Congratulations on your 8 years of running this site. I'm very new to Linux and to the site, but from what I've seen so far, it's a great resource. All of the people responsible for running the site and for helping with answers should be congratulated!

As far as suggestions go, one major category that is missing is a forum for powerpc users of Linux. These are mainly Mac people like myself, but there are a few other types of computers built with powerpc chips. I think it would be useful to have a separate forum for this because respondents with Intel hardware sometimes don't realize that the powerpc versions of the same Linux don't work exactly the same way. A good example was my attempt to solve an openSUSE ppc video problem by compiling a video driver available for Linux off the ATI site. The Linux drivers were only available in x86 flavours, and they wouldn't compile on my PowerBook. Just a thought - you guys know the Linux community a lot better than I do.

Cheers!

Happy Birthday! This site has been a tremendous resource for me. Keep up the good work!
Thank you.

Happy birthday - and thank you for a splendid community.
/Lars

happy bitrhday LQ,THANKS A LOT FOR THE AWARENESS....

happy birthday, 8 years in the online world is like a million years in the real world, you guys are pioneers in online forum. This is a Mile Stone for LQ, and i'm sure the success will continue. This is one of the best Forums, helpful and friendly

it's all great!
thanx LQ!

Congratulations!!!
I'm new to Linux and I don't speak very well English...

Sites this helpful do not happen by accident. Thanks for the help and Happy Birthday LQ!

You're right, I was only giving some suggesstions. They are not "compulsory ideas" you know...
I think posting other files than images are not that good idea, because it can easily go out of control. I already see that many deb, rpm, tgz files will be posted here and there, because it is easier than to find the package on the internet. Just check out how many re-asked questions are there. From the same laziness many attachments will be completely unnecessary to solve a kind of problem. If you have another view of this issue, please share it.

Now back to screenshots. I know that there are some "external" image hosting webpages, but I really don't like to use them this way, because they are heavily user managed. This is not a problem until you will notice in several threads that the images on the external site are deleted (because users need the storage space for other purposes), but the link to them remained in the thread. Many dead links can appear this way, and I think this is why users don't put links to such sharing pages in the threads. If screenshots would be "inside" LQ, that's a different story. Links to images (as I described in my previous post) will only remain under a post, until the images are truly reachable. This way no confusion, no bad experiences.

Jeremy

Thats very considerate of you.


cheerio

Happy anniversary and Congratulations LQ!

I have tried Linux on and off for 8 years now with varying degrees of success and this site has proved to be one of the best for getting accurate answers quickly.

So a big thank you to all who have worked hard to get the site to what it is now and to those who contribute their time and expertise to help us poor incompetents.

What is missing from Linux, in my opinion, is a decent set of tutorials to help people set up or solve various services and problems. And what makes this harder to do is that it seems to be different not only for different flavors of linux but also for different versiona within the same linux version. Setting up samba on Fedora is a case in point.

Would it not be possible to provide a consistent interface across all or most versions of linux for tackling the most common problems? In this way a good tutorial could be created (and maintained) and would apply to all or most versions of linux.

I saw a topic recently where someone maintained that to get a problem solved it was easier to explain using a gui linux (of which there are many) saying that this was the easiest for newcomers to understand. I don't agree, the gui's hide details and change from one version of the software to the next - so any tutorial is quickly out of date and only confueses the user (I know I have dome it often enough). I found the easiest way was to understand the config fils. The only question then is what are the config files called on the different versions of Linux and where are they stored.

There are some great tutorials out there on the internet (see the setup instructions for Slackware or for SMEServer for instance. So really good tutorials could be created and if a gui was needed one could be written for those versions of linux that use gui exclusively. But it would be the same interface...

This site has helped me get file serving working quickly and effectively for my small company and will mean the spread of linux in this part of the world.

Once again thank you.

silverbird

Happy Birthday LQ.
Well, i reeally appreciate that LQ is celebrating its 8 th bday.

I am certainly no expert on these hosting services. My only experience is with imageshack.us. While ImageShack allows people to delete files there is no motivation to do so as there is not a limit on the number of files a user can upload. And unless the user deletes it, the image is supposed to stay there forever. (Of course, forever is a long time, and companies can go out of business, etc.)

I agree that "inside LQ" would be preferable from a permanence standpoint. But I was presenting another alternative in case Jeremy is not able or willing to allow that. I do think a "permanent" link outside LQ is preferable to a temporary link inside LQ. If LQ decided to point people to hosting services, the info could request that people never delete the images. Of course, there would be no way to enforce this. But all you and I can do is make suggestions. The decision rests with Jeremy.

(Note: while double checking info about ImageShack I discovered that there is more than one website that uses that name. To reiterate, I was specifically talking about http://imageshack.us .)

@jeremy,

Spell checking this post reminded me of another suggestion. The spell checker seems kind of weak in guessing what word might have been meant. It frequently seems to miss single character ommisions and simple transpositions that other spell checkers usually figure out. I also don't see that telling it to "learn" a word does anything.