Farewell

Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?

The battle cry from the original LXF001 still rings true. Look back with some of the original staff at how Linux Format launched, managed to keep going and racked up 25 years.

NICK VEITCH

Editor 2000–2008

LXF001 to LXF142

When I first started Linux Format, I had two central ideas. I also had two desks, one computer and an amazing six weeks until the first deadline… But back to the ideas.

The first was that it should be a proper ‘Format’ magazine – one that really understood what the readers wanted and delivered entertainment and information in good measure, as well as a coverdisc full of useful things. The second was that it should take more leads from the vibrant community of open source. In some respects, the magazine still had to be a gatekeeper, or at least a filter of ideas, but we (two more staff joined after the first week) really felt like we were curating a magazine that let the readers and the wider open source community determine what was important and what we should be covering. The very first issue had a letters section – possible because we ruthlessly canvassed online Linux communities for ideas and got them to mail us.

“We really felt like we were curating a magazine that let the readers and the wider open source community determine what was important”

I guess an early example of how this played out was the Distrowatch section. I wanted to track and inform people about the latest releases in the incredibly fast-moving space of Linux distros. There were no defined release schedules in those days, and there were many quirky takes on what a distro should be and how it should work, so it seemed like a good thing to cover. After the first column went out, we were contacted by a reader who had independently had the same idea and had created a website, also called Distrowatch! He’d done such a good job on it that we immediately gained a regular and long-standing contributor.

I’m pretty proud of what we managed to create with Linux Format, a magazine few people thought was more than a fad. Because of its deep ties with the community, it became a focal point of what was actually going on in the world of open source, and made familiar names (and sometimes faces) of the real people doing exciting, innovative and occasionally ridiculous things with our favourite OS. Thanks for sticking with us on the journey.

I have many, many memories from my time working on the magazine, but several in particular stand out.

The original internal shortcode for the magazine was LFO, but I thought there should be an X in it, so I managed to change it by simply using LXF for everything until people stopped bothering to correct it.

In the early days, Richard Drummond used to attempt to compile a new kernel pretty much every night. There were always things to tune or fiddle with, but a build would take hours and hours, so after half an hour of guessing what the options in make menuconfig might really mean, he set off a build and went home, turning up the next day to discover he had a great kernel for graphics performance but had failed to enable the keyboard driver… Richard is one (maybe the only) regular member of staff to have actually contributed to the Linux kernel and had his code accepted.