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Penguin Pete's Blog

Penguin Pete's Blog
Being an extraordinarily geeky site about Free and Open Source Software and the wonders thereof. Full site features include the hippest FOSS blog on the 'net, a gallery with over 400 wallpapers at this count free for download, source code, distro rev

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Articles

10 Reasons Why the Command Line is More User-Friendly than the Desktop
2007-11-24 15:00:00
I aim all of these not just at Linux, BSD, and Unix-alikes, but at every computer system ever. Nor do I say all of this as a power-using geek, but to apply it to every computer user everywhere. 1. Keying is faster than mousing. You might argue this point, and if you do, I'd just point out "Why are there keyboard shortcuts on most menu entries in a GUI?" And why are they called "shortcuts"? Because using a mouse to do something is the long way to do it, each and every time. 2. It's easier to both give and get help. Nearly every Debian system has synaptic, and I'll bet most people use it. Yet even amongst synaptic users, they'll still answer questions with an "apt-get" statement. It doesn't matter if you use apt-get or synaptic; it's still more efficient to use the command expression behind the GUI action to answer questions online. You can interpret the answer into the GUI tool of your choice. Ever seen somebody answer a question that has no command-line answer? "Go here, dou...
More About: Desktop , User , Reasons , Friendly , Line

What comes next after Web 2.0?
2007-11-21 18:09:00
http://www.snap2objects.com/2007/11/20/ho w-to-destroy-the-web-20-look/ Snap2Objects has a thoughtful post up on the future of web design. I've had some interest in the trend, particularly when it will be over. Snap2Objects defines the early 1990's web as its "Dark Ages", and I have defined the current trend as the Disco era of the web. As you might guess from my own site style, I kind of go along with it but poke ironic fun at it at the same time, so I was going for a "post-Web 2.0" style. But the examples he cites, which he calls "retro-vintage" with perhaps a dash of grunge, will remind any CSS fan of CSS Zen Garden, which has been hosting styles like this for years. Yes, this movement has been bubbling away under the surface for quite some time. I'm all set to go retro-vintage whenever the rest of the Web is ready for it, and I was grunge when grunge wasn't in yet. Design trends will eventually change. When will that be? As opposed to the technology that controls it, web d...
More About: General

An HTML Chess Table
2007-11-18 12:40:00
I'm up to my ears in paid work right now (Holiday rush coming soon!), and haven't time to blog, so here's an HTML chess table. The chess table source is here - right now you're just viewing an iframe. View source and copy-paste if you're setting up a chess game for the web. It's Unicode art, but I have to post it in "ANSI art" because I was too short-sighted to name the category to cover all forms of character-based graphics. Wasn't that thick of me? NOTE: I get these characters from this Unicode page. If you see question marks, boxes, or anything but chess pieces, go to that link. If you can't see the chess pieces there, either, there's something wrong with either your web browser settings or your font. If you can't see my chess pieces but you can see the pieces at the linked page, *I* have messed up, and I'd appreciate your dropping me a note in the comments to tell me about it.
More About: Chess , Table , Html

Inkscape and Gimp: Tracing a Cartoon Figure
2007-11-11 18:51:00
This isn't really an Earth-shattering technique, but I've lucked out with it enough times to warrant a tutorial. It actually fits with the popular art-school methods for drawing a figure on paper, especially for drawing superhero-type figures. 1. Pull an interesting human figure off of a search. Here, I chose this muscle man. Import the image into Inkscape . Enlarge as necessary. 2. Make an oval using the circle tool. Your oval should have a partially transparent fill color and a solid border color of about one pixel. Place it over the face, sizing and rotating it to the closest fit. 3. Keep covering the rest of the body by duplicating the oval and scaling and rotating it into place. Hey, squares are OK to use, too! 4. When you're done covering the figure, move the original picture out of the way or delete it - we are done with it. Select the whole group of shapes and group them, then surround the group with a transparent box (to give the figure some pixel padding around...
More About: Cartoon , Gimp , Figure

