Please login and post your comments and suggestions here. We value your opinion and appreciate the community that takes part in Linux.com :-)

Hi, I like the site redesign, but I am having a problem viewing it correctly. The problem seems to be that the background is white, but the fonts are using a default colour. Since I am using a black theme my default font colour is white, so I can't read most of the text without selecting it :( I am using Epiphany, and there is an option to override all of a site's colours, but then I wouldn't get to see the cool new design. I hope this isn't too hard to fix Thanks, Warbo

There is a very large blank space at the top with adblocking turned on, though of course you don't want to hear that ;) Looks good, tableless etc. There is a 1px border showing up on mouseovers in this forum that bumps everything on the page down by 1px: .highlight td { border-bottom: 1px solid #99CCFF !important } Is the theme released under GPL or is it only for Linux.com use?

The new design looks good. (I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Ubuntu Linux.) I got to this new page via a bookmark I had for 'newsforge.com', which I've been reading for years. I'm assuming that this is meant to be the "new NewsForge", especially since much of the content appears to be the same.

Hi, Rich. Yes, the new Linux.com is also the new NewsForge.com. Same editorial staff and writers. Glad you like the new look, we're excited about it. Joe

All you need to do now is loose the ads that tell me that I'm better off using Windows. I find it hard to imagine a site named Linux.com funded by Windows ads. Ironic to say the least. It's weird because I don't see a lot of Windows ads at Mac.com or... I think you get the idea. The site seems to work now. Not sure what happened the other night. I am long time reader, Keep up the good work

Why when I try to visit newsforge.com am I redirected here? EDIT: Oops. My bad. It's supposed to be this way. :embarrassed: [Modified by: tr1pw1re on June 20, 2007 05:33 PM]

Newsforge is gone :-( :-( RIP Newsforge, you will be missed. I understand the desire to use the Linux.com domain, of course. For those of us who have been around the *forge name has it's own attachment. In fact I believe that's why I 1st visited Newsforge was the connection to the venerable Sourceforge. Can't believe I'm getting all maudlin over a webb address. Oh well, not all of existence is bound in the rational. Now for a couple of bugs. 1. I had to browse back and clikc on the Reply button several times as I kept getting the message: A fatal error occurred while serving your request. We are sorry for this inconvenience. If this is the first time you see this message, you can try to access the site directly through index.php If you see this message every time you tried to access to this service, it is probable that our server is experiencing heavy problems, for this reason we ask you to retry in some hours. If you see this message for days, we ask you to report the unavailablity of service to our webmaster. Thanks. Technical information Xaraya has failed to serve the request, and the failure could not be handled. This is a bad sign and probably means that Xaraya is not configured properly. The failure reason is: xarDB_init: Failed to connect to xarmysql://xardba@xaraya-db-2/lc_live2, error message: Too many connections 2. The site is awful slow to load. 3. When I hit the back button after viewing the preview, all my work was gone. I should be able to browse back to the composition page and retain all my work and/or have the editing symbols available on the preview page for further editing. If the formatting of this comment is not easily readable it's because I have not yet figured out adding spaces between lines. I'm assuming we have to use non-breaking spaces. I will figure it out soon but for a newcomer to this format this is one area that is non-intuitive (at least to me).

Bug #4 The preview pane shows my comment without the spaces I put between paragraphs. The preview does not display the post as it will appear on the forum.

Did I mention how slow this site loads? This site loads so slow my dead granny could run a mile before it loads. This site is so slow the tortoise and the hare both beat it. This site loads so slow the rapture will be over before readers can view news from the day before the rapture started.

