Welcome From The Editor
November 2009
by Paul Arnote
Welcome to another exciting issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine! As is usually the case, there is a lot of exciting things going on with PCLinuxOS.
First, Texstar and the Packaging Crew are hard at work. Since updating the toolchain, new versions of all sorts of applications have been hitting the repository at the speed of lightning. Texstar has been putting his usual "midas touch" on things, and is working steadily towards a stable KDE 4.3.2. Work is progressing on the PCLinuxOS 2009.3, the third quarterly ISO release. Sproggy has created a test release with e17. And all of this is leading up to the PCLinuxOS 2010 release.
You are also likely to notice a few new things with the magazine this month, as well. The first thing you may notice is the new look for the magazine layout. We hope you like the new layout. We also hope that it helps keep the magazine's PDF file size down, by making better use of the available space on each page, without compromising on the content we bring you each month. As an added benefit, those of you who choose to print out various magazine articles for use as reference materials should experience less ink and toner usage. We carefully tried to mirror the colors used in the PCLinuxOS forum and those colors used by the popular Blue Caress theme that is the default theme of the 2009.2 quarterly ISO.
The second thing you may notice is the new section in the magazine: Screenshot Showcase. For as long as I've been with PCLinuxOS, folks have been posting their screenshots in the PCLinuxOS forum. Each month, we will pick out several of those to highlight in the magazine. You guys and gals post some very nice screenshots every month, and this is another way to show off a sampling of those to the "outside world." The Screenshot Showcase appears throughout the magazine, along with the name of the person who posted it, the date they posted it, and the desktop environment they are using. To kick Screenshot Showcase off this month, we have six screenshots featured. It wasn't easy to pick which six to run. I had to pick them from 18 finalists. I only wish there was more space to be able to run them all.
We have lots of other things for you this month, besides the new feature of the magazine. BobK54 went to Ohio Linux Fest 2009 and reports back on his attendance there. We get to learn more about the people Behind The Scenes, as we get to know more about Joble. Meemaw continues her article on using your scanner, taking a look at using Kooka in Scanner Saga: Part 2. Meemaw and I also put our heads together to publish a rather long, but definitely not comprehensive, list of links where you can find Wallpaper Sites to download wallpapers to dress up your desktop. Ms_meme is back with another round of Forum Foibles and ms_meme's nook, as well as Forum Puzzle, a nice prose she penned about the PCLinuxOS forum. Georgetoon graces the magazine with another Double Take and Mark's Quick Gimp Tip. Kalwisti writes up An Absolute Beginner's Guide To LaTeX On PCLinuxOS, which should be enough to get anyone interested in learning LaTeX going in the right direction. Critter provides us with Command Line Interface Intro: Part 2, continuing his tutorial on getting users comfortable with using the command line. AndrzejL gives us this month's Gadgets & Gear column, where he reviews using his new wireless optical mouse with PCLinuxOS. Gary Ratliff, Sr. continues his series of articles, Computer Languages A to Z, where he sheds some light on Elisp.
With the recent release of Microsoft Windows 7, Ver Pangonilo shares a reprint from his blog on setting up a dual boot with PCLinuxOS and Windows 7 -- after the Windows 7 upgrade messes up your GRUB boot loader. We also have a photo of Linus Torvalds on the Windows 7 launch day, where he was in attendance at the Japan Linux Symposium. JohnBoy shares with us an easy, step-by-step method of manually creating a Live USB. I write up an article on using mencoder, and share my initial experiences with Google Wave, after receiving my invitation to participate in the Google Wave Preview. Katie gives us a testimonial, and Flashback features using Grsync to create backups of your personal data. This month's Wiki Wicket covers migration from Microsoft Windows to PCLinuxOS. And finally, this month's cover comes to us, yet again, from Timeth, of the PCLinuxOS Beautification Team.
November, in the United States, is the month when we Americans celebrate our Thanksgiving holiday, commemorating the first fall harvest of the 17th Century settlers on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Regardless of your country of origin or residence, I believe we can all find things in our lives that we are thankful for. For me, I'm thankful for my wife, my family, my job, good health, great friends, and all the things that make my day-to-day life as wonderful as it is. I'm also very thankful for Texstar and the Packaging Crew for creating PCLinuxOS, a stable OS where my computer works for me, rather than me working for my computer. I am thankful to be able to contribute back to PCLinuxOS as this magazine's editor. So as we enter November, I'd like to urge each and every one of you look around you and acknowledge the things in your life that you are thankful for -- and to continue to acknowledge those things throughout all the year.