Linux Magazines - the March issues

Not a particularly good month for either magazine. Although to an extent for any topical magazine it is acase of working with what you have.

The DVDs provided by the magazines were surprisingly similar:

LinuxFormat: Slackware 12.2, OpenSuse 11.1 & Mint 6

LinuxMagazine: Slackware 12.2, Fedora 10

Personally I only found a couple of interesting articles across both magazines.

LinuxFormat had an article about GIT, and the ext3cow filesystem.

LinuxMagazine had an article on parallelizing bash  scripts, the Conky system Monitor and Debian's Fully Automated Installation mechanism.

I have to say that FAI was remarkably similar to Sun's Jumpstart technology.  Which is a good thing. Jumpstart is a really useful tool. Of course there should be similarities as they are trying to do the same thing, if for different OSs. 

Whilst LinuxFormat dedicated 4 pages to GIT, whereas LinuxMagazine had a three inch column referring to David Howell's The Git Hater's Guide to the Galaxy - which shows a little pretention. Or perhaps was an attempt to indicate the level of humour the author was attempting to inject into the dry subject of software configuration management.

Conky is perhaps most similar to Windows Taskmgr. Until this article it hadn't occurred to me that I didn't use such a tool when I run Linux desktops, but it is usually the first thing I fire up, if I haven't already added it to my startup, on Windows.

ext3cow is an interesting development, mirroring the UFS snapshot facility on Solaris. I'd like to really look at ext3cow in much more detail though before considering using it to replace the NetApps at work.

And that's that!