It is unacceptably slow at the moment, our apologies. We are working like mad behind the scenes to rectify that. Thanks for your patience in the meantime. Joe Barr [Modified by: Dean Henrichsmeyer on June 21, 2007 07:16 PM]

WarPengi, I created and named NewsForge, so it was even harder for me to let the name go, but Linux.com is a "better" name in a general sense for an "All things Linux and open source" site. As for the rest of the changeover pain... I'm viewing it as a bystander from Seoul, S. Korea (LinuxWorld Korea is this week, and I'm here both to speak and report), and I know both the programmers and network operations people involved will get things squared away before long. - Robin 'Roblimo' Miller Editor, etc.

This looks bad for all of Linux. I am disappointed that a site with this kind of performance is being viewed by the public. I have had complaints from a number of people I have recommended to switch to Linux about this site today. I can not defend the poor performance. Is there another way to troubleshoot this problem by leveraging your community without putting this poorly performing site online? Was there an Alpha/Beta test for this site with the Linux community ? or was this a hot cut over ? Sad today for Linux ...

Speed is slow, I'm on DSL that is usually slow, and I just came from dialup. Total load times are about what sites needed when I had dialup. Site seems to hesitate in responding at all - problem is not as if I get one graphic, then a sentence, then a pause for 10 seconds.... I get no activity in FireFox for about 10 seconds. Numion.com testing my connection speed shows: "Download speed: 5,319.20 (664.90) 100% Upload speed: 673.69 (84.21) 100% Surfspeed inside United States: 145.59 (18.19) 100% Surfspeed average (worldwide): 165.91 (20.73) 100% Surfspeed outside United States: 179.39 (22.42) 100% Latency: 422 milliseconds" For your site: http://www.numion.com/SiteSpeed/index.html might help you. As for masterkabuki and others.... hold yer horses - complaining without helping is for newbs.

Team, I have noticed a 50% improvement in screen load times vs earlier today. If you are tuning.... good progress !!!!! There is a difference between the load times for IE and Firefox. Interestingly, IE is loading the pages faster (20-40%) than Firefox. This is still twice as slow as the original site. If there are any specific tests or timings you need run, please let me know. Keep plugging.....[b]

[quote=roblimo]WarPengi, I created and named NewsForge, so it was even harder for me to let the name go, but Linux.com is a "better" name in a general sense for an "All things Linux and open source" site. [/quote] Allow me to disagree - the Linux.com name is a very good name for "All things Linux", but in my opinion (and I suspect, the opinion of many others who use lots of different OSS things on lots of different platforms) it is a poorer name for "all things open source"... Also, as an avid reader of both NewsForge.com and Linux.com, I really felt the the two sites were different in profile (read: content). But this might just be my imagination, of course. -- Torfinn Ingolfsen, Norway

The Good: It now looks like a real destination web site rather than a collection of links someone put somewhere. The Bad: The light blue highlighting that follows ones mouse is very annoying. (very)

[quote=roblimo]WarPengi, I created and named NewsForge, so it was even harder for me to let the name go, but Linux.com is a "better" name in a general sense for an "All things Linux and open source" site.[/quote] OK, so we can mourn the loss together. I know, as a parent, your loss is greater than mine. I just want you to know that it meant a lot to me too.:-)

[quote=noldrin]The Bad: The light blue highlighting that follows ones mouse is very annoying. (very)[/quote] I second that. it's extremely annoying. Makes me think that if I click, something will happen. [Modified by: John Varouhakis on June 21, 2007 06:57 PM]

Haven't tried IE yet, but any site that is slow enough for me to give up on the page load to go on to other things isn't exactly going to get me to frequent it. And, I must agree with others who commented about the name... isn't there as much or MORE OSS running on Windows? Or, is everyone running this site so biased against Windows unilaterally that anything associated with it is simply discounted? I presently provide support in a Microsoft-ONLY environment and am looking for ways to open doors to OSS and Linux. I'm sure my situation isn't at all uncommon, especially in government!

