1. Welcome From The Chief Editor

2. Happy 10th Birthday, PCLinuxOS!

3. LibreOffice Tips & Tricks, Part 4

4. Get A New HD Wallpaper From Bing Every Day

5. PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: Bald Brick

6. PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner

7. ms_meme's Nook: PCLOS Is The Finest In The Land

8. Xfce Power User Tips, Tricks & Tweaks: Miscellaneous

9. GIMP Tutorial: Tree Silhouette In Sunset, Part 1

10. How To Kill A Zombie

11. LXDE 2013 With A Full Openbox Menu

12. Installing A Web Server: XAMPP vs task-lamp

13. Personalize Chrome With My Chrome Theme

14. Game Zone: Forced

15. A Lesson: Why It's Important To Learn The Command Line

16. PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions

17. Screenshot Showcase

Welcome From The Chief Editor

With the exception of that which is running in VirtualBox, my home is a "Windows-free" zone. As much as I wish I didn't have to run Windows in a virtual machine, that is not reality. Thanks to the shortsightedness of many software vendors, I (like many other Linux users) must keep a copy of Windows around, regardless of how much I think/know that it stinks.

For example, most of the income tax software to file your income taxes runs only on Windows or OS-X. Sure, there are some free, web-based income tax software tools around, but their abilities often fall short of meeting the needs of all but those users filing the simplest of returns. As a result, running a Windows income tax filing software bundle is often the only choice.

Why am I picking on income tax filing software vendors? September and October typically are the months when those software vendors ramp up their promotional e-mailings, with offers of discounted prices to "early bird" purchasers. Sometimes, their offers allow customers to buy or reserve a copy of the software at last year's prices, before price hikes occur. So, as you might imagine, my email inbox has seen a steady increase in promotional emails from these companies.

What I cannot understand is why software vendors would willingly limit their market to Windows users only. It seems to me that it would (or should) be a simple task to create software that is capable of running on all platforms - and not just one that is losing market share every year. Meanwhile, Linux's market share continues to grow year after year. Some surveys estimate that Linux's market share is higher now than OS-X's market share. You would think that software vendors would jump on being the first to tap into a previously untapped market.

Perhaps when Windows market share has dropped to a hidden "critical level," we'll see these software vendors support cross platform solutions. Java and Python immediately come to mind as cross platform solutions, although the former has been plagued by security issues for what seems like forever. PHP also seems like a viable solution, allowing users to run income tax software in their favorite web browser.

So, I keep a copy of Windows around in VirtualBox, ready to run the software for which there really isn't any alternative. I can remember six and seven years ago, when I switched to using Linux. Back then, I would only set up my Linux installations as a dual boot with Windows XP. Unfamiliar with the Linux landscape back then, I was afraid of not being able to run my favorite Windows programs that I had come to depend on. It was all I knew, and Linux (at that time) was the unknown. What I failed to consider or focus on was the tasks that I was needing to do on the computer. Focusing on the programs left me blinded to finding alternatives to get those tasks completed.

Eventually, as I became more and more accustomed to Linux, I found alternatives for every Windows program I used to use - except for income tax filing software. As time went on, I found myself booting into Windows XP less and less, with months often elapsing between Windows logins.

I eventually eliminated my dual boot installations, and reclaimed the "wasted space" that was formerly consumed by Windows. Instead, I migrated to running Windows XP (and more recently Windows 7) in VirtualBox. About the only thing that I regularly use my Windows virtual machine installations for is - if you can't guess - running income tax filing software. The bonus is that Windows now runs better in VirtualBox than it ever did when it was a bare metal installation.

It's rare that I even boot into my VirtualBox copies of Windows. Linux, and particularly PCLinuxOS, has fully replaced Windows as my daily operating system. For me, the only "holdout" is the income tax filing software. Other users may have other Windows-only programs that they cannot live without, and that don't have a suitable substitute for under Linux.

Running PCLinuxOS, and then Windows in VirtualBox, provides me a perfect solution. I get the security and stability of PCLinuxOS for meeting all of my other computing needs, and I still get to run those few Windows-only programs when I need them (although, that need has dwindled to only one case).

Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity.

Happy 10th Birthday, PCLinuxOS!

On October 24, 2003, PCLinuxOS Preview .4 was released as a fork of Linux Mandrake (Mandriva) 9.2...

And so it began, 10 years ago this month. Since that time, PCLinuxOS has matured into its own independent Linux distribution. Just uttering the all-still-too-common line that PCLinuxOS is still a fork of Mandriva may cause sparks to fly. While PCLinuxOS may have been originally forked from Mandriva, it also borrows from openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mepis, Debian, Slackware, Arch and just about any/every other Linux distro around.

What's even more amazing is that PCLinuxOS continues to thrive, without the backing of multimillionaires and billionaires funneling cash into its coffers, and without the backing of any corporation. PCLinuxOS truly is a community Linux distribution, with virtually all of the funds to keep it going coming from donations of its users, either monetarily or by the donation of services.

To commemorate the 10 years since the "birth" of PCLinuxOS, below is a reprint of part of an article we ran last December, as part of the Windows Migration series of articles. I doubt that experienced PCLinuxOS users ever tire of hearing this story. Without a doubt, new PCLinuxOS users will want to familiarize themselves with the tale of PCLinuxOS's origins.

What Is PCLinuxOS?

PCLinuxOS is a Linux distro, just like Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Mepis, Knoppix, Debian, Slackware, Arch and about 600 others. Probably the best way to describe PCLinuxOS is to provide a brief history from the founder of PCLinuxOS, Texstar -- a.k.a. Bill Reynolds (pictured below).

In the summer of 2003, I became interested in Live CD technology after looking at Knoppix and a fresh distribution from a fellow named Warren, called Mepis. I was interested in helping Warren with Mepis at the time, but I had no clue how to build DEB files. Coming from 5 years of packaging RPMS and not really wanting to learn a new packaging system, I happened to come across a South African fellow by the name of Jaco Greef. He was developing a script called mklivecd and porting it to Mandrake Linux. I, along with Buchanan Milne (Mandrake contributor) and a few others, began working with Jaco to help debug the scripts. I got an idea to make a livecd based on Mandrake Linux 9.2, along with all my customizations, just for fun. I had previously provided an unofficial 3rd party repository for the users of Mandrake for many years, but had since parted ways. Since Mandrake was a trademarked name, myself and others decided to name the Live CD after our news site and forum, pclinuxonline, thus PCLinuxOS.

Preview .3 was my first attempt to make a livecd. I distributed it initially to about 20 people to get their reaction and feedback. Everyone who tested it loved the livecd but there was one thing missing. There wasn't a way to install the thing to the hard drive! srlinuxx from tuxmachines.org came up with a novel way to copy the livecd to the hard drive and posted it on our forums. Jaco utilized this information and inspiration from the Mepis installer and wrote a pyqt script to make the Live CD installable, thus the birth of a new distribution.

On October 24, 2003, PCLinuxOS Preview .4 was released as a fork of Linux Mandrake (Mandriva) 9.2 utilizing mklivecd scripts from Jaco Greef, a multimedia kernel from Thomas Buckland (2.4.22-tmb) and a customized KDE (3.1.4-tex). Preview .5 through .93 were built upon on previous PCLinuxOS releases. After three years of updating one release from the other using the same gcc and glibc core library, we found too many programs would no longer compile or work properly against this aging code base.

In November 2006, we utilized a one time source code snapshot from our friends at Mandriva to pull in an updated glibc/gcc core and associated libraries. We spent the following 6 months rebuilding, debugging, customizing, patching and updating our new code base. We pulled in stuff from our old code base, utilized patches/code from Fedora, Gentoo and Debian just to name a few. This is why you will never see me distro bashing, as it would be hypocritical to do such a thing. We are still dependent in many areas on other distros development processes due to our limited but hard working volunteer development team.

On May 20th, 2007, we felt we had reached a pretty stable base and released PCLinuxOS 2007. It utilized our own kernel from Oclient1, KDE built by MDE developer Ze, updated mklivecd scripts from IKerekes & Ejtr, a heavily patched Control Center, graphics from the PCLinuxOS beautification team, and many application updates from Thac and Neverstopdreaming. Development continues as work is being done for a Minime release and an international DVD. A future release of PCLinuxOS will feature an updated kernel, KDE 4, fresh Xorg server and all the latest applications. All in all it has been a great ride and we have made many friends along the way. Some have gone on to other distributions and many are still here from our first release. As I've always said, we're just enjoying Linux technology and sharing it with friends who might like it too. We hope you have enjoyed the ride as well.

While the above was written a few years ago, PCLinuxOS has continued to thrive and evolve. Shortly thereafter, MiniMe was released. MiniMe represented a barebones KDE installation, with little else than the bare desktop and core Linux OS files. Designed for more advanced users, MiniMe allows users to install only those applications that they want. Even though this distro uses the "rolling release" update method, new Live CDs were released every year (and recently, even more often) so a user wouldn't have to download a huge number of updates after installing to make sure they had the most up-to-date system available.

In 2009, several developers left PCLinuxOS to start their own distro. While this happens in many other distros, PCLinuxOS hasn't suffered from it, and is still one of the top distros. In the wake of their departure, others stepped up to fill the vacated developer roles. Several other users stepped up to create the various "flavors" of PCLinuxOS. Today, there several "flavors" of PCLinuxOS available to users, each presenting PCLinuxOS a choice of which desktop environment to use.

To this day, the KDE desktop is still employed in the "main" PCLinuxOS release. However, all of the other desktop versions utilize the exact same Linux core, as well as the same repositories.

Following the rolling release design, improvements are always being made, and things evolve. First Texstar, followed by the PCLinuxOS development team, expanded their focus a bit, and a much-wished-for 64-bit edition of PCLinuxOS has recently been offered. Requiring a rebuild of all of the applications in the repos, the 64-bit repo now has over 8,700 of the 12,000+ applications in the PCLinuxOS 32-bit repo.

Birthday Wishes From PCLinuxOS Users

I've invited some veteran PCLinuxOS users to express their "birthday wishes" for PCLinuxOS's 10th anniversary. The well wishes are presented in the order in which I received them, via email. I'll start it off.

I've been a PCLinuxOS user since PCLinuxOS .93, a.k.a. PCLinuxOS 2007. Prior to arriving to the PCLinuxOS community, I was a brief (very brief -- only about six months) Ubuntu and Kubuntu user. The unstable nature of those two pushed me to look around for something that worked better on my then aging hardware. After trying a few distros, I stumbled across PCLinuxOS. Not only was all of my hardware recognized and properly configured, but I found a stability that had previously been lacking. As a bonus, I also discovered a community that is second to none.

Thank you, Texstar, and all of the other developers, for creating the best Linux distro around. Happy 10th anniversary, and I hope and pray that there are many, many more years of PCLinuxOS.

-- Paul Arnote (parnote), The PCLinuxOS Magazine Chief Editor

I've been using Linux for only 3 years now and 2 of them have been with PCLinuxOS. I'm happy I've found this distro but at the same time regret for not having the chance to do this earlier.

This little miracle has changed my computer life. I've finally found peace of mind and I've been running trouble-free all this time. I don't have to worry again about viruses, trojans. updates that last forever and mess up the system every time, formatting my hard drive every now and then, long boot and loading times, privacy and security issues, to name just a few.

First of all, I want to say a big THANK YOU to all the people responsible for PCLinuxOS. They're just a small team with no funds or unlimited resources that work hard to provide a rock-solid operating system for all of us.

Second I want to wish PCLinuxOS a Happy Birthday with all my heart. May it live for many more years and provide us with all the greatness that can be found nowhere else. PCLinuxOS, forever and ever!

-- Antonis Komis (agmg)

Wowee PCLinuxOS you are now 10. =-O You are getting quite grown up. :-)

Happy Birthday to our favourite (or favorite) OS. I have been privileged to use PCLinuxOS since 2007. A fellow Kiwi sent me a copy of 0.93 to try out. I have been using it almost exclusively since.

