Learn To Read

Continuing my quest for Linux knowledge, I picked up three Linux magazines yesterday. It's a wonderful thing, really, to have something popular enough to actually have a pretty big selection of magazines to choose from that concentrate on it. For now, anyway, I'm enjoying my time in the sun!

• Linux Pro Magazine (US$10) : An oversized one from the UK, it includes a DVD with Knoppix 5.1.1 on it. Looks pretty solid. The issue I have (#77 from April 2007) has a nice overview of Mondo Rescue, a backup utility and several other interesting articles. Looks like a decent buy at US$10 for 3 issue trial subscription.
• Linux+ (US$15) : Only the second issue, it is obviously going through some growing pains. But it includes two openSUSE ("open Soo-Sah") DVDs, which is really cool. I'm not sure if DVD 1, the 32 bit openSUSE 10.2 release, is the downloadable DVD, or the double-sided purchase DVD, which would be even cooler. Still, nice to have a SUSE-colored DVD. The second one is a 64bit openSUSE 10.2 release, plus a few other goodies. The articles themselves are light, and in need of some editing (markup still shows in several of them). I guess it is a long running foreign language magazine, but the English language one is still in its infancy. I'll probably just keep an eye out for more issues and see how it goes.
• Linux Magazine (US$5) : (they don't stick their necks out when it comes to a title, do that?) Some nice coverage of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, some cool expert colums (perl, LDAP and X), and a silly article about how Vista is better than Linux. The first few reasons are stupid show tricks like 3d desktops and Alt-Tab preview windows. Another one is the claim there is no Linux Media Center; one view of this will easily refute that claim. 12 issues for US$30 isn't too bad, but I might just keep looking.

I've also been casting about for a book. I've been using Safari for about six months now and enjoying it, but I want to have at least one real book in hand to read over. I liked the looks of Linux Administration Handbook, 2nd Edition and noticed it was 50% off at Bookpool.com, so I added Linux Bible 2007 Edition, which also looks real nice, with its discussion of 12 distros! And I see that openSUSE Linux Unleashed is on its way in June, so I pre-ordered that.