Welcome From the Chief Editor
by Paul Arnote
The July 2010 issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine represents a personal milestone for me. It is the 12th consecutive issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine with me as its Chief Editor. Yep. 12 issues. A full year of a monthly magazine for the PCLinuxOS community. And what was I thinking? Twenty-three years ago, I thought I had left journalism for good when I left my last job at a local newspaper (as a photographer) to start a career in the medical field. Ha!
Before you get any crazy ideas, don’t worry. I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. After all, we’re only just getting started here. The magazine’s rebirth in the last year is only a beginning. We have lots more to do.
Over the last year, we’ve seen the magazine reborn as a monthly publication, instead of the previous quarterly publication schedule. We’ve seen the size and content of the magazine increase. This is largely responsible to the increased involvement of the PCLinuxOS community with the magazine.
We’ve seen the addition of new regular columns in the magazine: Game Zone, Screenshot Showcase, Gadgets & Gear, Firefox Add-ons are examples. We’ve seen the publication of brilliant, multi-part article series, such as Command Line Interface Intro, article series that take a close-up look at desktop environments (so far, KDE 4 and Xfce, with more to come in future issues on the other desktop environments), article series on multimedia formats and tools, article series on computer languages, the Behind The Scenes article series, and much more.
The last year has seen the magazine layout evolve and change to its current state, allowing us more latitude and options when laying out the articles and better utilizing the available space on a page, while still providing an attractive and easy to read layout.
So, in this issue, we have critter’s Command Line Interface Intro: Part 10 article. Athaki reviews KDE 4’s Netbook Interface, and Stricktoo takes a look at KDE 4’s Widget Dashboard.
Leiche walks us through creating a basic RPM file for PCLinuxOS, while Joble helps get you started creating a PCLinuxOS packaging environment in Phoenix. Meemaw and djohnston take a close-up look at OpenOffice Writer, as part of the OpenOffice series. djohnston also shows us how to get started with folding@home.
I continue my look at Xfce 4.6.2, with the second (of three) installments on the Xfce Settings Manager. I also walk through how to customize your Xfce panels, and take a look at the Xfce panel plug-ins. I also take a brief look at the 21st annual World Population Day. The July magazine cover, by Timeth, commemorates World Population Day.
Xyus makes his magazine debut, with his Game Zone: Osmos article. It’s the first of what we hope will be many more such game reviews to come from him. Lee2010 gives us a look at how teenagers view PCLinuxOS. Patrick G. Horneker returns with an article on how to configure the Epson NX-415 printer.
Of course, all of your regular columns are back. georgetoon provides us another installment of Double Take & Mark’s Quick Gimp Tip. ms_meme entertains us with two installments of her ms_meme’s Nook, and features ByteS From The Bunkhouse in Forum Foibles. And, of course, we have another collection of PCLinuxOS user’s screen shots, gleaned from the forum’s monthly screenshots section, and displayed in Screenshot Showcase.
I’d like to give the PCLinuxOS community a huge thank you for all of your support over the last year. We, the magazine staff, hope you enjoy the magazine half as much as we enjoy creating it for you. Stay tuned! There’s lots more yet to come.
So until next month, I wish you all peace, happiness, contentment and tranquility.