Slowly Making Friends With The New Gimp
2007-11-10 17:52:00
What's driving me to put Gimp 2.4 on my Slackware box (my main office) is that I can never again do a Gimp tutorial until I am set up with 2.4. The interface overhaul is just too massive; every Gimp tutorial currently published in print or the web has now become worthless. It's things like this that held me back from mastering Blender; I was just getting pretty good with it, when they rebuilt it. At least half the tutorials out there for Blender even now make references to buttons that no longer exist and menu paths that have changed. Hopefully, the Gimp community can handle itself better. For anybody who asks, I will be putting a header on each of my own Gimp tutorials specifying that they are for 2.2. Anyway, I'm running Slackware 11.0, having just dialed in the perfect distro setup as I reviewed here. This may come as a shock, but I don't keep current on my main work station. I apply the Debian philosophy; I want long-term stability, because there is so much that is so comp...
More About: Friends

Gimp vs Photoshop, round #infinity: - in which the author gets to crow and
2007-11-09 16:42:00
Pardon me, while I make an unbearably smug schmuck out of myself. At about this time in my blogging "career", I'd have to assess that I'm at least one of the top five online pundits who have made a name for themselves by taking the Gimp 's side in the Gimp vs. Photoshop debate on the side of Gimp. And not just Gimp, but Gimp Classic, as opposed to Gimp-in-Photoshop's skin. And not just taken sides, but dug a foxhole from which to lob mortars. So recently, I reviewed the latest Gimp here and here, and protested noisily the drag, with screams athroat and limbs aflail, towards being Photoshop Junior. Yes, I believe phrases like, "Photoshop compared to Gimp sucks. It sucks the road tar off the Highway to Hell!" were bandied about with gusto. Wasn't that just a few posts back? And the pixels on them have yet to dry, and here we have Adobe to Unclutter Photoshop UI, courtesy of Slashdot. It's like the Universe saw what I was doing and handed me a big, meaty club to convince people...
More About: Crow , Author , Round

I'm Bored! What's In The Searchbag?
2007-11-08 15:03:00
Cue the dancing kangaroos in tutus! Fire up the credenza! Split a sliff, smoke some schwag, and tune your boogaloo kazoo! As your Master of Ceremonies takes the balcony, turns to the peanut gallery and says: Hello, True Believers! It's time once again to pull up a few items from the search-bag, that list of search terms tracked by my b2evolution stats which show some of the phrases which landed people on this site via a search engine. What I'm mostly interested in are the "near-misses" - those phrases which show that the searcher came here looking for something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unhere. I'm also interested in filling space... "desktop toilet full" - What an excellent name for a desktop recycle bin. Right-click and select "flush". Click "yes" to the hysterical dummy box that asks "Are you SURE you want to flush these (x) items?" as if these were priceless treasures from the Smithsonian. By the way, I think all real-life trashcans should include a voice ch...
More About: Bored

I'm Bored! What's In The Searchbag?
2007-11-08 15:03:00
Cue the dancing kangaroos in tutus! Fire up the credenza! Split a spliff, smoke some schwag, and tune your boogaloo kazoo! As your Master of Ceremonies takes the balcony, turns to the peanut gallery and says: Hello, True Believers! It's time once again to pull up a few items from the search-bag, that list of search terms tracked by my b2evolution stats which show some of the phrases which landed people on this site via a search engine. What I'm mostly interested in are the "near-misses" - those phrases which show that the searcher came here looking for something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unhere. I'm also interested in filling space... "desktop toilet full" - What an excellent name for a desktop recycle bin. Right-click and select "flush". Click "yes" to the hysterical dummy box that asks "Are you SURE you want to flush these (x) items?" as if these were priceless treasures from the Smithsonian. By the way, I think all real-life trashcans should include a voice c...
More About: Bored