-- Jim Wilkinson (aka jimwilk), New Zealand

How does one give birthday greetings

And make it special in every way

How does one send birthday wishes

With something new and original to say

How does one express the best to Tex

And in a different style display

The special things about PCLinuxOS

That we love and use each day

I do not have the answer

No fresh verses to convey

So rewind my old birthday messages

And press the button that says REPLAY

-- ms_meme

Bueno Paul, como se que me entiende le voy a contestar en español.

Hace ya 10 años? Increíble!!!, parece el otro día cuando empece mi relación de amor y enfado con Pclos, al igual que con cualquier relación, existen momentos buenos y momentos malos, pero francamente han sido mas los momentos buenos que los malos.

Yo me considero un "Pclos-user", así pues, espero que PCLinuxOS, siga en mi vida como mínimo otros 10 años mas, eso si me gustaría que hubiera un pequeño cambio con respecto al escritorio que uso.

Gracias Pclos, por sus 10 años de trabajo y ilusión, en verdad y con el corazón en la mano les deseo feliz cumpleaños y que cumplan muchos mas.

El mundo Linux, sin Pclos, no seria lo mismo, mil gracias.

-- Agust (Pclos user desde 2005)

Bacon Apple Pie

Happy Birthday, PClinuxOS!

One of the "most fond memories" I have as a member was the night we had "Zombies."

I forget what year it was, but I was logged on late at night when they attacked. I was probably one of the first to see them.

A lot of people got upset about that and the Zombies have not been back but... a TOAST to the Zombie attack. A stroke of genius if you ask me.

-- Rudge

I have been using PCLinuxOS since the release of Preview .4. Thanks Texstar, with such limited resources, a masterpiece has grown during the past 10 years. Here's to looking forward to many more years of the best of PCLinuxOS!

-- David Moore (YouCanToo), Oregon

Happy 10th Birthday, PCLinuxOS!

I have been using PCLinuxOS since 2006, starting with release .92. I tried Ubuntu (because my brother uses it), but I found I was much more comfortable with PCLinuxOS, and it worked perfectly for me, so I've been here ever since! I've found a wonderful second family, and continue to be amazed at the helpfulness of the forum members.

Thanks so much, Texstar, for making such a great distro!

-- Pam, aka Meemaw, PCLinuxOS Magazine Assistant Editor

I really don't remember the first time that I heard of the Linux operating system. It was probably around 1993, whilst I was using MS-DOS 3 point something or other and an early version of MS-Windows.

Then one day, I got hold of a set of installation disks for Red Hat Linux and installed it. The experience was not a good one. The installation took several attempts, but eventually I had a Linux system installed, and I set about exploring my new world.

Although I could see that the command line was far superior to MS-DOS, the graphical interfaces available at the time were disappointing, and not really usable in a production environment. Network support (actually all hardware support) was, at best, very poor.

Microsoft Windows had Win3.1, and then Windows 98 graphical user interfaces, running on top of MS-DOS, which were far superior -- and usable.

But Linux was an operating system based on Unix, the core OS since the early '70s and so it had potential if it could be developed. My interest was aroused and I kept returning, trying different distributions, as they became known, and finding them to be more and more usable but still missing the mark for every day adoption.

That is until sometime around 2007, when I stumbled upon a Linux distribution called PCLinuxOS. A relatively new distribution with its origins in Mandrake Linux (which I had found to be very promising but...).

I installed the system and almost everything worked. The KDE desktop was (almost) as good as the MS offerings. I was ready to move to Linux, and with PCLinuxOS, which although still a relatively new player on the field, I felt reassured and confident with.

Using PCLinuxOS 64bit KDE today, I find it hard to believe that this distribution is only now coming up to its tenth anniversary. PCLinuxOS has matured and developed, year on year, to be a real challenge to some of the other, better funded, distributions that stand at the head of lists, such as Distrowatch.

To PCLinuxOS, Texstar and the rest of the developers,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PCLINUXOS!

I wonder what the next 10 years will bring.

-- Peter Kelly, a.k.a. critter

Chocolate & Bacon Cake

I can remember the moment I hit on Linux and, specifically, PCLinuxOS. It was the late 1990's. I was running Windows 98. I don't know how it happened or what I was doing, but my computer just went into fits, starts and stops. The Blue Screen of Death had reared its ugly head. I called Windows support and, rather than charge me for the time and trouble of fixing my system, they walked me through troubleshooting and editing of the registry. This took place each evening over a two week period. I always scratched my head about not being charged. It suddenly dawned on me that the problem was probably widespread and M$ was keeping it quiet by simply fixing it "under the table."

After that nightmare, I decided I had had enough. I started looking around for Linux distros. I tried them all. I liked Mandriva (at the time called Mandrake) and settled in there. But the community support wasn't as accessible as other distros. Well, this lead me to search for distros forked from Mandriva. Distro bouncing around for several months finally brought me to PCLinuxOS. It was easy to download, easy to install (One mouse click! Wow!), and the community was right there to help. The PCLinuxOS community didn't care if you were a programmer, web designer, carpenter, plumber, homemaker, or like me, a cartoonist. They wanted you to have the best Linux experience with what they believed to be the best Linux distro out there. And I believe PCLinuxOS to the best, too!

And a really terrific thing happened. Encouraged by the PCLinuxOS community, I was able to contribute and give back in my own way. I found myself offering help on the forums to minor issues that I had solved (through the aid of others). I wrote articles and submitted cartoons to this magazine. And I tried my hand at the Konsole learning, little by little, its commands and intricacies (I'm still learning this.)

All these years later, I now run PCLinuxOS on two desktop PCs and a notebook computer. I also installed PCLinuxOS on an older laptop and desktop system for my brother Tom. (He loves it! No more BSOD!)

So, Happy Birthday, PCLinuxOS! Thank you so much for so many great years of stable, secure, rock solid computing! Your stability has kept my computers up and running and online, your community has been a great teacher, and your repository (with GIMP, Scribus, LibreOfffice, and other top notch graphics tools) has allowed my creativity to soar!

-- Mark Szorady, a.k.a georgetoon

So... PCLinuxOS is ten years old? Congratulations, folks, for making it happen for this long! A Linux distribution doesn't survive for long on air and empty promises -- it either delivers or it withers. PCLinuxOS has consistently delivered, even through some of the more tumultuous times in its recent history.

I first came to PCLinuxOS back when 2007 was current, in March, I think. It took several months later for me to get involved in the community, and, when I did, I wanted to kick myself hard for not joining sooner. The reason? PCLinuxOS is the vibrant, multi-faceted jewel it is because of the efforts of its people. No other distribution I've seen has a community anything like this one. Developers, packagers, folks compiling documentation, all the folks on the forums sharing knowledge, and just laughing and crying together. It feels like family.

One of the basic ethics of the distribution is echoed in the slogan I first saw with PCLinuxOS 2007: Radically Simple. It's not about making things complicated -- it's about making things that work "out of the box" and are truly usable and useful. Even now, after all these years, it still rings true. I've seen some who turn this meme on its head and write it as Simply Radical, and there's a grain of truth in that attitude, too. The community has a tendency to think in edgy, innovative, and sometimes disruptive ways that keep the distro fresh and keep it moving forward with the times, and that's a good thing.

Through all the changes that came with the introduction of KDE4, newer kernels, and through all the changes that keep happening in the Linux community in general, PCLinuxOS has stood out as a leader on the desktop. The community has sometimes had periods where we disagreed on the best way forward, and where many of us (including me!) had to learn new ways of doing things as desktop environments changed and became more complex, but, at core, PCLinuxOS has survived, evolved, and grown into the distribution it is today, continually reflecting that basic ethic of radical simplicity.

So... ten years on, it looks like PCLinuxOS is still true to its founding principles, still one of the most usable, powerful, stable, and useful operating systems out there for desktop use. Happy Birthday, PCLinuxOS, and here's to many more!

-- horusfalcon

Bacon & Corn Griddle Cakes

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PCLINUXOS !!!!

10 Years. A very long time. Well, in Earth years.

I wonder, Mr. Reynolds, if you had any idea what your creation would become?

We of Antares intercepted your first version 10 years ago, and we were impressed. I myself was made aware in July of 2009. I have never looked back.

There are times I reflect back on what my life was like Pre-P ( My description of Pre-PCLinuxOS ). Not a pretty picture. Constant problems to even go through a day not having some issue with Windows.

With "Now-P", I just use my computer. I don't worry about anything. It has been ages since even the smallest problem with "OUR" OS. Anything that has gone wrong, was my fault. Hasn't even been much of that.

TEX you are a Giant among Giants.

I respect you. I thank you. All your hard work has payed off.

10 Years. Yes a very long time. I have socks older than that. Oh yes, sometimes I wear socks.

PCLinuxOS. Has kind of a ring to it. I am proud to be a user of this OS.

Now, when I am asked how I handle a Windows problem? Oh, I say, that is an easy fix. My answer is: I USE PCLinuxOS. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

May you live long and prosper!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PCLinuxOS !!!!

--- joechimp

LibreOffice Tips & Tricks, Part 4

by Meemaw

I hope you are finding a few tricks to make your work easier! In this installment of our series, we will look at a few tricks in LibreOffice Impress.

Master Pages

As you know, when you open LO Impress, you are met with basically a 'blank canvas" which includes one page. You have to add the pages, and design them to your liking. The designs include the background you can use and also the layout of each slide. The Slides area on the left shows each of the slides you have added. If you have designed a slide already, you will see a thumbnail of it at left. If not, the thumbnail will be blank. Many Master Pages (backgrounds) and layouts exist for your use, and more backgrounds can be downloaded from the LibreOffice Extensions site. You can also design your own backgrounds and layouts. If you have a graphic you want to use, simply insert it on a blank sheet and save that sheet as a template, that is, click File > Save As Template...., and give it an appropriate name. I used the farm scene below for a presentation I did. Don't forget to copy it to your LO config folder so it will show up in LOImpress next time you open it. In my Xfce install, it is ~/.config/ libreoffice/4/user/template/Presentation Backgrounds/ although all the templates are installed to /opt/libreoffice4.1/share/template/common/layout/ so you could copy it to either place. A better alternative is to import it into LOImpress from wherever you saved it. In fact, my farm scene didn't show up until after I imported it into the templates by clicking File > New > Templates, clicking the Import button and choosing my new creation.

Most of the time you will choose a background (Master Page) and put it on every slide in order to make your presentation look uniform. Some presentations need something different. It IS possible to choose a background for each slide. When choosing the background, you can right-click on it and choose 'Apply to All Slides" or 'Apply to Selected Slides", as you wish. If I did that, I would at least choose similar backgrounds rather than one red, one green and one blue as I have above. One idea I might suggest is to use a pre-made background for the title page, and a simplified version of the same one for the following pages. That way you would have some variety, but everything would be more uniform.

Hide a Slide

Suppose you create a presentation for two different groups, but it contains financial information that one group doesn't need to see. Rather than creating one presentation, removing the financial information and re-saving it as a second presentation, you can hide the slides that the second group doesn't need. Simply click on a slide in the slides list at left, and choose Hide Slide. The slide will look the same in your center workspace, but will have a shaded rectangle over it in your Slides list. when you run your slideshow, LOImpress will skip over hidden slides. When you no longer want a slide hidden, click on it again and choose Show Slide.

Reorder Pages

OK, you are really busy creating a multi-page document, and you discover you have a page in the wrong spot. This is actually an easy fix! You can drag a page to a new location in the document. Using your Normal workspace, you can click on a slide in the Slides area at left, and drag it up or down to the new location. You can also click on the Slide Sorter tab above your workspace. There you will have an arrangement of all your slides, in rows, left to right. You can click on the slide you want to move and drag it over to the correct position. In the example below, I have dragged the 4th slide from the top row, right side, down to the end after the red slide.

