New Linux User

Make Your Own Tux Plushie

Clair Ching — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:21:08 +0000

I’ve been learning how to sew with a sewing machine and it’s been difficult sewing in curves. However, I really want to make a lot of things and that includes a penguin plushie. Fortunately there are patterns thanks to the Free Penguin Project.

I have a couple of penguin plushies but they were mostly given to me by my friends. When I learn how to make one, I hope I could replicate it and give them to other people. I was thinking that it will be awesome if I finish some and give them to the children of my co-workers. Yes, introduce Tux to their kids early enough is the plan.
The finished projects of those who have downloaded and modded the patterns are awesome. Some of the interesting things I saw:

inflatable line laundry Tux
Tux made from from fleece
Txulhu - a Cthulhu Tux!
Love Dilbert? Meet Tuxbert!
Captain Tux! Yaarrr!

If I will make some for children I should make sure that the materials I will use are kid-friendly. The project team is really awesome for coming up with this. If you want to make pins, there are also images that you could use for it.

Post from: New Linux User

Test Posting from Tomboy

Clair Ching — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:54:29 +0000

I've tried posting a note on my personal/crafting blog using Tomboy already. But not yet on this blog. It's interesting because I am used to Drivel, where I have to do the mark-up myself. In Tomboy, it's like I am using a rich text editor or something. Lists will be easier to make, same thing goes for other formatting needs.

Things that will be easy using Tomboy as a blogging client:

Using bullet points.
Putting links.
All basic mark-up related tasks and editing.
Having a better idea of what the post will look like, more or less, at least in terms of the styles of the fonts, etc.
Copying and pasting information from other notes. Tomboy has a search function I could use for that.

What are difficult things to do with Tomboy as a blogging client:

Embedding videos and images. At least not now. I have yet to test it and see for myself if there's actually a way.
Tagging blog entries.
Assigning categories.

It's going to be tricky but for text-heavy posts, Tomboy seems to work fine. I guess that for quick notes that I want to publish right away, Tomboy could be the tool to do just that.

Post from: New Linux User

Having Problems Viewing Videos on Firefox?

Clair Ching — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:36:40 +0000

I never really had troubles viewing videos but for those of you who might have been having issues, then this blog entry about How to Fix Full Screen Flash Videos in Linux and Firefox will help you. They’ve written a guide for all of us who are/might be afflicted with this problem.

In summary, they said that you need to get libGL.so.1 and preload it before starting Firefox (or Swiftfox). Basically you will do this by writing a script to do it. You have to make the script executable or it won’t work.

I don’t have much trouble but maybe that’s because I use clive to get videos from YouTube. In any case, check it out if you need to fix watching videos in Flash format.

Post from: New Linux User

Using Tomboy as a Blogging Client

Clair Ching — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:44:41 +0000

We know Tomboy is this awesome sticky notes application which basically also acts like a wiki. We also know that we could organize lots of notes through ‘notebooks’ but I just learned recently that you could actually use it as a blogging client. Surprised? Good. Now let me show you how.

Download and installation
Download and install the Tomboy Blogposter plugin written by Robin Sonefors. For those on Ubuntu, you will find it in the repositories. Else, download the tarball or get it from Github.

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

What to do next

Activate the plugin. Run Tomboy and from the “Search all notes” dialog, go to the Edit menu and select “Preferences.”
In the “Preferences” dialog, select the “Add-ins” tab and you will see “Post note to your blog” listed under “Tools.” Click the “Enable” button while it is highlighted.
After enabling the blogging plugin, you have to add the URLs of your blog/s. There are various URLs depending on the blogging platform you are using.
- WordPress - /wp-app.php/posts ; make sure that the option for Atom Publishing must be enabled.
- Blogger - View the source of your Blogger blog. Then check the address in the tag that has the rel attribute set to service.post. Therefore, it follows the template http://www.blogger.com/feeds//posts/default.
- LiveJournal - http://www.livejournal.com/interface/atomapi//post
Start writing a new note. When you’re done, go to the “Tools” menu of that note then select the option to post it on the blog URL you’ve saved.