Linux Users - Not Just Feral, but Rabid
2007-11-06 13:40:00
ITWire has this little ditty in their open source blog, going "tsk-tsk" at the Linux crowd for being such a tenacious little bunch. Why, just look at how Russell Kennedy got them all riled up! When he did that "why Ubuntu still sucks" troll, the peasants with pitchforks and torches lined up at the gates. So Varghese asks "Are Linux users really a feral bunch?" No, Mr. Varghese, it's worse than that. And calling us "loose-lipped or juvenile" is also missing the point. Think about revolutions and minute-men. Think about angry libertarians. And after that, think of the settlers of the wild frontier. Because at this time in history, that's just what Linux is: the Wild, Wild West. The nature of leaving civilization to settle an untamed new world requires a special breed of individual. Colonists self-select for a set of attributes which make them prone to be seen as anti-social, but at the same time makes them the toughest survivors you've ever met. These are not gentle folk with A...
More About: General , Users

Overcoming THE FEAR
2007-10-31 19:10:00
This being Halloween, it seems appropriate to talk about fear. Why don't more desktop users adapt to free computing? THE FEAR. The command line. Scary stuff, for some. Speaking as someone with a family member who suffers from chronic anxiety disorder, I know exactly how crippling fear can be to the intellect. It is the performance anxiety of the brain. Here sit we geeks, calmly explaining the options to ls for the 60th time, and we can't see through the screen to the face of the person we're talking to. If we could, we might sometimes be able to tell that that person is terrified of messing up. How many people out there are misdiagnosed with ADD? When all the while the reason they can't learn is because their thoughts are drowned out by their amygdalas screaming "Panic! I have to get away from this NOW!" Businesses. The debates that go round and round on Slashdot about open-source adoption in the business sector usually settle on the point: Businesses stick to commercial softw...
More About: General , Fear

Gimp 2.4 - A Proper Review
2007-10-26 23:05:00
Now that I've gotten all the fussing about the wrong-headed design changes last time, it's time to talk about the good news: the new features. There is no merely discussing this as "an upgrade". This is basically a reinvention of the Gimp as we knew it. Keep your hat on, as there is just too much to talk about to proceed through in any kind of orderly fashion. Also see Gimp release notes and Red Hat Magazine's write-up. Click the shots for full-size images. [happy now, Eric? q;o)] The New Look - Lip-smackingly tasty. The new icon set plus the new widget integration makes Gimp look 100% better than it did before. I can't speak for other systems, but on Linux with KDE it does indeed adopt the desktop style. Brushes - The first feature I noticed with the brush was that I could easily draw a straight line. The lines at the top were not done with holding down the shift key; instead it seems to detect when you're trying to go straight (hint: drag slowly) and keeps it that way. B...
More About: Reviews , Review , Prop , Rope

Ahhh! What did they do to my Gimp?
2007-10-24 21:54:00
I've just installed Mandriva One 2008 on my kid's computer. Ordinarily, I'd be reviewing that first. But the first thing I do with a distro review is pop open Gimp to take screenshots. And Mandriva's using the release candidate Gimp 2.4. And I opened it and with a tortured shriek that sent birds flying from every tree on the block, uttered the line which makes the title of this post. I have good news and bad news: the good news is that a ton of new features have been added. The bad news is, the UI has been entirely re-designed. Have you ever used the Gimp before, read a Gimp tutorial online, been using it since the 1.0 days? Then you will be lost. I repeat, you will be lost. You might as well go pick a new graphics tool to learn as the Gimp. For instance, where were drop shadows? Script-Fu->Shadow->Drop Shadow? No, as the above screenshot shows, it's now in Filters->Light and Shadow->Drop Shadows. And the old light menu now has shadow stuff dumped in on top of it. And there ...
More About: Reviews