Hi, 1. I prefer the old setup, as the layout's less in-your-face than the new one; permitting more textual information / skimming more news items at a glance. Also the visual weighting of the features vs the raw newsvac worked quite nicely. Now news around the web's nearly half the width of the text area; font far too large, only headlines visible for 2nd and later items. As for the feature text - even this seems to offer maybe half as much information as before; maybe because the 'stylish nav menu' is too wide. Navigation column: far too wide, too heavy visual borders, font far too large (remember: people rarely try to read much text in the nav column, so it doesn't matter if they squint for a second, as long as they don't have to squint for the main textual content, i.e. the features). Tweaking font sizes, table cell width or allowing users to select a css-style via cookies or whatever might solve most of the points above. [firefox 2.04; ancient linux box rather old gtk/... installations] 2. The current setup via linux.com seems slower than the old via newsforge (?!) 3. And a non-code problem: Fearing a possible change of topics and definitely the perception of a far more restricted scope I'd kind of considered newsforge a one-stop point for news on free unix, from linux to bsd, opensolaris to more interesting stuff like minix3, plan9 or hurd. With a flavouring about new non-intel hardware and a peek once in a while at larger changes to commercial unices software or hardware, from OS x (ok...) to Solaris, AIX and maybe even HP-UX. Given the switch in the hostname, I see some possible problem with community generated content for non-linux topics. And given the hostname, if such content is NOT 100% linux specific (say Lawrence Lessig's change in research topic), I can easily imagine non-community people now saying: "oh that's just a special interest linux resource, but I'm not a geek, I won't read it even if people-in-the-know try to point me to important articles on linux.com." IMHO Newsforge's name being more neutral was an advantage. cu Peter

another issue, or lets call it a bug: with newsforge, it was possible to go to the external site with the original article for both features and newsvac. Now it requires to go through the slow loading and annoying intermediate page ALL OF THE TIME. One of the primats of web design is REDUCING the number of links on the way to the goal, not increasing it...

I'm sure the bug reports are piling in, so I'll keep this quick and simple. Firstly, The site loads around every third attempt. Not only the front page, but every page. If it doesn't fully load, I only receive a blank page. If I view the source, it's totally blank. I assume this is being worked on though. Secondly, It's not possible to log in with a password that isn't alpha-numeric. My old password contained a few symbols, and I had to change it to log in to the new Linux.com. Otherwise, I get an error message when tying to log in or change my password. It reads: "A system error occured while processing your request - Please retry shortly" Thirdly, There is a nice big fat Microsoft advertisement on the front page that's trying to convince me that companies are switching from Linux to Windows Server: http://linuxinit.net/site/images/screenshots/snaps/0264.jpg Fourthly, I'm unable to click the pagination links on the top of the forums. For example, |< < 1 2 > >| I can see the link, and I can tab to it, and hit enter, but I'm unable to click it, as if something invisible is on top of it, such as an invisible image element or something similar. Fifthly, The hover background colour effect on forum posts is EXTREMELY annoying. As a designer myself, I like the idea, and have used it, but can I suggest using a slightly more subtle hover colour? Overall, I love the new site layout and design. But as far as usability goes, it needs more work. :)

@Peter: The NewsVac without the intermediate annoyment pages went to [url]http://www.linux.com/feed[/url] appearantly. There is a link below its frontpage sidebar labeled "More News" which starts from entry #16. Presumably the designers time or attention didn't last to add a user-reachable link to the real NewsVac. But, btw, we had that intermediate ad-pages 'bug' on Newsforge, too. It was fixed after a while of complaining. Speaks for them, sort of. ;-) [Modified by: milky on June 22, 2007 09:06 AM]

