Mailserver
Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA or lxf.letters@futurenet.com.
Weird things with newsletters, forcibly converting Windows users, loving the MX Linux toolbars and letters make prizes!
Subscriber or not?
I was confused to receive your “recently unsubscribed” newsletter as actually, I had not unsubscribed and I wasn’t aware that my subscription had expired. I had in fact only recently renewed my subscription for another two years!
But I’m a little bewildered, because I also received by snail mail a letter informing me that LinuxUser &
Developer magazine will no longer be published and that the remainder of my subscription will be transferred to LinuxFormat. I’m unsure of the number of issues left of LU&D. Truls,viaemail
Neil says
Accept my apologies for any confusion. As you’ve noticed, these subscriber newsletters are fired out from our marketing team, so I suspect there’s a small window of potential confusion between them building mailing
lists of existing subscribers and sending the relative “you’re a subscriber/you’ve unsubscribe” newsletters out, during which the subscription status could change. We also think this very occasionally happens with our Archive access: people renew their subscription and technically their old subs number goes invalid, but they might not have realised or received the updated one.
On a related note, it’s very sad news that our sister open source magazine LinuxUser&Developer has recently closed. Existing LU&D subscribers can have their remaining subscriptions rolled into LinuxFormat – we hope that’s what people will want to choose! One piece of good news is we’ll have the editor Chris writing for us, at least for a while, and it looks like a number of regular writers will be coming on board. So hopefully new LU&D readers will feel a little more at home here.
Side issues
Thank you for the very positive review of MX Linux 17.1. I help out in a small way on the project, mostly with testing and proof-reading, and I know the developers will be pleased to hear that their work is well thought of.
May I clarify one small point? MX Linux ships with a single vertical panel on the left of the screen. Many of the developers use their creation in their paid jobs, and if working with documents it makes sense to make maximum use of the vertical dimension of the screen. However, some users dislike that panel placement, and were finding difficulty in relocating it to its more conventional place, and then configuring the icons to suit.
To make this easier, the developers created a Tweak category to enable that relocation with just a single click. It’s an example of how the development team at MX is willing to listen to users’ requests, and respond appropriately. ChrisWhelan,viaemail
Neil says
Thank you for the details on the sidebar – glad to hear the devs are listening so keenly to their users. I hope you spotted in LXF242 it made our top distros of the year list!
Camera overload
I read the letter in LXF235 asking about a CCTV NVR for 1,000+ cameras. I used to install camera systems and the issue is more about the computer hardware. I built a Linux-based recorder for my house with five HD cameras on two different subnets. I’m recording over 20Mbps from those cameras – about 50GB of video, per camera, per 24 hours. If the writer is trying to build out for 1,000+ cameras at HD quality, that’s over 4Gbps of an aggregate data rate. Even if a server was using 10Gbps NICs, there’s not enough CPU power to process the incoming video and still be able to serve out files. When I did commercial installations, we limited each server to 25 cameras. I also assume no one wants to store 50+ TB of data per day. AaronQuinto,Colorado
Neil says
We’d love to hear more about how you’d go about solving this problem with Linux.