Save Presentation as a PDF

Just as with LOWriter and LOCalc, an LOImpress file can be exported as a pdf. This is good if you want to give your presentation to your audience for reference after you are finished. Simply click File > Export as PDF or click on the PDF tool in the toolbar. You will see a window asking where to save your document and what it should be named. Your presentation file name is there by default, but you can change the file name.

Oh, by the way, you can also print other forms of this presentation. When you choose File > Print, you will see a print dialog window that defaults to printing each slide as they are in the presentation, but you also see a drop-down that will have choices in it. You can print the slides, outline, notes or handout. The Handouts format puts six slides on a page and prints them that way. Notice that the layout shown for the handout only has four slides. One of them is hidden, remember?

The Notes format puts one slide at the top of a page and leaves space for the notes below. These are the notes you may have added in your workspace tab called Notes, and you can print these pages as a presentation aid.

Slide Transitions

LOImpress has many transitions you can use. You can change from one slide to the next by 'wiping" the screen from any of four directions, have it fade out and the new slide fade in, have the slide change to a changing checkerboard pattern and even have a circular sweep of the page. Be sure to go in and experiment. Some people will want to use a separate transition for each slide. It can be done, choosing the transition and clicking the button which says Apply to Selected Sli... However, to bring unity to your presentation, you probably should only use, at most, two or three transitions. The presentation I make for work every year only uses one, and that's sufficient for my audience.

Auto-play

If your presentation has sections that prompt question and discussion, you should probably advance the slides by hand. My yearly presentation is a basic showing of events my company has sponsored or participated in, so I can set the presentation to run without anyone monitoring it. In that case, you can set it on auto-play, and set a certain time limit for each slide to show. Most of my slides can be viewed in about 10 seconds, having mostly photos, but I have one slide that is mostly text, so I set the 10 seconds the entire presentation by clicking Apply to All Slides..., but then go back to that one slide and set a longer time on it, then click Apply to Selected Slide.... That way the one slide stays on the screen longer and can be read.

Impressive Bullets / Numbering

Many times the reasons we do a presentation is because we have loads of information for our audience. Many times, bulleted lists display that information in a neat and orderly fashion. But, really... do we HAVE to use those black dots all the time? The answer, of course, is NO. LOImpress has a big variety of bullet styles, so your presentation will look different from that other guy's. From Format > Bullets and Numbering, you can click on the Graphics tab and choose from many different designs.

Vary Your Content

Remember that you can put multiple types of media on a slide - pictures, tables, sounds, graphs - not just text. This will help to make your presentation more informative, and probably less boring! Remember not to make every slide that 'busy" so as not to overwhelm your audience. Also remember that LibreOffice has a Gallery of clipart, just in case you need one more little touch. It's always available from the toolbar (in Impress it's in the bottom toolbar) or from the menu in Tools > Gallery.

You can also insert a comment. This might help if you have to pull up a presentation you haven't seen for a while. I inserted a comment into this presentation. While you are typing it, there is a big square over your slide (like a sticky note). When you are finished and go on, it changes to a very small square in the upper left corner of the slide you added it to. Clicking the square opens your comment. Don't worry... it doesn't show during the slideshow.

Slide Presenter Console

This used to be an extension for LOImpress, but they have incorporated it into the base program now. It is only for those times when you have a second display connected. In fact, it doesn't show up in the menu at all. The documentation says that it shows up when the second display is connected. It allows you to view the slideshow along with your slide notes, plus the ability to see the upcoming slide and control the presentation timer while the audience is looking at the current slide. I haven't had a chance to experiment with this yet.

Summary

We have learned about some aids that help us use LOImpress more effectively. I have learned several new things myself! Next year's presentation will be even better! Next month we'll look at LODraw.

Get A New HD Wallpaper From Bing Every Day

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Last month, I shared a script with you that downloads a new HD wallpaper from National Geographic. You can run it as often as you like -- daily if you want. I modified the original script to allow you to only download the images, or to set the newly downloaded image as the wallpaper for your current desktop environment.

This month, I'm sharing another script that downloads a new HD wallpaper from Bing. Say WHAT?! Bing? That search engine run by the "evil empire," Microsoft?! Why yes, the one and very same.

Regardless of what you think/feel about Microsoft, one thing that they do have is a new, high quality background image on their search page every single day. The images are typically high resolution, and make for some excellent wallpaper images. Since this script allows you to download them, you, me and everyone else might as well get something for free from Microsoft. For myself, and probably a lot of other users, therein lies the "sweet spot" of this script.

Compare the screenshot of Firefox displaying the Bing search engine, with the image obtained with the Bing wallpaper script, then used as my wallpaper.

This was the background image on August 28, 2013 (when I started writing this article), commemorating the 50th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington, D.C., in 1963. All of the downloaded images are 1366x768 in dimension.

The script

Here is the script, in it's entirety. You can type it into a plain text editor (Kate, Kwrite, Mousepad, Leafpad, Geany, etc.), or copy and paste it from this article into a plain text editor. If you'd rather save yourself the trouble, you can download this script from the magazine's website. Be sure to remove the ".txt" file extension, save it to a location in your path, and make sure the file is marked as being executable. The easiest way to do the latter is to open a terminal session and type chmod +x path/to/script/bing.sh (provided you saved it as bing.sh).

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# ********************************

# *** FUNCTIONS

# ********************************

function make_js {

js=$(mktemp)

cat > $js <<_EOF

var wallpaper = "$PICTURE_DIR/$filename";

var activity = activities()[0];

activity.currentConfigGroup = new Array("Wallpaper", "image");

activity.writeConfig("wallpaper", wallpaper);

activity.writeConfig("userswallpaper", wallpaper);

activity.reloadConfig();

_EOF

}

function kde_wallpaper {

make_js

qdbus org.kde.plasma-desktop /MainApplication loadScriptInInteractiveConsole $js > /dev/null

# sleep 2

xdotool search --name "Desktop Shell Scripting Console --

Plasma Desktop Shell" windowactivate key ctrl+e key ctrl+w

rm -f "$js"

dbus-send --dest=org.kde.plasma-desktop /MainApplication org.kde.plasma-desktop.reparseConfiguration

dbus-send --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ReloadConfig

dbus-send --dest=org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.reloadConfig

# kbuildsycoca4 2>/dev/null && kquitapp plasma-desktop 2>/dev/null ; kstart plasma-desktop > /dev/null 2>&1

}

function xfce_wallpaper {

xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/image-path -s $PICTURE_DIR/$filename

}

function lxde_wallpaper {

pcmanfm -w "$PICTURE_DIR/$filename"

}

function mate_wallpaper {

gsettings set org.mate.background picture-filename $PICTURE_DIR/$filename

}

function e17_wallpaper {

OUTPUT_DIR=~/.e/e/backgrounds

FileName=$PICTURE_DIR/$filename

edcFile=~/tmp/Bing.edc

echo 'images { image: "'$FileName'" LOSSY 90; }' > $edcFile

echo 'collections {' >> $edcFile

echo 'group { name: "e/desktop/background";' >> $edcFile

echo 'data { item: "style" "4"; }' >> $edcFile

echo 'data.item: "noanimation" "1";' >> $edcFile

echo 'max: 990 742;' >> $edcFile

echo 'parts {' >> $edcFile

echo 'part { name: "bg"; mouse_events: 0;' >> $edcFile

echo 'description { state: "default" 0.0;' >> $edcFile

echo 'aspect: 1.334231806 1.334231806; aspect_preference: NONE;' >> $edcFile

echo 'image { normal: "'$FileName'";  scale_hint: STATIC; }' >> $edcFile

echo '} } } } }' >> $edcFile

edje_cc -nothreads ~/tmp/Bing.edc -o $OUTPUT_DIR/Bing.edj

sleep 2 && rm -f ~/tmp/Bing.edc

echo 'Enlightenment e17 Bing.edj file created'

enlightenment_remote -desktop-bg-del 0 0 -1 -1

enlightenment_remote -desktop-bg-add 0 0 -1 -1 $OUTPUT_DIR/Bing.edj;

}

function usage {

printf "%s\n%s\n\n%s\n%s\n\n%s\n\n%s" \

"Bing will download the Bing Wallpaper Of The Day,"\

"and (optionally) set that picture as the new wallpaper."\

"Based on original script by thejandroman, and expanded by Paul Arnote for PCLinuxOS."\

"Originally published in The PCLinuxOS Magazine (http://pclosmag.com), Oct. 2013 issue."\

"Works for KDE4, Xfce, LXDE, Mate and e17 desktops."\

"Usage: $0 [arguments]"\

printf "\n %s\t%s" \

"-h, --help" "This help text"

printf "\n %s\t\t%s" \

"-d" "Download pictures ONLY"

printf "\n %s\t\tSetup for the %s" \

"--xfce"    "XFCE4 Desktop"\

"--mate"    "Mate Desktop"\

"--lxde"    "LXDE Desktop"\

"--kde4"    "KDE4 Desktop"\

"--e17"    "Enlightenment Desktop"

printf "\n"

}

# ********************************

# *** MAIN

# ********************************

if [ "$1" == "--help" ] || [ "$1" == "-h" ] || [ "$1" == "" ]; then

usage

exit

fi

echo "===================="

echo "== Bing Wallpaper =="

echo "===================="

PICTURE_DIR=~/Wallpaper/Bing/

mkdir -p $PICTURE_DIR

sleep 1

urls=( $(curl -s http://www.bing.com|grep -Eo "url:'.*?'"|sed -e "s/url:'\([^']*\)'.*/

http:\/\/bing.com\1/"|sed -e "s/\\\//g") )

for p in ${urls[@]}; do

filename=$(echo $p|sed -e "s/.*\/\(.*\)/\1/")

if [ ! -f $PICTURE_DIR/$filename ]; then

echo "Downloading: $filename ..."

curl -Lo "$PICTURE_DIR/$filename" $p

else

echo "Skipping: $filename ..."

fi

done

if [ "$1" != "-d" ]; then

echo "Setting image as wallpaper"

fi

# For Xfce

if [ "$1" == "--xfce" ]; then

xfce_wallpaper

fi

# For LXDE

if [ "$1" == "--lxde" ]; then

lxde_wallpaper

fi

# For Mate

if [ "$1" == "--mate" ]; then

mate_wallpaper

fi

# For KDE4

if [ "$1" == "--kde4" ]; then

kde_wallpaper

fi

# For e17

if [ "$1" == "--e17" ]; then

e17_wallpaper

fi

Modifications

To make this work for all of the mainstream desktops offered for PCLinuxOS, I borrowed the functions from the NatGeo script to automatically set the wallpaper for your chosen desktop environment. So, the script works exactly the same way as the NatGeo script from last month. Instead of repeating all of the same information here, I'll refer you to the discussion in last month's magazine article, particularly the "Notes About The Desktops" section. Since I had already done the "heavy work" by creating the functions to set the wallpaper for each desktop environment in the NatGeo script, it only made sense to reuse that code.

However, it is important to reiterate two items. First, e17 users must enable DBus Extensions module, or the script will not be able to change/set the desktop wallpaper. Second, KDE4 users will need to install xdotool from Synaptic in order for the script to set the desktop wallpaper. Users of Xfce, Mate and LXDE don't need to do anything special, except to run the script. Please refer to the NatGeo article (previous link) and review the other notes.

Usage

The usage of the script is identical to the usage rules for the NatGeo script. Why reinvent the wheel? When you find something that works and works well, you might as well stick with it. Right?

$ bing.sh

Bing will download the Bing Wallpaper Of The Day,

and (optionally) set that picture as the new wallpaper.

Based on original script by thejandroman, and expanded by Paul Arnote for PCLinuxOS.

