Friday, 6 December 2013

LXFDVD120 - On the hunt for LXF magazine's DVD

Will the Internet see me through in my mini-quest to find a file?  I'm looking for an ISO image for a certain issue of Linux Format Magazine (LXF).  The original site doesn't have it, and the rest of the Internet appears to be devoid of any sign that this file still exists.

I first got to looking for this file when I started collecting all the DVD's from the LXF site.  They have torrents of most of their recent DVD's, but the one for issue #120 is missing a link for downloading that particular DVD

In January 2013, I fired off an email to their support address, and I sent another one almost a year later.  In the meantime, I have taken a peek into the Internet to see if something showed up.

The main reason I wanted to have this DVD is because I love the 9.04 release of Ubuntu - the Jaunty Jackalope, and I want to see what LXF has done to customize it in this DVD.  It isn't even a good reason really, but I still went after it.

There are some copies available on archive.org.  They have a collection of the LXF DVDs, some much older then my collection of LXF DVDs needs to satisfy my need for relative completeness.  However it is user-maintaned and nobody has uploaded a copy of DVD 120.

Maybe somebody still has the hardcopy DVD - for heaven's sake, it's only 4 years old, this isn't an archeological project here!  There are some "back issues" on sale on ebay, and even amazon offer's a year's subscription to the current version.  Linuxformat.ru has a lot of older issues translated into Russian, available for subscribers, but no DVD's come with those. 

There was  an interesting site that had a listing of all publications by Future Publishing, ltd, which showed the exact DVD I am in search of:
http://www.nsrl.nist.gov/RDS/rds_2.42/ProdList.txt
Future Publishing	LXFDVD120	July 2009

I almost want to contact the company to find out if they have the hardcopy DVD somewhere, but it looks like it is more of a record then an inventory.

Well until it shows up on a torrent site, or somebody uploads theirs to archive.org, I'll just have to leave the Internet to work away steadily, perhaps turning up exactly what I needed in time.  I'll likely forget about the custom jaunty on LXFDVD120 for the time being, but eventually I will revisit this hunt, and I will be eager to try it once I get it.