by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
There are two things that make me happy: good Linux
stories, and story archives that never disappear. Linux Today
archives go all the way back to the very beginning in 1998. Here
are a few choice stories to share, from the funniest to the most
expensive LT story ever to the most popular story, which also gives
a prescient peek into Apple’s turn towards extreme
control-freakdom.Funniest
CentOS:
It’s L-i-n-u-x, That is an Operating System is one of my
all-time favorite Linux stories, in which the lead developer of
CentOS, Johnny Hughes, struggles to explain to Jerry Taylor, the
city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma that CentOS is not an attack on
the City of Tuttle’s servers:“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block
me and anyone else from accessing it??? Please remove your software
immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the
City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.”In a followup news story in the Tuttle Times, it is obvious that
Mr. Taylor, who claims 22 years of computer experience, didn’t
learn much:
City manager misunderstanding prompts international
response“This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don’t
have anything better to do,” he said. “When I came in to work
Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls
from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system
that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on
his hands.”Most Expensive
This is the most expensive LT story of all time: Ending
Microsoft FUD: An Interview with Peruvian Congressman
Villanueva, by the excellent Dee-Ann LeBlanc. As Brian Proffit,
who was Linux Today editor then, explains:“This was the one we worked hardest to get. Knowing the
importance of his letter, I assigned this story to Dee-Ann, who
skillfully tracked down Congressman Villanueva and set up an
international translated interview. (This story, by the way, holds
the current all-time record for most expensive, once all the fees
for the phone calls and translators came in.)“This interview offered us all a first glimpse at the man who
wrote the now-famous letter to Microsoft Peru, and let us see that
he was the genuine article.”Best April Fool: Linus Resigns
Linus
Torvalds: Linux Needs New Leadership, in which Linus announces
his resignation from kernel development, turned out to be a hoax.
But it sure does sound like Linus:“Fellow hackers,
“For some time I have felt unappreciated by some members of the
Linux community. Far too many of you like to whine and cry, saying
“My patches aren’t being accepted by Linus, but they are by Alan or
Michael!” It seems that some of you are too stupid to follow the
simple instructions that I have made clear on more than one
occasion. This, combined with the fact that today is my last day at
Transmeta, has prompted me to consider rediscovering that balance I
had in my life before you all took my hobby and made it into a mass
movement. I have not decided who should take over maintenance of
the kernel myself…”All-Time Number One
The all-time number-one story on LT, at close to 400,000 pageviews,
is Editor’s
Note: Beware of Suits Bearing Code by Brian Proffitt. It is
interesting how the same lessons still apply, and it gave a
prescient peek at Apple’s turn into extreme closed
control-freakdom:“But what really made things bad was when Apple decided
to keep some future-release features secret. Braun writes:“”As time went on, and Mac OS X got closer to release, Apple
decided they wanted to keep some things secret. Some new features
needed to be worked on, but couldn’t be in the live cvs repository,
or it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. Some things leaked out, which
caused no end of fuss, and gradually projects were removed from the
live cvs repository. Eventually, so little was left in the live cvs
repository and processes already needed to be in place to do
periodic source drops, the live cvs repository was abandoned.””Excellent “Wonderful World of Linux” Series
One of my favorite recurring features was Joe Pranevich’s
“Wonderful World of Linux” series, in which he dissected and
reported on new kernel releases. This was first-rate work. Here are
a few of them:Joe
Pranevich: Wonderful World of Linux 2.6 – Final(Dec 18,
2003)
Joe
Pranevich: Wonderful World of Linux 2.4(Jan 05, 2001)
Linux
kernel 2.2 explained(Jan 21, 1999)
The
Wonderful World of Linux 2.2 — ‘revised millennium penguin’
version(Jan 26, 1999)First-ever Linux Today Story
Want to know what the first-ever Linux Today story was? It was
Apache
1.3.2 is released(Sep 28, 1998). Somewhere along the way we
converted to redirects, but you can still find those old stories by
entering the URL https://www.linuxtoday.com/stories/1.html,
and change the number to find different stories. This Editor’s note
is the 98,492nd story posted on Linux Today, so you can find it at
https://www.linuxtoday.com/stories/98492.html.We hardworking LT staff get a nice Memorial Day holiday break.
The weekend queue will have fresh stories and Talkbacks as usual,
so please enjoy and we’ll see you next Tuesday!