Projects to Make with a Linux Desktop

Ok, so there are seven interesting projects to check out, as mentioned by the Tux Radar blog. Not just one! But seven! Goodness, gracious. How does one give so much time to all these projects?

Anyway, in that list of seven projects, two of them caught my eye. First involves you writing a text-based interactive game. You can use the tool Gnome-Inform7 for this. It’s basically an application that lets you create your world and describe it. You could code your game just by writing it all in plain English. Who says you can’t create a game in English? Who says you must code it in the a computer language? ; ) If you like playing text based interactive games this looks like it has potential. This tool actually also has extensions that you could use. If you’ve got conversations you might want to check out this page.

As for the the other cool project I am interested in is the one that lets you animate your drawings in GIMP. It’s you making simple animation on GIMP. Neat huh? The article gives you a very basic idea on how basic animation could be done in GIMP and save them as GIF files. The idea is that you will have layers of drawings that will let you manipulate them. Basically your animation will be shown by each layer working together to create the effect. There is also a warning on this article on what the GIF plugin of GIMP can do. (Hooray for screenshots!)

One thing I could probably add here is a novel using a wiki, not a text editor or word processor. Why do I suggest a wiki? It’s because it’s easier to divide content into chapters. And you could easily edit small chunks of text. And if ever you’re already contented with what you wrote you could just upload it on your server. Especially if you will use Zim Wiki. It is possible to publish pages in HTML format. That will be really cool, don’t you think? And it’s the National Novel Writing Month before you know it. So you might as well consider a wiki as one of your tools. (I use Tomboy and Emacs Planner often enough but lately Zim Wiki seems to be showing me that it’s very useful. ; ) So please check that out too.)

Good luck if you’re going to try any of these mentioned projects. Have fun! : )