It’s really awesome when you finally get to try it. The note’s title is automatically the title of your blog entry. From there it will be easy for you to just upload any note you want to share with anyone.

Have fun!

Post from: New Linux User

Make Concept Maps, Etc. with Xmind

Clair Ching — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:44:09 +0000

At work, we often look for the best tools that will help us deal with the information we have to analyze. Sometimes we have brainstorming meetings that make things either confusing or clearer. Either way we get tons of information that we have to process and sometimes we need concept maps and mindmaps to make it better.

Enter, Xmind, a collaboration tool and mind mapping software. It has different templates that will help you analyze and/or present information better. The interesting thing about this tool is that there is Xmind for Eclipse users so the software developers I work with can easily view it on their favorite IDE.

Xmind. Image Credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Xmind lets you create a topic and its subtopics. You usually start with a new page with a new topic and then when you right click it, you will find the various options available for you like adding subtopics and other topics. You could even add new notes to the items you’ve written already.

Xmind’s workspace is reminiscent of Eclipse. It has panels that help you with defining its properties, as well as view the outline you’ve created. For the properties, you could define the background color for the entire map. You could also define the colors of the rounded rectangle. You could change the font face you are using too.

Another nifty thing about Xmind is that there are a lot of markers that help you point out which are pending tasks, done, or should be flagged. You could even add smileys to the items on your mindmap. This would make it more graphical and help you remember better or would help you communicate your topics better to your colleagues and/or friends.

There are free downloads which are available as a plugin for Eclipse, installer on Ubuntu or portable version that does not require you to install it.

Post from: New Linux User

Pencil as a Mock-up Creation Tool

Clair Ching — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:58:21 +0000

Designing mock-ups of your applications could be tricky sometimes especially if you just want quickly drawn wireframes of the screens. I personally don’t want to use GIMP for that because it seems to complicated to use for such a task. Thankfully there is a tool you could install on Firefox called Pencil. (View more about it on the homepage of Pencil.)

Once you have installed Pencil, you should restart Firefox and then look for it under the Tools menu of Firefox. It will open a new window with a new page waiting to be ‘drawn upon’ with a mock-up screen. On the left side is a pane with the shapes you could use.

Common shapes such as rectangles, lines, text areas.
Annotation for your comments. Balloons, arrows, etc. make it easier for you to write your own comments fast.
GTK widgets help you come up with mock-up screens of GTK-based apps.
Windows widgets help you make design for the Windows user interface.

A sample mock-up screen. Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

One of the nice things about using Pencil is that you could put the shapes one on top of the other if needed. You could just drag shapes from the panel and drop them in to the space for the page. It is also nice that you could resize and rotate those shapes. Resizing is done by clicking it and you will notice the points around the shape become blue. Then, move your mouse pointer to stretch it in the proportion of your choice. If you will rotate the shape, click the shape until the points around the shape are red. Then start moving it in the direction of your choice.

You could create a new page with a button click on the “New Page” button. You could specify the size of your ‘canvass’ It’s up to you how you pick the size of the screen. As long as your team knows it’s what your designing for then well and good.

Creating a new page on Pencil. Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Whatever you make with Pencil is something you could export as an image file so you could use it for presentations, etc. if you need them.

Post from: New Linux User

More Twitter Desktop Clients for Linux

Clair Ching — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:05:03 +0000

Thanks to Tech Source From Bohol, I learned more Twitter Desktop Clients for Linux. I don’t use Twitter as often as I used to but it’s nifty to have a Linux desktop client when you’re always following people. The clients I learned about today:

Tweetdeck

Interestingly enough this seems to have a lot of nifty features. One of them is creating groups of people to follow, manage conversations with @ replies and direct messages, manage multiple Twitter accounts, view photo thumbnails from Tweetdeck, avoiding Twitter spam via the Spam button.
Twhirl

This runs on Adobe Air. You could find it easier to use this to connect to your Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts plus cross-post your updates via ping.fm to boot. This also allows searching of tweets via Twitter Search and Tweet Scan.
Choqok

Choqok is the KDE microblogging client and it currently supports laconi.ca and twitter. It supports multiple accounts too. One nice thing for those who prefer keyboard shortcuts to launch this: Ctrl + Meta + T does the trick.

