Is it really The End? Do a survey first! [LWN.net]

Is it really The End? Do a survey first!

Posted Aug 1, 2002 19:44 UTC (Thu) by robert1cole (guest, #3061)
In reply to: Is it really The End? Do a survey first! by lonely_bear
Parent article: Is it really The End?

I'm going to play the bad guy here for a min.

My home page is linuxtoday.com I get most of my info news wise from there and the links take me to places to read it that are free. Sometimes I get directed to LWN.net. Sometimes not.

Although this site is pretty well put together and all I wonder about the value of a subscription based system. There are just so many sources of news and such out there that I can never keep up with them all! I read news and stay on top of the linux world as part of running my business. Some days I spend 4 or 5 hours reading news and I STILL don't get it all.

To be honest I would probably be more likely to subscribe to linuxtoday if they went subscription based simply because they seem like a clearing house of information linking me all over the world. That's value to me because I want to know what M$ is doing and the rest of the linux world too.

I cancelled all of my paper magazine subscriptions a long time ago because the news is always out of date and I was hardly ever taking the time to read them anyway. They would sit for months then hit the trash.

Please don't flame me here this is just my opinion and views. I'm thinking that maybe everyone at LWN needs to just go out and get another job and do LWN on their spare time. Yes this will cause a decrease in content but maybe the focus of LWN could change to just reviews on hardware, software, extremely detailed howto's (very much needed I think and GENERIC ones too, not just Redhat, Suse, etc) on extremely popular topics like iptables, firewalls, detailed medusa9 or snort installation reviews, howto's. etc.

That type of focus is not so time critial and once the ball was rolling there would be new stuff pretty much every week. AND that would be something I would pay for. And LWN writers would be able to have their outside LWN job and have a little money from subscriptions to pay basic expenses like ISP/hosting costs, have a party now and again and post the pics of the fun and photocopying of butts while drunk :), etc, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is to become a source of detailed info on common and not so common howto's. And I do mean DETAILED. There isn't a clearing house of good info like this anywhere. The howto sites (tlpd, etc) just don't have what I'm talking about here. How about an example. I could contribute this one even... I looked and looked and googled and googled and couldn't find good info on chroot jailing named. I wanted to setup named in a highly restrictive chroot jail environment. Before you tell me all the places I can get that info let me assure you I went to all of them and many different places looking for a concise and CLEAR way to do this. Well I ended up using about 3 different sources and a bit of my own know how and a week or so later I had it done. In the end it was a rather simple process but because the howto's were so spacific to THEIR distro it made things EXTREMELY difficult because the howto's simply didn't work or apply.

I've found this problem with just about every howto out there. There are exceptions of course but many/most are just not very useful if at all. A focus on things like Medusa9, Snort, Freeswan, iptables/firewall's, various email apps, Linux as a desktop and all the goodies. Bringing all these sorts of things under one site would be a boon to many.

The most useful sources of how to set things up has been thru articles, not howto's. Linuxplanet is a good example of a place I go for how to get things going. I'm like many people I learn best by seeing something work first then go backwards in learning the extreme ins and outs. I'm not been very successful reading the manual/man page and getting a complex program to work the way I wanted it to. I learn by examples/sample configs, etc.

Anyway I've been long winded enough... These are just my thoughts...

Robert

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