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Linux.com to go Live Tonight
Chip Stillmore writes
"Just read this news.com.
Apparently Linux.com is
supposed to be going live today. " The page simply says
tonight. I've seen what they're doing over there. It isn't
at all what I really expected when they announced that
they had bought the domain, but it ain't bad. As long as
it covers the newbie stuff though, I'm happy. As of 2300 Eastern, it's live!
It's true, portals are usually scary. They tend to be money and therefore ad-driven. How else can they support themselves?
However, Linux.com is different. VA is backing the site but not interfering with its content *or* using it as an ad platform. Linux.com won't have banner ads and it won't preach "VA". No biases, no commercialization.
Crazy you say? The same was said about a 'free operating system' once upon a time...
Okay, so this is probably me just being picky - but for something that's mean to serve the Linux community, which is WORLD WIDE then putting up a banner saying "...please wait coming this evening..." seems a little short sited to me. There are people outside the US (I know, I've seen some of them).
A small point, but I don't want this to be a trend of not looking further than linux.com's back yard.
-- Dougal
It's about time. One of the biggest paradoxes in the Linux community is the argument over how to "sell" Linux to the mainstream. Nobody wants Linux to commercialize and to many, that means no selling, but sales is more than just making money. I, for one, am quite glad that VA Research, a highly respected company in the Linux community is taking responsibility for selling Linux and rather than do it through marketing or gimmicks, they're doing it through the one thing that Linux community actually has over its competition: community. One of commercialism's great knocks on Linux is that you can't expect good support from something written by many different individuals. Well, hopefully a site that coalesces and displays our community's greatest asset (it's knowledge) will start turning doubters into users.
VA Research and the Advisory Board should be commended on their efforts (international considerations or not) and the Linux community should be given a pat on the back for showing that people can get together and produce both good software and ideas.
Rob, how can it not be what you expected? According to this you're on the board of directors for the site? Hadn't heard that.
Anyway, I hope they keep up a good archive of projects being worked on. Thats the thing I miss the most about linux.com -- these days I can never find various projects when I want to. freshmeat.net and the (almost as useful) linuxapps.com are good, but have a lot of fluff in them, and aren't really project-based.
LinuxHQ.com is gone because the original creator of the site took back the domain name, and pulled it offline. As somebody who volunteered to run the site for 2+ years, I'm disgusted.
As for me, I didn't go to work for VA a few months back. I did start at Pacific HiTech, but I decided not to stay.
Cheers,
- Jim
http://linuxhq.jimpick.com/
That should work as a temporary fix.
Cheers,
- Jim
Well - I don't know what exactly you're expecting, but I can say that it's
fairly dynamic. I've been looking at it for the past
couple of days - they've got some big plans for the site, and
they've put a lot of work into it. (you should see the hardware
driving the site at the ISP)
I do know that a lot of people are concerned about the whole
"VA-run linux.com" but really I think that VA has done a pretty
good job of just hanging back and making the occasional comment
(besides being the ringleader of the group of volunteers that
have been working on the site).
anyways, that is my two cents.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
I remember when the bidding for this domain closed and the guy said that Microsoft had placed a bid in there. It says a lot about the guy who owned the domain that he didn't sell it to them, because they surely had piles more money than anyone else who bid. I've always really liked the integrity in the open source community, and I think that action there embodied quite a bit of it.
Despite all that, I'm still a little afraid of seeing this mega-portal site, though. Portals are always filled with advertisements and classified ads and all kinds of filler that bug the hell out of me, and I just don't want to see the site brought down to the lowest common denomitator like that.
On the front page they have a news service with news from themselves and LinuxToday. This doesn't really give much since I pick the news up elsewhere anyway, but once they start inserting their own news into the stream, this might improve the looks of it.
For some reasons, we're seeing lots of news cropping up at Linux sites. We have linux.com featuring linuxtoday, Red Hat featuring Slashdot and more. While having up-to-date news stories might be good, I think they'd both be better off focusing on their own news. People won't go to linux.com to read Linux Today, they will come there to read whats hot around linux.com.
Then they fail to mention the GNU Project, or even the FSF, anywhere. This is a lossage that I think should be corrected.
The Linux@Work place will most probably evolve to be terrific! It'll be a portal to all that you need to know about Linux@Work. This is a most welcomed addition.
We now go to the Linux.Com Live section, namely an IRC channel on OpenProjects. Thats all good and well, but will the questions that are answered there make their way back to Linux.Com for others to read? I don't think so, but that might be something to think about for the future. Having a bot online that records conversations and having someone go through it once a day shouldn't be a major task.
The LUG database will help you get connected with many other Linux users near you through a local LUG. Unfortunately, the only way to read the database seems to be to search it. This is a lossage because what if the LUG I'm searching for doesn't match the search query I entered? Searching is good, but there should probably also be a way to browse the LUG Database, perhaps broken down by country/state or something equivalent to that.
Their support section is also rather good since it contains links to most of the support centers that you need to know about as a new GNU/Linux user. They should find ways to interconnect this with the Linux.Com Live section, such as I suggested above with bringing answers back from IRC to the Web regularly.
Tuning Linux was mediocre at best. This is a situation where you probably should have thought about adding more content before making it public. It's a fair chance that people will watch it, see that "this is just old news", and never return. They should add more in-depth Linux tuning material here. As usual, this will probably come with time.
The one really positivt thing with Linux.Com that I found was their Weekly Columns, we've been seeing a few of those around on other sites aswell, but I find them really nice to read and most of the time also very interesting.
Their interviews could also become interesting with time. I think the interviewer needs more experience so that he'll know which questions to ask. I would recommend adding a function so that a week before an interview, you can see who they'll be interviewing and be able to add your own questions to the spool. Then they would get a better view of what the readers would like to know and can ask questions that better responds to that.
Summary: Linux.Com is a good site, but where's the content?
One of the biggest challenges of getting Linux.com up and running was our time constraint. We had to build a site that could stand under the pressures of LOTS of hits, be maintable by a large group of community volunteers, and be able to expand quickly -- and the site had to come together in a few weeks time. Right now, the Linux.com you see is just the beginning. The infrastructure is built so we can add features newbies need, better resources for support, etc.
If you don't see a feature you want, or think we should change our content, tell us at feedback@linux.com. Community suggestions and ideas are what drive Linux.com!
The important thing here is for people who don't know too much about linux and who stumble accross linux.com will have a GOOD impression. (period) A well designed site, with GOOD answers in english that my mother, father and girlfriend will understand.
Good Job guys!