The Answer Gang

By Jim Dennis, Jason Creighton, Chris G, Karl-Heinz, and... (meet the Gang) ... the Editors of Linux Gazette... and You!

Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

DirectPad Joystick

LN -- have I gone brain dead?

System V or BSD?

Yikes. --or--

Missing libraries
...and how to find them

Greetings from Heather Stern

Hey everyone, welcome to another year with Linux Gazette and the gang. I hope your winter went well; for most of us, it's been pouring rain (Noah, is that ark of yours open source?) but we seem to be healthy enough...

For my own part, I've gotten some of my silicate lifeforms a few winter gifts. If your favorite electronic pal has been bouncing up and down you would too. Here's a few things I got:

• For everybody in the household, we refreshed the UPSes that still work, and got some new ones. Shiny new power for everyone.
• Memory for some of our hardworking silicate souls. In my book this pays off much better than CPU upgrades 5 times out of 7. YMMV.
• New hard disk drives for our loyal backup Ultra 5. Getting hard to find these smaller, slower disks... get 'em while you can.
• I got my happy plushy bot in #fvwm, our good pal and the Answer Gang's bartender xteddy his very own crystal ball, and merged a bunch of his code into a new script. He's more huggable than ever and serves us coffee and stuff. It's a good thing the pretzels jar refills itself though.
• For my sleek black beastie that I use as a workstation, I got a new video card... another Radeon, this time a 256 Meg card. Gotta have more oomph if I'm gonna use all these workspaces or get any gaming done.
• Well, ok, it isn't really a present, we do this all the time. But full backups when things are looking bright are so much more useful than when they're looking frightful, so we did 'em. If you're the sort who only does it once a year or once an upgrade, do it now while you're thinking about it. Don't worry about us - we'll wait.

Besides that, check out the cover art I did this month. As usual, I couldn't resist the pun when it was presented to me. Have a good one, folks; enjoy our notes, and we'll see you next month.