Linux+ magazine to cooperate with us!

Alright, seems like a good time to unveil our cooperation with Linux+ Magazine. You may have noticed their square ad in the right sidebar of the site for a few days now. It's not a random sponsor nor an accident.

I have actually been in talks with them about writing some articles for the magazine as well as further collaboration between our community and them.

One of the ideas was to discuss certain topics and then use the discussion material to write an article. Another idea are hardware reviews by this community. Basically, in our hardware section we would ask about your opinions on a certain piece of hardware and then submit your views to the magazine.

We are not a big community, but I suppose it helps even if we get a couple of opinions, especially if they are more thorough than "I like it". Perhaps knowing that your opinion helps a Freedomware promoting magazine may be an additional motivation to help us with this.

We're interested to know which kinds of hardware would you like to review the most? I suppose it also depends on which hardware you actually were able to try. It can be anything from routers to webcams.

And there is something in it for us as well, we get to publish some of the Linux+ articles after their exclusive time AND they mentioned something about providing us with some free magazine subscriptions (we're yet to see how should we organize who will get them, because we can't give one to every member of this site. There are, formally, 1485 of them.

Please let me know what you think of all this?

Thank you!

I like cooperative efforts like this.. as long as nuxified doesn't become so so big that they forget who the real heroes are that brought them to world domination

The point system seems like a greater motivator for doling out subscriptions if there are a limited number of freebies which I imagine there are.

Being a mostly disinterested party (as far as specifically nuxified and Linux+ are concerned), I would like to see more groups of this nature working with each other. Yes, it might mean competition, but I think everyone in the freedomware community stands to gain *net* since we are under-represented in the larger markets. Having a faster growing ecosystem helps all members and we have lots of room for growth. [I am talking about making conscious efforts to reach out and grow the market rather than fighting for the easier bits already within close range.]

Why do I bring this up? Because there should be room for reaching out to other groups that also have stakes in the hardware review arena. Before growing, we should research and reach out to get groups in sync. It's more motivating to know you are a part of something large with support and lack of duplicative efforts (within reason) than to think you are all stepping on each others' toes.

Would that be limited to hardware-reviews? Especially if it's recent hardware this can be quite expensive, and just for a review I don't think anybody will do that.
I'd actually be more interested in writing things like application-reviews, or tutorials.

It's a great idea to use these forums to draft/vent reviews of any kind (even demo vids and artwork), making these more likely to handle critique and be useful to a wider audience once cleaned up. I don't know if that is standard practice. The exercise would be worthwhile the larger the audience. Maybe we can even incorporate voting to help identify particularly well written material that would be useful to a large audience since the widely relevant and digestable stuff would get the most votes.

I am not a professional writer, so I could really take advantage of this sort of feedback.

Does the suggestion about eyeballs at the end of this little comment http://www.nuxified.org/topic/torrents_in_a_nutshell#comment-12020 sound interesting?

...opportunity for all of us IMO. You may want to publish the books feature that Drupal includes. This way people would be able to collaborate on the articles right within Nuxified. Writing articles this way will enable us all to be involved even with the hectic schedules most of us have.

Very good stuff libervisco.

Hi Guys,

Thank you so much for so many useful advice and suggestions.
I am very very sorry for not getting in touch earlier, but I somehow missed libervisco message with the link in my inbox :/

I have just read all the links you sent and they all seem to be very interesting.

First of all, we really don't expect to receive reviews of the most recent or expensive hardware. It will also depends on which hardware you actually are able to try. For me and judging from our readers comments, the most interesting topics are those concerning peripheral devices - anything from routers to webcams, which are available in stores.

I would like you help me to put together the list of eight Linux-friendly pieces of hardware that we could recommend to our readers who i.e. are preparing to upgrade their PC or building a new computer, so reviewed hardware must be still available in stores.

Your opinion should consists of the following details:
- Linux compatible features
- price/ performance/ quality
- general opinion
- your opinion should be a kind of advice for customers – a suggestion about which webcam to buy or not?

Which kinds of hardware would you like to review the most? What about webcams?

I have just prepared a list of compatible with Linux webcams in the price of about $60- 80.
Do you use any? Please let me know about your thoughts...

I really look forward your messages

Kate

Hardware compat database for PCLOS.
http://pclinuxoshwdb.com/index.php?option=com_jreviews&Itemid=63

Just came across it. We may want to list some more since various vendors as well as independent groups have hwcd.

OK, another one:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

And a story about this topic with links to a few more hw compat sites:
http://www.linuxloop.com/news/2008/02/19/linux-hardware-compatibility-sites-does-anyone-do-it-right/