Originally published in The PCLinuxOS Magazine (http://pclosmag.com), Oct. 2013 issue.

Works for KDE4, Xfce, LXDE, Mate and e17 desktops.

Usage: /home/parnote-t42/Scripts/bing.sh [arguments]

-h, --help    This help text

-d             Download pictures ONLY

--xfce        Setup for the XFCE4 Desktop

--mate        Setup for the Mate Desktop

--lxde        Setup for the LXDE Desktop

--kde4        Setup for the KDE4 Desktop

--e17        Setup for the Enlightenment Desktop

If you type either bing.sh, bing.sh -h or bing.sh --help in a terminal session, you will get the text above displayed in the terminal screen. If you type bing.sh -d, the wallpapers will be downloaded to your computer, but it will skip setting the image as your wallpaper. To download the image of the day and set that new image as your desktop wallpaper, supply the appropriate command line option for your selected desktop (--xfce for the Xfce desktop, --mate for the Mate desktop, --lxde for the LXDE desktop, --kde4 for the KDE4 desktop, and --e17 for the Enlightenment e17 desktop). There is virtually no error checking to insure that you enter the right command, just to keep the script size small.

When you run the script, you will see the following displayed in the terminal window:

$ bing.sh --xfce

====================

== Bing Wallpaper ==

====================

Downloading: MarchonWA_EN-US13404932946_1366x768.jpg ...

% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current

Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed

0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0

100  119k  100  119k    0     0   195k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  955k

Setting image as wallpaper

The script will inform you that it is downloading a new image, and then setting it as your desktop wallpaper.

$ bing.sh --xfce

====================

== Bing Wallpaper ==

====================

Skipping: MarchonWA_EN-US13404932946_1366x768.jpg ...

Setting image as wallpaper

If you've already downloaded the Bing "image of the day," the bing.sh script will skip downloading it again, but still set that image as your desktop wallpaper. This makes it easy to switch back to the Bing wallpaper image of the day if you've previously downloaded it and then changed your wallpaper to something else. Just rerun the bing.sh script.

Summary

Between the NatGeo and Bing wallpaper scripts, no PCLinuxOS user should ever worry about having or finding wallpaper image files. Both scripts retrieve very high quality images that make perfect wallpaper images for any computer user's desktop.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: Bald Brick

by Bald Brick

I don't like talking about myself. I find it pretentious. Nevertheless:

I am seventy years old and live by myself in a small flat in a suburb of Helsingfors, a.k.a. Helsinki. (Our capital city has two official names: the original Swedish one, and the Finnish one that is used by the majority of my countrymen. Historically, Helsinki is a pidginization of the Swedish name for the surrounding countryside.)

This is where I live:

This is the view from my drawing room window:

And this is the view from my balcony:

My kitchen is all too small, but I do have a sauna. I sometimes miss the garden I used to have, but at least I'm close to two manifestations of water. The idea of living further from the sea is somewhat strange to me.

I also miss my cats and dogs, but my back is so bad that I couldn't possibly take a dog for long walks several times a day, and I have gradually developed an allergy that could kill me if I shared an apartment with a cat. Asthma is not something to wish for.

I went to the same school as Linus Torvalds, but thirty years before him, which actually means that it wasn't the same school: its name is still the same but after my time there, they have let in girls and simplified the curriculum.

That girls were let in is probably a good thing even (even if it's said that girls and boys don't mature at the same pace), but in my day, we could choose whether we wanted to concentrate on mathematics, classical languages or modern languages. Today the classical languages aren't an option any more, and this is simply shameful. I actually picked math, but the choice was mine.

Then, over fifty years ago I studied English and Nordic Philology at the university, but over time I became more and more active within the student theatre and ended up as a script editor and theatre director. I've also done some acting - and a bit of teaching at the Theatre Academy - apart from giving elocution classes at three universities. For the last 23 years before I retired, I was head of Radio Drama at the Swedish section of our national broadcasting company.

I have translated a couple of hundred plays from six languages, and one of my own plays won the Prix Italia some twenty years ago.

Since a very early age, my main hobby has been cooking, but I actually find most things in life interesting - except for athletics. (The reason I've never been interested in sports - with the exception of chess - is probably that I was a couple of years younger than most of my classmates, and consequently, never could compete.) Even if I went to the same school as Linus Torvalds, I've never met him. But I do like to brag about being his grandfather's IT teacher.

"You like computers, don't you?" asked one of my colleagues.

"Why, yes", said I.

So he informed me that he and I would be the instructors at a one-day computer seminar organized for one of our writers' unions. (We actually have three writers' unions: one for those that write in Finnish, one for those that write in Swedish, and one for playwrights regardless of language.)

And the oldest one of the writers that turned up was Ole Torvalds, who at the time - the mid eighties - was well known as a newspaper editor, a poet and a translator. A few years later, he would be better known as Linus Torvalds' paternal grandfather.

Now, my colleague and I mainly demonstrated word processors and desktop publishing programs, but my colleague also happened to mention the term "operating system" a couple of times.

"Excuse me", said one of the writers. "What's this operating system thing?"

So my colleague tried to explain it. After a couple of minutes the eyes of all the writers were a bit glazed over, and I had to step in:

"An operating system is the ghost in the machine."

"Ah", said the writers. "Of course."

Even if my father was the CEO of quite a large company, I don't have any money. I'm poor as a church mouse. When I finally got enough of broadcasting, I retired a few years earlier than what would have made economic sense. I suppose I reacted a bit like my nephew when he was five and got fed up with my sister.

He started packing all his toy cars.

Sister: "What on earth are you doing?"

Nephew: "I'm packing."

Sister: "But whatever for?"

Nephew: "I'm moving."

Sister: "Oh. May I ask you where? Or is it a secret?"

Nephew: "To Granny's of course."

Sister: "Of course. But she's at work at the library all day."

Nephew: "Oh?"

Sister: "She really is." Nephew (without hesitation): "I suppose it will have to be some orphanage then."

He didn't really move. When I got fed up with broadcasting, I did.

Of course, I'm handy with my hands. You give me the right tools and the right materials and I'll build you the Taj Mahal. Or something more modern. (But not modernistic.)

I was born during an air raid, during which they couldn't move my mother to an air raid shelter as she was ... sort of ... giving birth. I don't remember much of that though, even if my earliest memories are a bit earlier than those of most people. I was two when I had the most traumatic experience of my life, and I may write about that in my memoirs but not here.

And do you want me to explain why I started using PCLinuxOS?

I first installed Slackware Linux in 1994, when I could buy a set of CDs at a local book store. At that time downloading it would have taken a week. Shortly afterwards I switched to Red Hat - because Red Hat became available at the same store - and later I switched to Mandrake. Mandrake came with KDE, while the default in Red Hat was Gnome. And as Tex consistently had produced KDE RPMs that were better than the "official" Mandrake ones, I naturally tried out PCLinuxOS as soon as it became available.

But I wasn't hooked yet. My main operating system was OS/2 and that was all I needed.

Then my employer decided to standardize on Windows 95. I had actually found Windows 3.x almost useful - if you also installed PCTools for Windows or Norton Desktop for Windows. But Windows 95 as a company standard?

I told my bosses: this is an insult. I won't use it. And, believe it or not, even at work I managed to get a Linux computer instead, even if I wasn't allowed to connect it to the company's network because of security reasons. (How stupid can you get while remaining alive?)

That's when I got rid of all Microsoft products.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight is an exclusive, monthly column by smileeb, featuring PCLinuxOS forum members. This column will allow "the rest of us" to get to know our forum family members better, and will give those featured an opportunity to share their PCLinuxOS story with the rest of the world.

PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner

Easy Pierogi Casserole

Ingredients:

9 lasagna noodles, uncooked

4 cups hot mashed potatoes

1/2 cup Herb & Garlic cream cheese spread

6 green onions, thinly sliced

1 cup Bacon Bits, divided

2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese, divided

Cooking Instructions:

1. Heat oven to 375ºF.

2. Cook noodles as directed on package, omitting salt. Meanwhile, combine mashed potatoes, cream cheese spread, onions, 2/3 cup bacon and 1 cup Cheddar cheese.

3. Place 3 noodles in 13x9-inch baking dish sprayed with cooking spray; cover with 1/3 of the potato mixture. Repeat layers twice. Top with remaining bacon and Cheddar; cover.

4. Bake 30 min. or until heated through. Uncover; bake 3 to 5 min. or until cheese is lightly browned. Let stand 10 min. before cutting to serve.

Options: For a change of pace, substitute cottage cheese for the mashed potatoes.

ms_meme's Nook: PCLOS Is The Finest In The Land

OGG           MP3

Xfce Power User Tips, Tricks & Tweaks: Miscellaneous

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Over the previous six months, I've been presenting a series of articles that I've called "Xfce Power User Tips, Tricks & Tweaks." My plan was to wrap up the series with this, the seventh article in the series, but I've found another "power user" tip, which I'll present next month. I toyed with adding it to this article, but decided that a tip this good needed its own article, and it would make this article too long.

This month's article is a collection of miscellaneous tips, tricks and tweaks. Some of these were ones that got inadvertently left out of previous discussions. Some are ones I discovered after the related article had already run. Others are ones that didn't fit into the other discussions, for one reason or another.

Multi-Level Launchers

Like a lot of Linux users, I really hate my desktop being littered with a lot of icons. Personally, it reminds me of when I ran Windows, and every program you installed wanted to place an icon on your desktop -- some of them whether you wanted an icon there or not. Still, I do like to have easy and quick access to some of my more frequently used programs. This is where this Xfce tip comes in handy.

Above is pictured a portion of my panel, showing my grouping of launchers, along the top panel of my screen. Take notice that four of the launchers show a small downward pointing arrow at the left bottom corner of the icon. The arrow serves as a visual cue that there are other choices. My launcher for web browsers is shown open above. Yes, I really do have four web browsers installed. Here's how to create a multi-level launcher.

First, add a new launcher to your panel. The easiest way to do this is to right click your mouse on the panel you want to add the launcher to, then choose Panel > Add New Items... from the context menu that appears. Select "Launcher" from the dialog box, then the "Add" button.

The new launcher will be placed at the far right edge of the selected panel. Right click on the new launcher, and select "Move" from the context menu. Drag your mouse to where you want your new launcher to appear. Then, right click on the new launcher icon again, and select "Properties" from the context menu.

Click on the "+" button along the right edge of the dialog box.

A dialog box with all of your installed programs (that use a GUI) will be displayed in a list. Find the program you want to add to your launcher, and select the "Add" button.

Once back to the Launcher properties dialog box, click on the "+" icon again, and select the next program you want to appear. Repeat this process for every program you want to include in your multilevel launcher. By default, the first program in the list of launchers will dictate the icon used for your multilevel launcher. Once you're finished adding programs to your multilevel launcher, select the "Advanced" tab of the Launcher properties dialog box.

Select the "Arrow button position" drop down list box. It is labeled "Default" -- by default. The default value places the arrow position to the right of the icon of the icon used to display your multilevel launcher. I change this to "Inside Button" to reduce the footprint of the launcher on my panel. This tells Xfce to "paint" the arrow over the bottom left corner of the icon on the panel.

Right above the drop down list box is another item, called "Show last item used in panel." If you check this, the icon for your multilevel launcher will change to depict the last item you used from the multilevel launcher. I leave this unchecked. I prefer to have a static icon displayed.

Now, here is a tip within a tip. You might have noticed that I have separate icons for "regular" Firefox, Chrome and Chromium, as well as the private browsing option for each. The private browsing option isn't installed by default, and is typically only available either from a menu inside each browser, or via a command line switch. It's the latter that allows you to set up a launcher for starting the browser in private browsing mode.

