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Using ZimWiki to Write Your Masterpiece

Clair Ching — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:59:50 +0000

Or soon to be great literary work, that is. ; ) Some of us might be aspiring to become writers of best selling novels or maybe screenplays or 1 act plays, etc. For that we need some tools that help us get our masterpiece out of our heads and somewhere online.

It so happens that in this case I will suggest a tool which could be easily available to you without proprietary licenses and agreements that might surprise you. Why? This is something that is most likely to be available in the repository of the Linux distro you’re using. I am talking about Zim Wiki.

image credit: taylorschlades via morguefile

Zim Wiki is, well, a wiki. You could easily create new pages as well as manage your tasks. There are also formatting options you could choose from in terms of content. Well, if you really need other kinds of formatting like italics, etc., then there are basic options available for you.

So how do I suggest for you to use Zim Wiki as your tool in managing your masterpiece’s files?

Install Zim Wiki. But of course!
Create a directory that you intend to use for the files which are related to your masterpiece. You will use this information later.
Run Zim Wiki. Create a new notebook. If you want this to be the default notebook (in case you want to be truly focused on this) then select it to be such. Otherwise, don’t select it and don’t set it to be the default.
Define your main page or starting point. I find it easier when there’s one.
On your starting page, write down an outline of the sections you’d need for your masterpiece. In my case, if ever I’d make a novel, I’d list down what I need in an outline. Then make a section in your starting page that would contain chapters.
In your outline, make those list items as links. Why make them links? So that they become pages that you could edit later on. You could make them into links as you decide to create their pages.
Start writing! Fill out those pages!

Zim Wiki has a spellcheck plugin and if you select it to be on, it will check for your spelling mistakes as you write your story. Another good thing with Zim Wiki is that you could export it later as HTML files, in case you want them to be published. How nifty is that?

If you’ve got some things you want to try out with Zim Wiki, go ahead and have fun! : )

Post from: New Linux User

Projects to Make with a Linux Desktop

Clair Ching — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:04:41 +0000

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?

Wilber is GIMP's mascot

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! : )

Post from: New Linux User

Linux From Scratch

Clair Ching — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:40:57 +0000

Why would anyone bother with making Linux from scratch? With all these distros with almost everything you need, people still choose to build Linux from source. There are people who say that they get a more optimized system that way. Others want it because of the control that they have over the system. I know of one person who built Linux from scratch and it took him a long time to do so and if I recall correctly he couldn’t really use his computer for a week because he did something wrong and it was his problem at the time.

Looking at the Linux From Scratch website, these are the benefits of installing it from scratch:

You understand Linux better because you learn about the ins and outs of the system.
You get a more compact system.
It is a more flexible system because you can do anything with it.
You could make your system more secure.

I am personally overwhelmed by what’s in the LFS wiki but it looks like that the wiki is very detailed so you should be able to follow what’s written there. But still, I suppose that Linux from scratch is more for the experienced Linux users who want to dig deeper into operating system or if they really want a very customized Linux for their personal use.

One day if you have this itch to start on this project, you might want to start reading about it now and prepare really well. Also you might want to check it out too so that you could decide if it’s what you want to do or if you’d stick with one of the distros.

Edit: The url was wrong so I changed it so that it will point to linuxfromscratch.org

Post from: New Linux User