on how we select where messages end up:

Here it is.

There's one letter where the guy gives a long explanation about his install. I'm not sure if it belongs in the Mailbag or Tips.

[got your attachment on this one]

If he's telling the rest of us his successful answer, but it's really long (eg more than 2 lynx pages) I put in in TAG with a bangbubble. That's what happened to our SuSE/NFS fellow.

If shorter ans esp. if he has some good insightful item that's enough to absorb there, it goes in Tips. Oh yeah, I don't count script length too much against people.

If he has a gnarly question I think the Gang would have trouble with too, it goes in Wanted. "I'd like to see an article on..." also go in wanted, inclu. if that's my own thought sponsored by some question that came through. This is a massively reduced subset of the unanswered souls - I just like to give the readership a flavor of some of the stuff we have overflowing.

If it's a kudo thanking us 'cuz some past issue helped him nail it, it goes in mailbag... possibly edited, but not usually. (mild kudos with lots of tip or answer go in tips or tag respectively.)

Otherwise it goes back in the float, and maybe Jim and I will give a shot at answering it, or maybe he loses the TAG lotto. We don't promise to answer everything. Once in a long while Jim gets bitten by the answer bug and decides to clean out a bunch of backlog, but I don't see that happening for at least a couple of months at least.

To be perfectly honest, Jim's better at keeping the lost ones together, and I'm better at keeping track of which month they came in, but that's a natural side effect of the way we each work on the messages

I don't know how Ben and the rest keep track of what they like to answer, but as long as it all flows by my desk, everything works great.

[ and if I don't have enough time for it, that's gonna be The Blurb. :D ]

... and of course, Dear Reader, you know that that's exactly what happened. That fellow's message is long, but he just decided that he couldn't give us enough kudos if we didn't see the voyage of discovery he travelled with LG. So it stayed right where it is, and this is The Blurb.

Not Linux of the month for me:

On our local radio show two mornings ago, the PG&E building is right across the street from the station, and the hosts notice that it's "lit like a christmas tree" - every floor, completely on. Except the lobby area, where people would normally come in to pay bills. So... PG&E in California can't pay their bills to buy us enough power, but they haven't ordered their cleaning crew to change its habits about leaving all the lights on in their buildings.

But Jim says Walgreens is a lot easier on the eyes now that they only use a third of the lighting. Just remember -- computers don't eat much!

Enjoy.

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Published in issue 62 of Linux Gazette February 2001

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