I’m more of a GNOME user so I might have not been posting much KDE apps here but I am glad that this blog entry pointed out one KDE app for Twitter. I wouldn’t know about it if not for this. It seems that Choqok is still relatively new so it looks like interesting to follow if you’re a KDE user.
May you find a good Twitter client for you to use!

Post from: New Linux User

Asus: No More Linux?!

Clair Ching — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:31:03 +0000

Asus was practically the first to popularize netbooks with Linux on them back in late 2007. However, times have changed. It seems as though Asus really has turned its back on Linux. Why? It’s because the people preferred Windows XP. That is why there aren’t many machines with Linux.

They said that it was a business decision to lessen the models with Linux on their netbooks. Other manufacturers like HP and Dell were said to have triggered the change. The Asus notebooks with smaller hard drives paled in comparison thus losing marketshare. I hope that they won’t totally eradicate Linux. After all, they have helped create a community around their EEE PC and they have created ways for us netbook users to use Linux without much trouble.

Sad to say decisions like that are based on business and income. It’s not a matter of advocacy. I’d like to hope that there will be companies that will really have their decisions considering the principles of free and open source software.

Post from: New Linux User

Sharing to Those Want to Know

Clair Ching — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:08:48 +0000

Carla Schroder’s blog entry today about changing the world one penguin at a time gave me a different perspective on advocacy. It’s not the same as what I’d normally encounter. I’d usually encounter people saying “Let’s introduce Linux to one and all.” But she has a different perspective: Introduce Linux to those who are actually interested. In her words:

In other words, don’t waste your time on people who are not receptive. Using a well-set up computer isn’t very hard for even the greenest Linux greenpea, despite all the propaganda and FUD to the contrary. But no matter how easy it is, there will always be people who have mental blocks against even trying, so don’t waste your time.

I might have been thinking in terms of “the world must know what Linux is” and so I take into consideration how to introduce it even to people who are not very receptive. I guess it’s because a lot of the people I have around me know Linux already but they are still thinking about it differently, that it won’t work and that it’s scary. Closed minds will find it difficult to accept what Linux could do for them and what they could do for Linux as well. So yes, she’s got a point when it comes to advocating Linux.

However, I personally think that it’s still best to be prepared to tell others about Linux no matter the level of interest they have, as long as the opportunity is there. It’s just that it will not be as effective compared to those who want to know more in the first place.

Post from: New Linux User

IGEL Releases Firmware to Boost Power Management, Virtualization

Clair Ching — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:53:29 +0000

Some of you might not be familiar with thin clients because you don’t use them at home. For the enterprise, there are thin clients that are mainly for input and output and rely on servers for content, software, etc. One of their suppliers is IGEL Technology. This company has launched their “Linux Universal Desktop firmware” and this adds features in power management, multimedia and virtualization.

What’s the benefit of using their firmware?

Power saving
It allows them to have the IGEL thin clients go into standby mode and back on in seconds. This means that it won’t take long for them to boot up their thin clients. This would even increase the savings in power usage + time.
If your company is using IGEL’s thin client lines such as IGEL one, UD2 and UD3, this firmware makes them in line with the upcoming Energy Star certification for thin clients.
Virtualization
Virtualization becomes better with this firmware. There is a way for IGEL thin client users to have support for multimedia acceleration as well as USB redirection.

If you’ve got IGEL thin clients in your office, check out igel.com and see what’s in store for you. It’s free to download if you are already using them

Post from: New Linux User