First, add in a duplicate icon for each of the browsers that you want to enable a launcher for the private browsing option. Double click on the duplicate, which will bring up a dialog box similar to the one above. In the example above, at the end of the "Command" line add --incognito to the command to launch Chromium (be sure to leave a space between the %u and the command line option). The same command line switch also works for Google Chrome. For Firefox private browsing, change the command to firefox -private %u. Midori comes with a private browsing option already set up, so all you have to do is select it from the list of the "Add New Item" dialog box when adding the program to your multilevel launcher. Then, so you can differentiate between the icons, change the name to include "Private" and select "Save."

Auto Adjust Photos X 2

Back when we talked about working with Graphics files, I gave you (the readers) the challenge of making a Thunar Custom Action for correcting photos with aaphoto (installable via Synaptic). I covered using aaphoto in the October 2012 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine.

When you install aaphoto, an entry is automatically added to the "Open With..." context menu in Thunar. However, that menu item only applies the default values of aaphoto to the selected photos. A lot of times, the default values work just fine. But by creating your own custom action using aaphoto gives you the opportunity to further customize what aaphoto does to enhance your photos.

So why do I call this part of the article "Auto Adjust Photos X 2?" Well, it's because I have two slightly different Thunar Custom Actions. They both basically do the same thing, but each gives a slightly different feedback to the user. One displays the output from aaphoto in an informational text dialog box. The other displays a pulsating progress bar while aaphoto completes its task. To "mix things up" a bit, the output display version uses Zenity to display the dialog boxes on the screen, while the progress bar version uses Yad.

Enter either "Auto Adjust Photo Colors (Output)" or "Auto Adjust Photo Colors (Progress)," depending on which one you prefer. If you prefer only one of the custom actions, you can leave out the text in parenthesis. Since I have both custom actions defined on my Xfce installation, I use the text in parenthesis to differentiate which one is which. Enter "Automatically adjust colors in selected photos" as the description.

Next, we need to enter the command to be executed with the custom action. For the custom action that displays the aaphoto output, the command to enter is shown below. We are able to view the output by piping the output from aaphoto (with the verbose flag) to a Zenity informational text dialog.

D="$(zenity --title="Directory Name" --entry --text="Please enter the directory name")"; if [ ! -d $D ]; then mkdir -p $D; fi && Q="$(zenity --title="Quality Level" --entry --text="Please enter the quality level")" && aaphoto -a -o $D -q$Q -V %N | zenity --text-info --title="aaphoto Progress" --width=300 --height=300

For the custom action that displays the progress bar, here is the command to enter:

D="$(yad --title="Directory Name" --entry --entry-label="Please enter the directory name")"; if [ ! -d $D ]; then mkdir -p $D; fi && Q="$(yad --title="Quality Level" --entry --entry-label="Please enter the quality level")" && aaphoto -a -o $D -q$Q %N | yad --progress --pulsate --progress-text="Please wait ... images being processed" --title="aaphoto Progress" --auto-close --auto-kill

Besides the difference of using Zenity and Yad, there is one other difference. The progress bar version turns off the verbose output from aaphoto, by omitting the -V command line switch. The verbose output from aaphoto was proving to be problematic, and causing the command to behave inconsistently. Removal of the verbose output command line switch seems to have eliminated the problem.

You can just as easily add in commands and dialog boxes to rotate the image and/or resize the images. The aaphoto command line switch to resize images is -r or --resize, followed by either the percentage (with the % sign) or the pixels of the long side of an image. The resize command can only make images smaller. To rotate images, aaphoto takes the command line switches of --rotate90, --rotate180 and --rotate270. The --rotate90 switch is the same as rotating an image 90 degrees to the right, or clockwise. The --rotate270 switch is the same as rotating an image 90 degrees to the left, or counterclockwise.

So, let's take a look at a couple of other incarnations of the aaphoto command that you might find useful.

To rotate images:

D="$(zenity --title="Directory Name" --entry --text="Please enter the directory name")"; if [ ! -d $D ]; then mkdir -p $D; fi && Q="$(zenity --title="Quality Level" --entry --text="Please enter the quality level")" && R="$(zenity --title="Rotation Degrees" --entry --text="Please enter degrees rotation\n90 = Right, 270 = Left")" && aaphoto -a -o $D -q$Q --rotate$R -V %N | zenity --text-info --title="aaphoto Progress" --width=300 --height=300

To resize images:

D="$(zenity --title="Directory Name" --entry --text="Please enter the directory name")"; if [ ! -d $D ]; then mkdir -p $D; fi && Q="$(zenity --title="Quality Level" --entry --text="Please enter the quality level")" && S="$(zenity --title="Resize Pixels" --entry --text="Please enter new size in pixels, based\non the long edge of the image.\n\nYou may only reduce an image.\nYou may not enlarge an image.")" && aaphoto -a -o $D -q$Q -r$S -V %N | zenity --text-info --title="aaphoto Progress" --width=300 --height=300

As you can see, you can chain together Zenity entry dialogs for many of the aaphoto command line switch values. There is nothing to prevent you from moving all of this to a custom bash script, either. Doing so will give you easy access to every variable for aaphoto, without having to repeat "code" in multiple Thunar Custom Actions.

View JPEG Exif Information

The JPEG graphic format has something special that separates it from other graphic formats. That something special is the storage of all kinds of extra information about the image. It is called Exif, which is an abbreviation for Exchangeable image file format. Here is the Exif information for one of the National Geographic wallpapers that I've downloaded:

File name     : japanese-white-eye_68766_990x742.jpg

File size     : 673948 bytes

File date     : 2013:07:22 23:40:37

Camera make  : Canon

Camera model : Canon EOS REBEL T3i

Date/Time     : 2012:10:24 08:19:42

Resolution   : 990 x 742

Flash used   : No

Focal length : 400.0mm  (35mm equivalent: 3280mm)

CCD width     : 4.39mm

Exposure time: 0.0025 s  (1/400)

Aperture      : f/5.6

ISO equiv.   : 200

Whitebalance : Manual

Metering Mode: pattern

Exposure      : Manual

Exposure Mode: Manual

======= IPTC data: =======

Record vers. : 2

Caption        : The Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonicus), also known as the mejiro (   ,   ), is a small

passerine bird in the white-eye family. The specific epithet is occasionally written japonica, but this is

incorrect due to the gender of the genus. Its native range includes much of east Asia, including Jap

Headline       : Intense colors

Byline         : Boris S.

DateCreated  : 20121024

City           : Tainan

State          : Taiwan

Country        : Taiwan

SuplementalCategories: Animals

SuplementalCategories: Nature

Keywords       : bird

Keywords       : japanesewhiteeye

Keywords       : taiwan

The JPEG Exif data is derived from the Exif data used with TIFF image files. There is a 64 KB size limit on the amount of Exif data that can be saved within the JPEG file format. If you think about it, that is a lot of data. The text of this article is less than 15 KB. You can read more about the Exif format here. The Exif data displayed above from the National Geographic wallpaper image is quite a bit more than most images will contain.

Fortunately, it's quite easy to make a Thunar Custom Action to read and display the Exif information from JPEG image files stored on your hard drive. This Thunar Custom Action got inadvertently left out of the discussion on working with graphic files, in the March 2013 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine. To do this, you will first need to install jhead from the PCLinuxOS repository, via Synaptic.

Enter "View JPG Exif Info" in the "Name" field, and "View the Exif info of the selected JPG file" in the "Description" field. Then, enter the following in the "Command" field:

jhead %n | zenity --text-info --title="Exif Info" --width=400 --height=250

Under the "Appearance Conditions" tab, enter *.jpg,*.JPG as the file pattern, and place a checkmark in front of "Image files" ONLY. Now, when you right click on a JPG file, select "View JPG Exif Info" from Thunar's context menu. You should see something similar to the dialog box shown above, filled with the Exif information from the selected JPG file. We can only view the Exif information for one file at a time. If you want to view the Exif information for multiple files, you will need to view them one at a time.

Directory Playlist

This next Thunar Custom Action got inadvertently left out of our discussion in the May 2013 issue about working with multimedia files. This is what happens sometimes due to my testing new Thunar Custom Actions on more than one computer. I create the custom action on one computer, move my work to another computer, and forget to transfer the new custom action to the second computer. Mea culpa.

Nonetheless, this Thunar Custom Action can take an entire directory filled with your favorite music and automatically create a *.m3u playlist file with the same name as that directory. What's great is that the playlist is placed inside the directory that contains the music files. You will need to install the unix2dos command line utility, via Synaptic. This utility will convert the text-based *.m3u playlist file from Linux/Unix format, with a return character only at the end of each line, to a DOS format, with a return and carriage return character at the end of each line. Unfortunately, some MP3 players may depend on the *.m3u file being in the DOS format. Those that don't will most likely ignore it. So, we'll include it, just to be sure that we have maximum compatibility with as many MP3 players as possible.

Enter "Directory Playlist" in the "Name" field, and "Make a playlist from the files in a directory" in the "Description" field. Then, enter the following in the "Command" field:

ls -w 1 -R %n/ |egrep *.'[fF][lL][aA][cC]|[aA][pP][eE]|[wW][vV]|[wW][aA][vV]|[mM][pP][3]|[aA][aA][cC]|[oO][gG][gG]|[oO][gG][aA]|[wW][mM][aA]|[mM][pP][cC]|[mM][4][aA]' >%n/%n.m3u && unix2dos %n/%n.m3u

This command lists the contents of the selected directory, and writes the filename of each audio file (*.flac, *.ape, *.wv, *.wav, *.mp3, *.aac, *.ogg, *.oga, *.wma, *.mpc and *.m4a) that it finds to the file with a *.m3u file extension and the same name as the directory. It then converts the file to DOS text file format, with the unix2dos command.

For example, let's suppose you have a directory full of your favorite tunes from The Moody Blues, named MoodyBlues. Right click on the directory and select "Directory Playlist" from Thunar's context menu. Every audio file you have in that directory will be written to a file named MoodyBlues.m3u, written inside your MoodyBlues directory. That file is then converted to a text file format that adheres to the DOS specifications, with a CR + LF at the end of each line.

Here is an example of the *.m3u output from a folder I have from a rip of Toby Keith's Greatest Hits, Volume 2 CD:

01_how_do_you_like_me_now.mp3

02_country_comes_to_town.mp3

03_you_shouldnt_kiss_me_like_this.mp3

04_im_just_talkin_about_tonight.mp3

05_i_wanna_talk_about_me.mp3

06_my_list.mp3

07_courtesy_of_the_red_white_and_blue_the_angry_american.mp3

08_whos_your_daddy.mp3

09_beer_for_my_horses_duet_with_willie_nelson.mp3

10_stays_in_mexico.mp3

11_mockingbird_duet_with_krystal.mp3

12_go_with_her.mp3

13_you_aint_much_fun_live.mp3

14_shouldve_been_a_cowboy_live.mp3

Take note that if you have a subfolder that you don't want included (say that you converted all of your MP3 files into OGG files, stored in a subfolder ... I've been known to do this very thing), this command is recursive, which is just another way of saying that it'll list all the audio files it finds. You can either remove the -R command line switch from the ls command, or you can manually edit the *.m3u file to remove the duplicates.

Of course, this is very handy if, using our previous example with The Moody Blues, you have each of their albums in their own special subfolder. Each subfolder will be read and the files it finds placed into the MoodyBlues.m3u file into the order they are listed/found.

Extract MP3 Audio From Video

This Thunar Custom Action makes it easy to "extract" the audio from your favorite video files. This is another "left behind" custom action, like the Directory Playlist custom action above. The ability to extract audio from a video can be an excellent way to build your music collection. If you have a favorite music video, you can download it from your favorite video streaming site, then extract the audio from that video. Or, if you have a favorite comedy show, you can download the video and extract the audio from it to playback on your MP3 player.

