Specifications

Try Puppy Linux
Wow, what a great article by Louis
Iacona [LJ, April 2008, “Puppy Linux”].
I was pleasantly surprised to find it so
in depth for a magazine article, which
is usually no more than two pages. It
definitely encouraged me to try Puppy
Linux, which I will do. I hope to see
more articles by this gentleman and
hope he was well paid. Thank you for
such a great magazine.
--
George Mulak
On ISOs
I have noticed mention of ISOs now and
then in LJ articles.
While working on our own applications,
we’ve often gone searching on the
Internet for tools and applications that
might already be found in the form of a
ready-to-run ISO.
Because ISOs are relatively new to the
public, we concluded that currently, it is
difficult to find such works or list them
if you are an author.
Therefore, we have created a new site,
www.isotogo.com, to help the public
and authors in working with ISOs.
There is no cost to use it or to list your
works, and because it is new, we are
working hard on moving up the search
engine ladder.
--
Mike Paradis
Comments on the OLPC XO
Dave Phillips is effusive in his praise of
the OLPC XO [LJ, June 2008], and most
of it is well deserved, indeed. But it
must be conceded that the keyboard is
a piece of absolute trash. After just a
few hours of use, mine developed keys
that stick or fail to actuate or actuate
with Alt applied unpredictably. This got
worse until it was completely unusable.
A Google search turned up many such
complaints and detailed instructions for
excising and replacing the keyboard
(serious tinkerers only!). The USB key-
board is really a necessity, but that is
not convenient in all circumstances.
The mouse does have two active but-
tons, as you can verify by copying the
binary of gpm from a compatible
system (I use Fedora Core 6 on a Dell
Latitude). Run it as:
gpm -m /dev/input/mouse0 -t ps2 -r 5 -a 3
and play with the -r and -a settings to
get it the way you like.
The display is a little bit strange. Plotting
a bunch of random pixels in white on a
black screen makes red, green and blue
dots. A white-on-black line may show
bands of color, depending on the point
density and inclination. So your favorite
graphics apps may need some tweaking.
If you want to run something that uses
SVGALIB, you need my framebuffer ver-
sion of that. It’s not complete yet, but it
does basic pixel, line and block functions.
I’ll put it on my SourceForge site soon,
but meanwhile, if interested, send me a
note at [e-mail].
--
Bill McConnaughey
Yet Another One-Liner
The June 2008 issue of LJ published a
letter from David Newall, which
responded to a letter from Joao
Macedo published in the February
2008 issue, which was, in turn, a
response to Dave Taylor’s column in the
December 2007 issue. Both Joao and
David wrote in with one-liners using
the echo and bc commands to do
floating-point calculations in place of
using Dave Taylor’s solve.sh script.
Joao’s example embedded an actual
newline character, whereas David
Newall’s used the escape code version
of the same. There is yet another way
to do this, and it is, in fact, my prefer-
ence, as it is much more intuitive to
folks accustomed to writing shell
scripts. In bourne-shell scripts, a semi-
colon can be used to place commands
together on a single line. It can be
used for the same purpose with bc.
Here is a third rewrite of the example
to demonstrate:
echo 'scale=4;11/7' | bc
--
James Williams Zavada
Correction
First off, great magazine! While reading
page 13, in the UpFront section [LJ, June
2008, “Eee PC Gets an Upgrade”], Doc
talks about the upgrade that the Eee PC
is getting, along the lines of the larger
screen, larger SSD hard drive and more
memory. He lists the new Eee PC 900 as
having 1GB of RAM, and say that this is
“up from 512KB”. I dunno about you,
but my Eee PC (from which I am sending
this letter) has 512 megabytes, not
kilobytes! If yours has 512KB of RAM,
you should send it back! Great maga-
zine, small typo, I forgive you!
--
Eric Jennings
Thanks
I just wanted to send a quick note to
thank all of the contributors to LJ. You
have inspired me over the past couple
of years to migrate over to Linux as my
OS of choice and motivated me to
learn new projects. I am in the middle
of setting up an LTSP project for our
home-schooling community and using
info gained from various LJ articles and
book recommendations.
12 | august 2008 www.linuxjournal.com
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