@milky thanx for the pointer to /feed/ with the direct links. A separate /feed/ page however is a separate tab to keep open, thus the old combined view - with direct links - on newsforge was better. Intermediate pages MIGHT be useful if there are worthwile comments on it (or to avoid legal probs). But for newsvac items, I kind of doubt their usability, as the "visibility" is only for a few hours at most... . Now if comments is one of the reason, giving the last 1-2 comments in a *SMALL* font on the /feed/ or in the newsvac column page might work. Another bug(?): in /feed/ the first 3 entries now display their text using only 60% of the textual width. Entry 4 and onward display normally - using full page width. With identical markup, same div-class, etc. Possibly something in the css? All in all, the newsvac /feed/ for me displays only 2 and a half items, due to spurious wide space / bad choice of font size (and no more truncation limit?). Links and high-detail info that's only read on interest can be in fairly small size; esp. the links info :). We had a lot more information displayed in far less space in the small newsvac column on the old newsforge main page. Something like 7 entries I think (maybe truncated to the first 100 chars per item, but that IMO was a GOOD THING). (this is firefox 204, linux; no greasemonkey/ etc, just ad block / noscript (with sf.net and linux.com being permanently allowed); browser window about 1100x900 to allow grabbing the frames of other windows...) cu Peter

suggestion: please add author/site information (in smaller font) to the detail information below the head line both in /feed/ and in the excerpted newsvac column on the main page. This helps to decide whether a seemingly interesting bit of title text is indeed of possible interest, or just from a troll site or a lower quality/more noise site. @myself: wrt my previous mail - of course some of the font and visual-estate problems could be fixed by grease monkey on a per user base. But thats a bad, inefficient work-around... even if linux.com were to offer greasemonkey scraps for that purpose. Ditto user-defined profile settings for css selection: such settings would need to be in a cookie, as they shouldn't differ wrt login/logged-out. thanx, Peter

One word. S----L----O----W .... I have tried to access the new website over the past couple of days and have encountered numerous problems: 1. Consistently get no response from the web server or connection timouts. 2. Database connection issues with Xaraya 3. Portions of the site do not work through proxy server (Privoxy). In the past, I would read most of my IT news from Newsforge and Newsvac. If the issues can't be resolved, I will need to find another site. Sorry about complaining, but the new site has been really s-l-ow the past couple of days. jb

I appreciate the hard work it took to make the site look better, but I have to say, I think I prefer the old version better. First of all, I liked Newsforge better than Linux.com, sorry! If it's gone forever, it will be very much missed by us all! The content on Newsforge seemed to be better, and I regularly viewed it more than once a day. I read this and other similar sites for the content, not the white(/color) space, nor the ads. I know you have to pay the bills, but they don't influence me very much. The blank space reduces the amount of actual content. Please reduce blank space to a minimum. Because of the new amount of graphics you have, the speed of the site has been greatly reduced. You do not validate to the XHTML1 'Strict' standard, you might want to drop that back to 'Transitional' until you work out all the bugs. The current page I am on writing this, http://www.linux.com/forums/newreply/1 , shows 20 errors. Please check the CSS as well. While you are trying to bring this site up to XHTML standards, please also consider WAI, and Section 508 Standards as well, so the site may be properly viewed by all, including the visually impaired. Please accept these comments in the spirit of Open Source, to help make this a better site. Thank you! Rick Stanley

I also see, or rather DON'T see a 'Home' button to return to the Haome page for Linux.com! Slight oversight? ;^) Rick Stanley

I collect interesting stories for offline reading and long term reference and will print to PDF of PS - your print CSS doesn't look bad, but I haven't seen any stories with embedded pics yet - please be PDF friendly. Or it would be really nice if an indexed PDF of the article could be downloaded. It's nice having all the links work too. Maybe something in the API when that comes out? I look forward to being able to skin your site to something less...well .. glam got something more Bauhaus? So far the site comes mostly from linux.com with a bit of google-analytics which is ok - but if you go all cross site advert you'll just get a smack from the adblock stick. I look forward to enjoying your site script free - if you have scripts you want to run, please justify them - I'm happy to enable clueful script functions. oh - and preview renders differently from when posted - gak! Best Wishes [Modified by: author on June 24, 2007 06:33 AM]

What a difference! I never liked the (old) website style because it was very hard to read with too much text with headers not to distinguish so good from the other text. The new layout, margins, fonts and font sizes are much better to read! Shows perfectly on Opera 9.21 on Ubuntu Linux - great!