Enter "Extract MP3 Audio From Video" in the "Name" field, and "Extract the audio track from the selected video file" in the "Description" field. Next, enter the following into the "Command" field:

ffmpeg -i %f -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128 -f mp3 %f.mp3 | yad --progress --percentage=40 --progress-text="Please wait ... file being processed" --title="Audio Extraction" --auto-close --auto-kill

When you right click on a video file stored on your hard drive, select "Extract MP3 Audio From Video" from the Thunar context menu. You will see the progress dialog box displayed above while the Thunar Custom Action completes the task. Depending on how big the video file is, it could take a few minutes to complete the audio extraction.

Thunar's "Send To" Menu

Thunar's "Send To" menu has always been a huge mystery to me. Very useful, but very mysterious. It wasn't until just recently that I've been able to figure it out.

You will notice that there are several items already populating the Send To menu. From the Send To menu, you can create a link on your desktop, add files to a data composition, or send an email (provided you have your preferred email client setup in Xfce Settings Manager > Preferred Applications).

Once you connect a removable drive -- a USB hard drive, a USB flash drive, or an SD card in a card reader -- it will also be listed among the choices. In the image above, I simply inserted an empty 4 GB SD card into the built-in card reader of one of my laptops. It automatically appears as the second entry in the Send To menu. The nice thing about using the Send To menu to send items to a removable drive is that you don't have to mount it first. Thunar takes care of automatically mounting the removable drive when you send items to it.

So far, not too much mystery. That comes in when you try to figure out how to extend or customize the Send To menu. Information isn't nearly as plentiful as it is for other aspects of Thunar. However, it's much easier than you might think.

For our exercise, we'll add a Picasa Upload item to Thunar's Send To menu. First, you will need to install googlecl from the PCLinuxOS repository. You will also need to log into your Picasa account and create an empty album, named "Uploads" (or make it with the googlecl command from the command line, like this: google picasa --create --title "Uploads").

You can later log into your Picasa account (via a web browser) and move your uploaded images into their own album. (Hint: open the "Uploads" album in your favorite web browser, then select the "Organize" button. Multi-select the images you want to move, select the Move button, then provide the name of the new album).

Next, we need to create a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto directory. If the directory (directories) doesn't (don't) exist, create them. Now, create the following picasa.desktop file in that directory.

# picasa.desktop - Integrate picasa into

#                 the "Send To" menu.

#

# Requires the installation of googlecl

# and the prior creation of an album

# named "Uploads" (without quotes)

#

[Desktop Entry]

Type=Application

Version=1.0

Encoding=UTF-8

TryExec=google

Exec=google picasa post --title "Uploads" %F

Icon=picasa

Name=Picasa Upload

MimeType=image/jpeg;image/png

Because we added the MimeType entry into the picasa.desktop file, the new addition to the Send To menu will only appear for JPG or PNG files. If you right click on any other file types, you will not see the Picasa Upload item in the Send To menu. If you omit the MimeType line, then the new Send To menu item will be available for all file types.

One drawback to this particular Send To menu item is that there is no visual feedback to know when the task has been completed. This could easily be remedied by creating a bash script that will also display a Zenity progress dialog box, then calling that script from the Exec= line of the picasa.desktop file. The other thing you can do is add StartupNotify=true as the last line in the picasa.desktop file. That way, you'll get the "busy" cursor until the Picasa Upload task is completed. However, that could be rather annoying if you are wanting/trying to do other things while you wait for the image uploads to complete.

Also, the additions to the Thunar Send To menu are exclusive to each user. If you want multiple users to have the same functionality on each of their user accounts, you will need to repeat this entire process for each user on the system (or copy the necessary files to each user's ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto directory).

Summary

One thing that makes Xfce so appealing to me is the foresight of the Thunar development team to include a relatively easy way to extend its functionality. For me, Thunar is the epitome of what a file manager should be, and exemplifies the Linux approach to applications -- do one thing, and do it well. It doesn't try to be all things to all users, but it does allow each user to personalize their experience using Thunar. It does this by extending that functionality with tasks that aid that user's particular tasks and needs.

I have to honestly say that my personal "wish list" for Thunar is short; I can only think of two things I would like to see implemented. One of those items is something that we've already covered -- the accurate reporting of file sizes. But that one isn't going to happen any time soon, if at all. The other is the ability to create submenu categories for the Thunar Custom Actions. This ability would go a long way in relieving the "clutter" for users who have a lot of custom actions, and allow users to categorize and organize their custom actions in logical groups.

Next month, I'll present the last article in this series (or at least, what I think is going to be the last). This upcoming article will explore how to leverage and tweak Xfce's built-in desktop wallpaper slideshow.

GIMP Tutorial: Tree Silhouette In Sunset, Part 1

by Meemaw

This month we will make a silhouette of a tree using Gimp, then next month we will put a sunset behind it using Inkscape. I was sent this tutorial and it looked really fun. You can use one of your own photos or download one from a free site, making sure it is legal to use it. I downloaded five from Google Images, and then looked at them together to see which one I wanted to use.

When you find the photo you want to use, open it in Gimp. I think I want to use the one at bottom right.

Crop the photo down to only the tree. Yes, my Gimp workspace has a grey background.

Now we will start adjusting the color, so click

Colors > Curves. You will get a graph with a diagonal line in it. While watching your photo, adjust the color curve (the diagonal line) so the color is disappearing. You will have to grab it with your mouse and move the line up and to the left.

There are several methods that will remove the background but let's use the Clone tool. Clone everything you don't want the same color as the sky so you only see the tree. Notice that I have some sunlight in the center of mine. I will want to clone that as well.

Now that I'm finished cloning you can see what I have left. I know it looks a little red, but we'll fix that soon.

Now, click on Colors > Brightness-Contrast. Change the Brightness and Contrast up by moving the sliders to the right. Increasing the brightness make the background lighter and increasing the contrast will make the tree darker. Keep an eye on your tree, though, because just sliding everything clear to the right may cause you to lose the detail in your tree. Mess with it a bit and discover the settings that look best to you. Every photo is different too, so my settings probably won't work for your photo.

Click on Image > Mode and change it from RGB to Greyscale.

Notice that part of my tree is grey and not black. Now we will go back to Colors > Brightness-Contrast and adjust again. This time we will adjust the brightness down, and the contrast up. Make the brightness -100, and the contrast 110. There's your silhouette.

Sometimes we can sharpen our image just a bit. Click on Filters > Enhance > Sharpen and see if it helps, because sometimes it doesn't. It didn't make any difference on mine.

Save your tree, and then export it as a picture file. I usually use .png or .jpg.

Next month we will finish this project with Inkscape.

How To Kill A Zombie

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with the popular genre of movies, television shows and comic books. Nope. This isn't about "The Walking Dead," one of the most popular shows on television. And this certainly isn't about the movies "World War Z" or George Romero's "Night Of The Living Dead."

What we're talking about are zombie processes. Even with all that is good about Linux, it isn't perfect. No operating system is. No program is perfect. Programs crash. Operating systems crash – although in the Linux world, the latter is a relatively rare occurrence. Especially when programs crash, or when programs aren't written properly, zombie processes can be left behind.

Quite simply, the parent process either didn't clean up the child processes when it exited normally (because of bad programming), or didn't have the chance to clean up the child processes when it exited abnormally. As a result, a zombie process is left behind. A zombie process cannot be scheduled for further processing (the parent process that spawned it has left it abandoned), but it cannot be completely removed until it is determined that it is no longer needed. Without its parent process, there's no way to determine if the remaining process is needed. So, it's just left hanging out there, abandoned, and occupying a process ID that cannot be reused until it has been released.

It's by way of the process table that Linux is able to keep track of everything that is going on all at once. So, when you have a web browser, a word processor, a terminal window, and a graphics viewer running all at the same time that you're listening to music, plus all of the activity going on in the background that most of us don't see or even think about, Linux keeps track of it all by way of the process table.

When a child process exits, it sends a SIGCHILD signal to the parent to let the parent process know that one of its child processes has completed. When this happens, the parent process should call the wait() system call, which in turn will provide the parent process with the exit status of the child, which will then cause the child process to be removed from the process table.

You can see if you have any zombie processes on your system by issuing the top command in a terminal session, then looking at the second line down, all the way to the right. In the screenshot above, I have no zombie processes. If you have a LOT of zombie processes, it would probably be best to either kill the associated parent process, or simply restart a service (for those zombie processes that are associated with a service).

To remove any zombie processes that you may have on your system, you first have to get the process ID numbers (the far left column of numbers in the screenshot) of those zombie processes. There is a better way to get the process ID numbers of any zombie processes on your system. Open a terminal session and enter the following on the command line:

ps aux | awk '{ print $8 " " $2 }' | grep -w Z

It will produce an output something like this:

Z 5802 Z 4771 Z 8629

Now, everyone knows you can't kill a zombie. They are already dead. Just kidding. To kill a zombie (process), put a bullet in its head, like this:

kill -9 5802

Actually, kill -9 is not guaranteed to immediately remove a zombie process. Sometimes that bullet travels in "slow motion."

When the parent process is terminated, the init process (pid 1) adopts the zombie. init calls the wait() function periodically to 'reap' the dead processes resources. So, you may need to wait until the next wait() call for your zombie processes to meet the grim reaper.

Now you know the proper way to kill a zombie … er … zombie process.

LXDE 2013 With A Full Openbox Menu

by Yankee

We all know the LXDE Desktop uses the OpenBox Window Manager and has an lxpanel Menu which handles the menu entries required for operation. Here it will be shown how to add an LXDE compatible menu to the OpenBox right click menu and how to add some needed customizations to the OpenBox menu. The first part will add the menu to the system so it works by right-clicking on the desktop, and in the second part, I'll show how to add customizations to the menu for your further use and need. The whole process should take less than a half hour, with just a few steps for each part.

Part One: Initial Setup

1) In the LXDE menu go to File Tools > Desktop Prefs > Advanced and be sure the box is checked to allow menus provided by Window Managers to appear.

2) Go to Synaptic and install the openbox-menu package.

3) In the file manager go to /home/user/.config/openbox and rename the menu.xml file to menu.xml.old. This will keep the old file from being lost.

4) In the file manager in root mode, go to /usr/share/openbox-menu and copy menu.xml-en to /home/user/.config/openbox. Change the owner and group in the file manager to your user and rename the file to menu.xml for the English menu. A French and German menu.xml is also there. Open the menu.xml file in the Leafpad editor, and resave the file as menu.xml.new. That will make a backup copy of the new menu.xml. Close the editor.

5) In the LXDE menu, go to and open LXAutostart. Enter the command below on the last line.

openbox-menu -o menu.xml -p -g -x -t "xterm -e" applications.menu &

6) Logout or reboot, wait a few seconds, and right-click on the desktop. The menu will appear as in the below picture.

Here is a picture of the now working menu before customization.

In this picture I've expanded the Preferences section to show where a customization is needed.

Part Two: Customizations

1) Go to Synaptic and install obmenu.

2) Run obmenu from the LXDE menu run command, or from a normal terminal.

3) Follow the steps illustrated in the pictures below, of obmenu.

4) Logout or reboot, wait a few seconds, and right-click on the desktop. The menu will appear as in the last two pictures below.

Here we will add a "New Item" to the Preferences section (highlighted) by clicking "New Item" on the toolbar, then moving the item up or down using the arrows on the right side of the toolbar. Add the "Label" text and enter the "Execute" commands in the lower box. This is for the LXDE Control Center. Delete everything from "No effects" to "Xsnow off" by highlighting them, then clicking on the minus icon on the right side of the toolbar. Click Save.

The new Terminal command needs to specify lxterminal. Add another "New Item" where highlighted, entering the necessary text in the "Label" and "Execute" fields in the lower box for the new Terminal command. Delete/remove the old "Terminal" command (below that), the separator, Sabayon command, and the Sulfur command by highlighting them and selecting the minus icon on the right side of the toolbar. Only delete those commands. Click Save.