TurboLinux Joins the Traitor's Parade
2007-10-23 16:52:00
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2804920 911.html Make a notch next to Novell Suse, Linspire, and Xandross for TurboLinux, the latest sell-out to Microsoft. Thank you, TurboLinux, your poison dagger in the backs of us all does not go unremarked. The Internet has a long memory. Make no mistake; every Microsoft-partnering Linux distribution may consider itself no longer a part of the Linux community, to not be reviewed, recommended, or noticed again. When I get the time, maybe I'll work out a little tombstone graphic suitable for the sidebar.
More About: General , Turbolinux , Parade , TRAI

Gutsy Gibbon and the Download Frenzy
2007-10-19 12:30:00
Just a note... I'm seeing a veritable riot erupt as everybody in the world tries to download Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon at the same time. May I suggest that some folks be a little more patient? Try again tomorrow, say? It isn't going to run away, you know. It will still be there next week, even. Perhaps go grab a Torrent? And stay online to seed afterwards? If you (as I used to be) are exasperated with BitTorrent clients, you haven't seem allpeers, the Firefox plugin which makes BitTorrent an absolute JOY to use. I saw the review for it on Rea Maor's pad, tried it, and haven't regretted it yet. Now, then, can we all be polite and stand in line? I've never seen such a donnybroook over a Linux distribution before. I guess this is a sign that Linux has arrived in a big way.
More About: Download , General , Frenzy

A MySpace Safari
2007-10-19 05:54:00
G'Day, Mates! T'day, we're going to don our pith helmets and explore one of the most obscure cultures of the Internet... the MySpace community! These natives are self-contained, having little-to-no contact with the outside world. Sort of like Yahoo in the 1990's. So, I'm Bruce, your host, and we'll be accompanied by Bruce the guide and our camera person, who is Bruce. Join us as we plumb... the Depths of MySpace! (echo effect: space pace ace ace ace) lynx http://www.myspace.com/ Allow cookies? "v" Well, of course, we wouldn't dare venture in with anything but our protective lynx browser. If you ever see a skeleton with spiderwebs on it propped up 'pon a monitor, that's the remains of someone foolish enough to access MySpace in a GUI browser. The bloody graphics could give a wallaby a fair dinkum seizure. Ignore the lynx warning "Bad HTML! Use -trace to diagnose". That's just a head on a stake meant to scare away geeks. Ah, here's a new user: Konvict. Probably a KDE ...
More About: Humor , Safari , Myspace

The BSD Community Compared to the Linux Community
2007-10-12 18:45:00
I'll tell you the number one thing right off that I like better about BSD than Linux : the peace and quiet. An amazing experience occurred when I began to run BSD. It was a Jedi event. I was jolted by something that suddenly stopped when I started BSD, something I hadn't been aware of until it was gone. I experienced a great calming in The Force; as if a million screaming, bitching voices suddenly shut the hell up! Here is the story of two free Unix systems. BSD, at this time, is about twice Linux's age. Many of the same programs will run on both. Much of the same kind of person who likes one should like the other. Yet on Linux's side of the fence, there is this massive war going on; while on BSD's side, you can step out on your porch at night and hear nothing but crickets. Nobody is preaching that BSD has to do this, this, and this to suit some agenda. Nobody is threatening to tar and feather the BSD users for being elitists. Microsoft isn't shaking any clubs at BSD and t...
More About: Community , General , Unit , Pare

The Unique Problem of Go
2007-10-11 18:46:00
This Slashdot article reminded me of one of my favorite games. It is about the continuing effort to try to make computers good at Go. Go is an active topic in the free software community. There's the excellent GNU-Go engine, the CGoban GUI front end, and then there was Hikarunix, the Linux live CD devoted entirely to the game of Go. It is a shame to see that Hikarunix appears to have closed since this review was written. Here's the Wikipedia article on it. Damn, I'd be happy to host that distro myself, if anybody out there is connected to the project and reading this, and it's not too late. I also blush a little bit whenever I hear a discussion of the difficulty of programming Go, because... I took a shot at it. This was back in my grasshopper days when I was tinkering with the SDL library and C. At the time, GNUGo was much slower, and I tried to make a one-piece engine and GUI front-end, that would be faster. It's fast alright, and it plays worse than a drunk monkey. It was...
More About: Linux Gaming , Unique , Problem