Hey guys, [quote=Anonymous]I look forward to enjoying your site script free - if you have scripts you want to run, please justify them - I'm happy to enable clueful script functions.[/quote] I like the new site overall, but would like to see it [b]without so much scripting[/b] going on every page. On the articles listing for instance, I see that you are using some fancy jQuery code to style each news item. I would prefer to see the items styled using CSS to begin with, using scripts to enhance the behaviour of elements only. I know jQuery is cool and you can do some pretty great things with it, but "with great power there must also come great responsibility" :) Using Firefox on Mac, it's a tad slow. Cheers; Poncho

I like this layout best. The previous one was the worst you had since you bought linux.com url centurys ago (that's just my opinion). This layout feels more news oriented. I don't wish you to turn into a slashdot clone (and I like slashdod raw look), but I think less redundant info is better.

@Rick Stanley: Click the big "linux.com" banner at the top of the page. That seems to have become the standard practice on many sites. My complaint: Please, Please don't use arbitrary fixed font sizes! It ruins accessibility for those of us with weak eyes. We set our default font sizes to something larger for a reason (22pt in my case). Specifying a font size of 13px clobbers it, especially on a high screen resolution like 1600x1200. 13px in my case is just over 1% of the screen height. If you use non-hardware-specific font sizes (Npt or N% or something like "medium"), and let the browser render it based on the user's preferences, the new design will be much more usable. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-size-props for more information.

Hi, please do try moving that d*** and wrap it around the

I'd like to add my voice to the request for some descriptive comments in the "News From Around the Web" column. A title alone is insufficient to attract me to reading an article and the column just looks like a waste of space to me. I see this has been taken care of. Looks like something that was already planned. Thanks, anyway. Loading is much faster now. [Modified by: WarPengi on June 27, 2007 06:19 AM]

I like the new site, but there seem to be a few bugs still. One, the load times are still incredibly slow, but only for POST operations. GET operations are fine. I've also noticed that there's a forum post with no title. It's hard to access, and Quick Reply is broken on it as a result. Also, on the Quick Reply, the "Submit the following?" is really annoying. It would be understandable if it was a preview page, but it's just a text box. Oh, and one Page 1 of forum posts, the thread navigation links at the top don't work. The ones at the bottom do, though. Firefox 2.0.0.0 on Debian 4.0, x86_64. [Modified by: James Buchwald on June 26, 2007 01:53 AM]

the picture viewer is slow, unnecessary, unhelpful, hurtful and clogs up my web browser. Please get rid of it.

I think you should have a link to email stories to friends.

This is a great site. I really like it. Thanks for the great site! Elad@ [url=http://webhosting.reviewitonline.net]Web Hosting Provider[/url] [Modified by: edcpartners on January 06, 2008 09:05 AM]

Hey hey hey! I actually like the forum. I dont like forums in general but i love the idea of giving technical support to new linux users. I dont find the site slow myself but if many others do re building the site using php might be an idea. Kind Regards EDIT: Would be nice to see the avatar option enabled :D [Modified by: alpinesatan.com on December 16, 2007 09:46 PM]

Forums are really good resources I think. You can usually learn a lot from most forums. Thanks, Elad @ [url=http://suv.reviewitonline.net]suv[/url]

I also see, or rather DON'T see a 'Home' button to return to the Haome page for Linux.com! Slight oversight?

[quote=]I also see, or rather DON'T see a 'Home' button to return to the Home page for Linux.com! Slight oversight?[/quote] If you click the Linux.com logo it takes you to the home page.

nice job. [Modified by: rokytnji on October 28, 2008 12:14 PM]

i would be good to be able to contac members real time . A Quic find post for any one to put links for any one to access