One more customization and we're finished. Add another "New Item" where highlighted above, entering "Log Out" in the "Label" field, and "lxde-logout" in the "Execute" field in the lower box. This is for the LXDE logout GUI screen. Delete everything, from "Log Out" to "Hibernation" by highlighting them and clicking on the minus icon on the toolbar. Click Save. Now, you're done!

See the two past PCLinuxOS magazine articles (below) if you are in anyway curious to further expand or customize your OpenBox menu further. They apply to OpenBox menu on LXDE also.

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201108/page10.html

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201110/page01.html

The two pictures below show what the final product looks like in PCLinuxOS LXDE 2013.

The above picture shows the menu after customizations, showing the LXDE Control Center menu item that was added to the Preferences section.

And here is another picture showing the menu fully expanded.

Installing A Web Server: XAMPP vs task-lamp

by YouCanToo

I have noticed lately all the talk about using XAMPP to install a web server on your local computer. This has me wondering why one would choose to go outside the normal repository to install XAMPP when we have a program that will do most the same things with task-lamp. Not to mention that task-lamp is in the Synaptic Repository.

Now for the warnings.... It is recommended not to install programs from outside the official PCLinuxOS repositories. This can cause problems with your machine. You could end up not being able to get support from the forum when you're in need of support the most!

To be fair in comparing XAMPP and task-lamp, I will install them on their own hard drives.

The first thing I will do is start out by comparing the software that will be installed by both XAMPP and task-lamp.

XAMPP                           Synaptic task-lamp

Apache 2.4.4                    Apache 2.2.24-1 installed by task-lamp

MySQL 5.5.32                    MySQL 5.1.55-2

PHP 5.4.19                      PHP 5.3.25-1

PEAR                            PEAR not installed

Webmin - not installed          Webmin 1.650-1 - not installed **

Python - not installed          mod_Python 3.3.1-5 installed by task-lamp

SQLite 2.8.17/3.7.17            SQLite 3.717-1 - installed by task-lamp

multibyte (mbstring) Support    mbstring 5.3.25-1 - installed by task-lamp

Perl 5.16.3                     Perl 5.10.1

ProFTPD 1.3.4c                  ProFTPD 1.3.4d - not installed **

phpMyAdmin 4.0.4                phpmyadmin 4.0.6-1 - installed by task-lamp

OpenSSL 1.0.1e                  OpenSSL 1.0.1d, 1.0.1e and 1.0.1j

GD 2.0.35                       GD 2.0.35-5 - installed by task-lamp

Freetype2 2.4.8                 Freetype2 2-2.0

libjpeg 8d                      libjpeg 6b

** Can be installed using Synaptic

XAMPP                           task-lamp

libpng 1.5.9                    libpng 3.5.0

gdbm 1.8.3                      gdbm 3.0.0

zlib 1.2.3                      zlib - 1.2.8-2

expat 2.0.1                     expat 1.6.0

Sablotron 1.0.3                 ** Developer support has been dropped **

libxml 2.8.0                    libxml 2.7.8

Ming 0.4.5                      Ming 0.4.3-2 - not installed **

Webalizer 2.23-05               replaced by awffull 3.5.1-5 - not installed **

pdf class 0.11.7                pdf class - not installed

ncurses 5.9                     ncurses 5.9-1

mod_perl 2.0.8                  mod_perl 2.0.5-1

FreeTDS 0.91                    FreeTDS 0.82-1 - not installed **

gettext 0.18.1.1                gettext 0.18.2

IMAP C-Client 2007e             IMAP 2004g-4 - installed by task-lamp

OpenLDAP (client) 2.4.21        OpenLADP 2.4.33-1

mcrypt 2.5.8                    php-mcrypt 5.325-1 - installed by task-lamp

mhash 0.9.9.9                   mhash 2.0.1

eAccelerator 0.9.6.1            eAccelerator0.9.6.1-1 - installed by task-lamp

cURL 7.30.0                     cURL 4.3.0

libxslt 1.1.28                  libxslt 1.1.26

libapreq 2.12                   libapreq - not installed

FPDF 1.7                        libpdflib-lite 7.0.5-3 - not installed **

bzip 1.0.6                      bzip2 1.0.6

ICU4C Library 4.8.1             ICU4C data Library 51.2-1

APR (1.4.6)                     APR 1.4.1-1 - not installed **

APR-utils (1.5.1)               APR-utils 1.4.1-1 - not installed **

** Can be installed using Synaptic

I installed task-lamp to begin with.

Just what is task-lamp you ask ?

According to Synaptic it is a Metapackage for the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Proftp, PHP and Perl serveX.

This package is a meta-package, meaning that its purpose is to contain dependencies for running LAMP-server, allowing easy installation of a comprehensive LAMP testing/development setup. For a production server, you may prefer to install a subset of the dependencies.

What does LAMP mean?

That depends on just who you ask, but one thing we can say for sure is it stands for

L - Linux it runs on our favorite operating System.

A - Apache, the workhorse of all web servers.

M - MySQL database

P - Perl and PHP -- some even say Python.

The first thing to do is open the Synaptic package manager, refresh it and then check task-lamp for installation. It may take you sometime to install task-lamp with its dependencies.

After installing task-lamp, I opened a console window as root and started the two major services.

apache - mysqld, using the following commands:

service httpd start

service mysqld start

You should see something like this after entering each command.

Now opening my favorite web browser I entered the following URL: http://localhost

Yes, my web server is alive and answering http requests.

The next thing I want to do is check that phpmyadmin is working, and that the MySQL database is accessible. So browse to http://localhost/phpmyadmin.

The normal password for phpmyadmin is:

username: root

password: blank

What's this?

Now what are we going to do? We have two options at this point. The first is opening an editor as root and changing the /etc/my.cnf file, or doing the changes via the command line. I am going to opt out for changing the /etc/my.cnf file. I am going to be using the nano editor.

In the console window as root I type in the following command

nano /etc/my.cnf

This magically opens the the my.cnf file. All I just have to find the variable called “AllowNoPassword” . The Ctrl + w key lets me search. I enter AllowNoPassword and press return.

Now we want to change the highlighted line to read like this

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] = true;

We want to change the variable from “false” to “true”. Now we need to save the file so we press the Ctrl + x key and we are asked if we want to save the modified buffer. Press Y. Now nano will display the name of the file to write to, just press the Enter key. Nano will now save your file and close. While we are at the console wind we want to make sure that php re-reads its configuration file. Enter the following command:

service httpd restart

You should see something like this:

[root@localhost phpmyadmin]# service httpd restart

Shutting down httpd:             [ OK ]

Starting httpd:                  [ OK ]

[root@localhost phpmyadmin]#

Now lets go back to our web browser and try accessing phpmyadmin again: http://localhost/phpmyadmin.

Enter root as the username and leave the password box empty and then press go. If all works as planned we should see something like this.

If you made it this far, pat yourself on the back. We now have an operational web server - mysql database server - with phpmyadmin.

Lets make sure that httpd (apache) and the MySQL database starts each time you turn on your computer.

Open a console window as root, and enter the following commands:

chkconfig mysqld on

chkconfig httpd on

You will see something like the following images. Don't be alarmed by the warnings that will be displayed.

Now every time that you boot your computer both the httpd service (web server) and your MySQL database will be started. If you find you need or want a ftp server, all you have to do is open Synaptic and choose which one you want to use. The major ones are pure-ftpd - vsftpd and pro-ftpd. I have written recent articles in the PCLinuxOS Magazine about installing and configuring each of these ftp servers.

I do suggest that no matter which route you go to install your web server be it XAMMP or task-lamp that you consider installing webmin to administrate your new web server. If you use webmin with XAMMP you will have to change all the configuration paths for each module in webmin to work, since XAMPP stores its files and configurations in non standard places.

NOTE: running your database without a root password is very, very insecure. Before doing anything else you should add a password to your MySQL database. It only takes a few moments of your time and will save you a lot of headaches down the road. NOTE: in the time it took you to read this NOTICE you could have already changed your database password. I can not state this enough, PLEASE ADD A PASSWORD to your database.

Configuration and log files paths

web server root directory /var/www/html

web server configuration /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

mySQL configuration /etc/my.cnf

php configuration /etc/php.ini

phpMyAdmin configuration /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

web server log files /var/log/httpd

OK, so now, let's have a look at XAMPP

What is XAMPP ?

X - means that the package can run under anyone of the following operating systems.

- OS X

- Windows

- Solaris

- Linux

A - stands for Apache, Our workhorse web server.

M - stand for the MySQL database

p - stands for perl

P - stands for PHP

You can download the latest version of XAMPP from the apachefriends website. Once you have downloaded and saved XAMPP file it is time to run and install it. I have saved the XAMPP file to my ~/download directory.

I will open a console window as the root user and then change into my Downloads folder. Since this is a installer script we need to give it permission to execute (run). In the console window as root enter the following command:

chmod 755 xampp-linux-1.8.2-2-installer.run

Now we just need to execute the file (run it). Enter the command:

./xampp-linux-1.8.2-2-installer.run

That's it. The program is now going to installing the required files.

Now is the time for a coffee break, as this part takes a bit of time. Ahh, it is finally complete.

Now we just click on finish and let's see what we get. Well, not a lot, except the window closes. It did have the Launch XAMPP box checked.

We will go the /opt/lampp directory and start it using the following command:

/opt/lampp/lampp start

Ahh, now this is better. Looks like things are up and running. Let's open our favorite web browser and go to http://localhost and see what happens. Success!!!

A matter of security (A MUST READ!)

XAMPP is not meant for production use but only for developers in a development environment. The way XAMPP is configured is to be open as possible and allowing the developer anything he/she wants. For development environments, this is great, but in a production or home environment, it could be fatal.

Here a list of missing security in XAMPP:

1. The MySQL administrator (root) has no password.

2. The MySQL daemon is accessible via network.

3. ProFTPD uses the password "lampp" for user "daemon".

4. PhpMyAdmin is accessible via network.

5. Examples are accessible via network.

6. MySQL is running under "mysql".

7. Apache is running under "daemon".

I have found that phpmyadmin has the same problem when it comes to entering the roots password as a blank. This time you will need to edit the conf.inc.php file, but from the /opt/lampp/etc/phpmyadmin folder to make the needed corrections.

Configuration and log files paths

/opt/lampp/bin/                         The XAMPP commands home.

/opt/lampp/bin/mysql                    calls for example the MySQL monitor.

/opt/lampp/htdocs/                      The Apache DocumentRoot directory.

/opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf               The Apache configuration file.

/opt/lampp/etc/my.cnf                   The MySQL configuration file.

/opt/lampp/etc/php.ini                  The PHP configuration file.

/opt/lampp/etc/proftpd.conf             The ProFTPD configuration file. (since 0.9.5)

/opt/lampp/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php    The phpMyAdmin configuration file.

Please remember that the document folders and files are not in the standard location when using XAMPP.

To stop XAMPP simply call this command:

/opt/lampp/lampp stop

You should now see:

Stopping LAMPP 1.8.2...

LAMPP: Stopping Apache...

LAMPP: Stopping MySQL...

LAMPP stopped.

And XAMPP for Linux is stopped.

To remove XAMPP from your system simply type in the following command

rm -rf /opt/lampp

So how do I compare XAMPP to task-lamp ?

from a range of 0-5 with 5 being easy and 0 being poor

XAMPP          task-lamp

Installation ease               4                4

install time                    4                4

document/file locations         1                4

security                        1                4

ease of removal                 5                2

Personalize Chrome With My Chrome Theme

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Google Chrome -- the browser, not the OS -- has wasted no time at all winning over Internet users. Recent figures show that, despite coming to the party late, Google Chrome has the largest market share for web browsers. It has surpassed its competition -- Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. -- in garnering the largest usage among those browsing the web. All of this seemingly occurred overnight (even though it didn't), especially when you consider how long the competition has been around.