My 'lil' FreeBSD Notebook
2007-10-06 20:04:00
New to BSD from Linux? Welcome to the outback! BSD is going to feel like a TV commercial that goes: "We've secretly replaced this geek's Linux with BSD - let's see how long it takes to notice!" Herein is a random little list of notes I'm leaving along the way, as I venture into the depths of BSD: NOTE: BEFORE YOU COMMENT The computer I installed FreeBSD to is OFFLINE. It has no Internet connection. For very, very good reasons. If you leave me a comment on this post to the effect of me being an idiot who doesn't connect to the freebsd.org site and use ports, I WILL make fun of you! Don't let me do that. My 'lil' FreeBSD Notebook Console tip: The mouse in BSD is an actual mouse pointer graphic, and you can use it to snarf and paste text. Just click and drag over the text you want to copy, which will store it in the "clipboard". Then middle-click to paste it elsewhere. Exactly like in Linux (given the right setup). You've gotten your desktop up and hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get...

My FreeBSD posting - Why Am I Doing This?
2007-10-05 19:29:00
The reactions - both here and all over the web - to my last post about installing FreeBSD have shown that some people seem to be unclear on my motives and methods. Perhaps it's time for a refresher course on my mission with this site. First off: thank all of you who recommend PC-BSD. Yes, I've heard about it, and there is no doubt in my mind that it both would have been easier to install and a slicker environment. But that wasn't what I was looking for - this time. Second off: Don't mistake this for a review. I'm not ready to write a review yet. When I get a desktop setup and installed packages and take screenshots, and have some time to use the system, I'll write the review then. What this was, was one person's story - so far. Third off: For those of you who (and boy, is the irony thick here!) are barking "RTFM" at me: I'll cite you chapter and verse from several manuals, but none of the manuals addressed the problems I was experiencing. To summarize: The section on Cr...
More About: Site News , Posti , Doing

The Penguin Grows Horns: Installing FreeBSD
2007-10-04 18:12:00
It has always bothered me that this site and my experiences stay inside of Linux so much, when the whole site is about "free and open source software". I've only dabbled in non-Linux FOSS with live CDs and such, but I'm ready to install a real BSD and stick with it for awhile. So, the recently-acquired box with Windows-XP will now be sharing space with a daemon. Windows on the first hard drive, BSD on a second, exactly as I did with Windows and Red Hat almost a decade ago. First impressions: FreeBSD is hard to install. Damn hard. I am the veteran of some 50 to 100 operating system installs in my lifetime, and I blew FreeBSD five amazing times and had to start over. It is well-documented and everything, but I still fumbled around with it. One misfire was the result of filling the 4.1 gig hard drive to capacity by selecting "all" for install options, reasoning that it couldn't get that big. It could. It would help if somewhere it told you how much space each installed module would...
More About: Site News , Horns , Penguin , Guin , Horn

Meatloafers Are Just As Bad As Spammers!
2007-10-03 23:47:00
INTRO: I've had this rant kicking around in the compost pile, but I was inspired to finally cough it up when somebody posted this notice on Reddit. They are trying to stop a meatloafer who insists on posting every episode of XKCD to Reddit, even though we all bloody well knew about XKCD before the meatloafer discovered it. So, frustrated social-news-user, this Bud's for you! The term "meatloaf" is one derived from being analogous to "spam". It is non-commercial spam, home-made spam. While spam-paranoia causes me not to be too liberal with posting my email address online, meatloaf-paranoia causes me to take much more severe counter-measures, even in person. I now have three email addresses at any given time; one a "dodgeit.com" bluff, one a test address, and one the real address that I actually read, which I trust people with only after they're passed the six-months probation with the test address. People don't even get the bluff address until I've quizzed them on their inten...
More About: Humor , Spammers , Loafers , Loafer

