Magazines

The British Linux magazine Linux Format has given a negative review (4 out of 10) to C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 by J Blanchette & M Summerfield, the official Trolltech book on programming with Qt 4, in the most recent edition (LXF109, Sept 08). They register disappointment with the content given the Trolltech endorsement and Matthias Ettrich's foreword, alleging that it will put anyone used to Python or .NET off Qt for life, that "even simple tasks take on gargantuan complexity", and that despite being comprehensive, it "reads like a Croatian train time table". They attach to the review an image of the first edition of the book, and quote the ISBN number of the first edition, making it obvious that they reviewed the first edition despite an update having been published in February. This is a theme we have seen before with this magazine, which has reviewed unfinished versions of certain products and rubbished them on stability grounds. I must say that I found the original (Qt 3) edition immensely helpful in learning Qt.

Issue 71 (March 2007) of Linux User & Developer has been released in the UK, and it features the first part of a tutorial on Qt by Ruediger Berlich. This month it has a couple of basic "Hello world" type programs and an explanation of signals and slots.

It also has a brief history of Qt which gives the wrong information that Qt ever stood for Quasar Toolkit, which is wrong. The Q stands for Q, which according to the Blanchette & Summerfield Qt book, looked beautiful in an Emacs font in the opinion of one of the original developers; the "t" stands for toolkit. Trolltech originally called themselves Quasar Technologies, but this is likely to have come from Qt, not the other way round.

Other features include a review of OpenSUSE 10.2 and articles on Oracle, open-source software blogs (not including this one, unfortunately), corporate desktop deployment of Linux and how "the UK's new off-the-shelf tendering system for public IT contracts is systematically excluding smaller suppliers offering open-source solutions". It is available at some of the larger branches of WH Smith as well as Borders.

The latest edition of Linux User & Developer magazine (issue 68, Dec 2006) has been released in the UK. Its main Qt-interest feature is a write-up of the aKademy event in Dublin earlier this year; there are also features on Blender and PyGTK, the usual columns from Pamela Jones and Jeremy Allison, and Ubuntu Edgy on the cover DVD. It costs £5.99 (US $12.99).

Konsole has come top in a group test of terminal emulators in Linux Format with 9 marks out of 10 (version 3.5.2 tested). Features noted included its versatility, its filesystem bookmarks, and its integration with the rest of KDE. The review noted that it was not one of the fastest, something which could be remedied by turning off anti-aliasing. GNOME Terminal got 8 out of 10, and xterm only three, it being noted that it was the slowest at scrolling text "by quite a margin". Others tested were Rxvt, Wterm, Eterm, Aterm and Mlterm.