Tiresome nattering about this and that
2007-10-02 22:35:00
Time to make one of those dreaded "just to say I posted" posts. Really, I've been trying to blog, but everything that comes up lately has a built-in unblogginess factor. Yeah, for instance, I've uploaded some new wallpapers to the 1600x1200 section. But really, when is that news? Except to toot my own horn: "See? I'm not slacking! No, I was drawing! Ha! You thought I was slacking, but I was draw-wiinnng!" Or else there's little nuggets like: I am thunderstruck to have actually beaten GNU GO! I mean in a straight game, full strength, with no handicap. For the first time. After playing it for years. I love Go - I consider it the greatest of board games - but it's kind of discouraging because it takes so many years of your life to finally get good enough at it where you don't suck. Yep, even got the screenshot to prove it: But who else cares about that? Nobody really ought to. No, to blog about something as personal and trivial as that comes off as sounding like a ...
More About: Site News , Some , Erin , Tire

Shhh! I'm quietly putting the 'Ubuntu is not Linux' posts back up...
2007-09-25 16:12:00
Now that the controversy has ebbed, I'm going to try to see if they and the rest of the Universe can co-exist in peace. Note that the controversy from Tux500 spilled over onto them. The posts were pounced upon by minions who thought they were getting half a million dollars and 27 virgins each, or something, and who thought I alone was stopping their entry into Zion or wherever they thought they were going. So the posts were spammed to the international Internet with comments quoting out of context, intentional mistranslations, and headlines to the effect that I was the enemy of freedom, hated Linux and apple pie and cute baby kittens, probably sodomized choir boys, etc. etc. yada yada. In the course of that flame war, Godwin had to repeal his law just so he could get some peace. So, now that they can live in Post-Tux500-War peace... (the trolls fled their cave long ago)... I'll give them a second chance. Ubuntu is not Linux - pass it on! No, really! Ubuntu is not Linux! Try ...
More About: Site News , Back , Putting

Obscure Linux Commands: Cheating At Word Games
2007-09-25 02:25:00
Now, granted, cheating at word games won't make you very good at the word games. However, using practical problems from word games is an excellent opportunity to brush up on your Command-Line-Foo! There is no better exercise to master regexps. One thing you've probably found is that 99% of Linux distros have a file in /usr/share/dict/ which is called "words". True to Unix traditions, it's nothing but a plain text file of words, one per line, which is what the system uses for spell-checking. So, you're bumbling along doing a crossword puzzle, and you need to find a seven-letter word that begins with 'm', ends in 's', and has a 't' in the middle. Go get it, grep! ß grep "^m..t..s$" /usr/share/dict/words mantels mantles martyrs masters matters mentors misters mittens mortals mortars mottoes mouthes mutters mystics Blow by blow: ^ - The carat (shift-6) says "this is the beginning of the line". Without it, it would find all words like "fundamentals". $ - The dollar sign ...
More About: Games , Cheating , Word , Commands

If Linux Isn't Successful, Why Is Everybody Talking About It?
2007-09-22 08:49:00
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/ archives/2007/09/why_linux_is_al.html Today is a banner day, because I'm doing something I don't often do: Linking to and agreeing with Information Week. The title of the piece (link in title) is actually "Why Linux Is Already A Success", echoing a sentiment I've expressed many times, that Linux does not need to replace Microsoft. I especially like Yegulalp's movie analogy: there are movies that are successful because they made a pile of money, and then there are movies that touched hearts. Honestly, every time I read somebody ranting about "Linux needs to do this, Linux needs to do that..." I always think, "Who asked you to draw up an agenda?" Linux may not make a pile of money... but it touches hearts. GNU/Linux is, when all said and done, a lovable operating system. It is democratic computing, the rebel spirit, the perfection of doing things right instead of "close enough" to fool Joe Sixpack into buying it. Regardless of whether L...
More About: General , Talking , Everybody

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