Here are the figures for August, 2013:

Internet Explorer:      11.8%

Firefox:                28.2%

Chrome:                      52.9%

Safari:                 3.9%

Opera:                  1.8%

There are a few things that has lead to the popularity of Google's web browser. Stability and speed top that list, along with a wide availability of popular plugins that extend the browser's functionality. Among that assortment of plugins is one called "My Chrome Theme."

My Chrome Theme allows the user to personalize their copy of Google Chrome, and it even allows them to share that theme with other users. Just to be sure that your customization handiwork isn't lost, you can even download your completed theme as a *.zip file.

One way to get to where you can install an additional extension into Google Chrome is to select "Settings" from the Google Chrome menu, clicking on "Extensions" on the left upper side of the screen, then going to the end of the list and selecting the "Get More Extensions" link. The other way to install an extension into Google Chrome is to simply open a new tab and display the installed apps. On that screen select the "Store" icon, then search for "my chrome theme" in the Chrome Web Store, and click on "My Chrome Theme" in the list. However you get there, you should see something similar to the image above.

When you get the dialog box similar to the one above, click on the "Add" button.

In the next dialog box, specify where you want a shortcut to My Chrome Theme installed. By "Applications menu," it is referring to the "Apps" screen in Google Chrome. Next, go to the "Apps" screen in Google Chrome. The easiest way to do that is to open a new tab, and click on the Apps marker at the bottom of Google Chrome's "New Tab" tab. Click on the icon for My Chrome Theme.

First, you need to provide an image to use for the background of your "New Tab" window. Most people will want to upload an image from their computer. You can also do a capture from a webcam. Once you have selected your image, click on the "Continue to Step 2" button at the upper right. This step is optional, believe it or not.

You can opt to have a plain, solid color background instead. If the latter is your choice (maybe you just want to colorize the tabs, tab background and main window background), simply click on the "Continue to Step 2" button at the upper right. Google Chrome will give you a "DOH!" message, informing you that you haven't selected an image, and asking you if you want to proceed. Simply tell Google Chrome "Yes" to proceed.

If you selected an image, you will be given a chance to adjust the image position, add image effects, or select a new image. The slider at the bottom allows you to select between "design mode" and "preview mode." All that preview mode does is superimpose a representation of the apps that display on your Apps screen over the top of the image, to give you an idea of what your image might look like beneath the icons.

Under "Step 2" of the process, you can select custom colors for the foreground tab, the background tab, and the color of the window beneath the tabs. Simply select the paintbrush icon above the corresponding part, then select the desired color from the color palette that is displayed.

If you opted to not display a picture, a fourth paint brush icon will be displayed to allow you the opportunity to set the main window background color. This step is also optional, allowing you to set only an image and keep the default colors. Once you have the theme colors set how you like (or if you are just keeping the default colors), click on the "Continue to Step 3" button at the upper right side of the screen.

The next screen gives you a preview of all of your choices. Give your new theme a name. I called this theme BabyRyan. Then, click on the "Make my theme!" button in the upper right corner of the window.

On the next screen, click on the "Install My Theme" button. Here, you can also share your theme with others, by clicking on the "Share Theme" button. You can also start over by clicking on "Make A New Theme" towards the bottom part of the window.

With my new theme, BabyRyan, created and installed, opening up a new tab in Google Chrome displays as shown above.

To manage your custom Google Chrome themes, simply start the My Chrome Theme app and scroll to the bottom of the screen. There, you will see thumbnails of your created themes. Click on the desired theme, and you will be given the chance to install or share your theme. Hover your mouse over the thumbnail, and you will notice an "X" in the upper right corner of the thumbnail. Clicking on the "X" will delete the custom theme. You can also click on the "Find More Themes In The Chrome Store" below the thumbnail display strip, and you can find and install additional Google Chrome themes. There is no option to edit a current theme. Instead, you will need to start over and make a new theme.

On my computers, I typically have both Google Chrome and the open source version, Chromium, installed. I do this for a couple of different reasons that I choose to not go into at this time. Sometimes, things I do in one browser -- either Chrome or Chromium -- will show up in the other. This is not the case with My Chrome Theme. While My Chrome Theme works in both versions of the browser, you will have to recreate the theme in the "other" browser if you want it to display in both.

Summary

My Chrome Theme takes personalization of a web browser to a whole new level. Firefox may have Personas, but My Chrome Theme makes it much easier for the average user (even those who may not be particularly "computer savvy") to customize their web browser experience.

Game Zone: Forced

by daiashi

About The Game

Forced is a one- to four-player co-op arcade action RPG with puzzle and tactical elements. You are cast as slaves in the toughest fantasy gladiator school of them all, condemned to fight as a gladiator and eventually win your freedom. You will face deadly trials and huge creatures, but Balfus, your Spirit Mentor, will guide you in your quest for recognition.

System requirements:

Fully updated PCLinuxOS and Steam

Hardware:

Minimum:

OS: PCLinuxOS

Processor: 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory: 2 GB RAM

Graphics: DirectX 9.0c-compatible, SM 3.0-compatible

Hard Drive: 5 GB available space

Recommended:

OS: PCLinuxOs

Processor: QuadCore 2.0 GHz +

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GT 120 / ATI Radeon HD

Hard Drive: 5 GB available space

About The Company

BetaDwarf was formed by a small group of persons, who moved into a classroom at a University in Denmark. It took the University seven months before a lecturer accidently walked into the room and realized that eight guys actually lived in one of their classrooms. So BetaDwarf was thrown out and the group decided to move together into a big house, where they made a successful kickstarter company, and are now on their third year of development on FORCED.

Some Gameplay Screenshots

Getting It To Run

Install Steam (if you don't have it installed already), then start it. You will need to create a new account, if you do not already have one. Once you have Steam up and running, go to the store tab. Click on the Linux tab if you wish and search for Forced. Click on and download the demo. If you have updated your system, including graphics drivers, you should be good to go.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/96200/

A Lesson: Why It's Important To Learn The Command Line

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

With today's modern desktops, using Linux has never been easier. Linux is no longer the solitary bastion of computer geekdom. The well thought out and user friendly graphical user desktops available for Linux insulate many users from the often perceived difficulty of the Linux command line. Running Linux is no more difficult than running any of the commercially available operating systems. Today, many Linux users can control their hardware and favorite operating system without ever having to touch or look at a command line prompt.

As a result, many Linux users don't even bother to learn how to operate or navigate Linux from the Linux command line. To some of those users, just opening a terminal session is wrought with anxiety, fear and trepidation.

But what would you do if, all of a sudden, your favorite graphical desktop stopped working properly? Would you be able to "fix" your beloved graphical desktop from the command line? Unfortunately, for many Linux users, the answer to this question is a resounding NO.

Disaster Hits Home

Let me use a personal account of something that happened to me not all that long ago. Without some prowess and ability to utilize every tool at my disposal -- including the command line in a terminal session -- I'm not sure that I'd have been able restore my desktop to fully functional status, without having to do a full reinstallation.

I don't keep it any kind of huge secret that my favorite desktop environment is Xfce. I have the Xfce desktop installed on most of the computers in my house (and that's quite a few). But being the magazine editor, I also have one computer that has a "bare metal installation" of KDE. I also have full installations of LXDE, Mate and e17 in VirtualBox.

One day in the not too distant past, I was updating KDE on that particular computer. The update from Synaptic seemed to go without a hitch. However, on that particular day, for some reason, I didn't immediately restart the computer. Not too long after I finished the update, plasma-desktop crashed. It didn't just crash. It crashed H-A-R-D. Please don't get me wrong -- this is not an attempt to malign KDE. It just happens to be that this problem occurred on my KDE installation.

I thought it would be a simple logout then log back in, and my desktop would be back just the way I had it configured. Nope. That wasn't to be. When my KDE desktop reappeared, my wallpaper was there, along with the YAWP desktop applet. That was all. I knew other things were running. I was getting notifications that Yakuake and my wireless connection had started, and I was getting email notifications of new emails from checkgmail, which I also run.

However, I had no panel. Nada. Not even a sign or hint of a panel. All of my panel launchers were gone. Also gone was the PC menu, from where you can typically launch all of your programs. No task area. No notification area. Just a big empty spot (now filled in with just the wallpaper) where my panel used to be.

In my mind's eye, I could easily imagine the horror and panic a less experienced user might experience. Trust me, even for as long as I've been using Linux (including the command line), the situation caused a fairly good sized lump to form in my throat. So now it was time to put on my detective hat and figure out what went wrong.

Right clicking on the desktop, I discovered that I still had access to the context menus. First, I tried to launch KDE's "Configure Your Desktop" control panel. My plan was to simply eliminate and then rebuild my panel. But no, the control panel wouldn't launch. It complained about not being able to find a library named icu18n. I searched through the PCLinuxOS forum (on another nearby computer) and discovered what package provided that particular library.

I then returned to the computer that has KDE installed on it. Since I received the notification that Yakuake had successfully started, I tried the keyboard shortcut that caused Yakuake to open (I love having a Quake-style drop down terminal just a keystroke away). Phew! Yakuake opened with a familiar command line prompt. Because I had just run updates from Synaptic, I knew (hoped?) that I had an up-to-date package list. I also knew, thanks to the notifications, that I also had wireless access.

Armed with the name of the package that contained the missing library file, it was time to reinstall the library from the command line. Also, knowing that only the root user has the necessary privileges to install stuff from the repository, I knew that I could do this from the command line only if I performed this task as the root user.

First, I entered su, followed by the root user's password on my system. Success! The command line prompt changed to red. Next, I entered apt-get install [package-name] at the root prompt in Yakuake (substituting the name of the package that contained the icu18n file for [package-name]). With the package successfully installed, I restarted the computer.

With bated breath, I eagerly awaited the resurrection of my seriously ill KDE desktop. But no, it wasn't to be. It still appeared as it had before, still without a panel. Drats! But now, I had a fully functioning KDE Configure Your Desktop. There were no more complaints of icu18n being AWOL.

Out of curiosity, I logged into KDE as the root user. I wanted to see if the root user account still had a panel. If it did, then I could safely deduce that the problem was with a file in the /home directory of my user account. Otherwise, it would indicate that there was a problem with some of the core KDE files. Tada! The root user account still had a panel.

Whenever a new user account is created, each user account is created with the same configuration and options. It is then up to the individual user to tailor the appearance and configuration of their desktop. Anyone who has been around for a while (and paying attention) will/should know that those basic user configurations are stored in /etc/skel. If you didn't know that, you do now.

From a previous issue I had on KDE, I knew the location and name of the configuration file that controls a lot of the plasma desktop applets on my computer. The path and filename of that file is ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc. It also happens to control my panel and the panel's notifications area.

I logged back into my normal user account. First, I opened the file in a text editor, but couldn't see anything flagrantly wrong. So, instead of trying to debug it (which could have taken hours), I renamed the existing plasma-desktop-appletsrc file by appending ".new" to the end of it. Since there was already a backup file right next to it, I removed the ".bak" extension on the file, the logged out and back in. Sure enough, I had a panel back on my desktop. But that backup copy was from the one that I had problems with before. I then renamed that file to have an ".old" file extension.

So, I logged back into the root user account, and went to the default configuration files in /etc/skel. I found the plasma-desktop-appletsrc file there, and copied it to my normal user directory (in the path listed above … the file has to be in the right place).

My KDE4 desktop, after resurrection.

Logging back out of the root user account, I logged back into my normal user account. Lo' and behold, I now had a panel again on my desktop. Yay! All I had left to do was to change my wallpaper from the default wallpaper that was displayed, and restore my YAWP plasma applet back to the desktop.

The Value Of The Command Line

In this instance, having some command line knowledge -- specifically, knowing how to reinstall the missing icu18n library file with apt-get -- was key to resurrecting my KDE desktop. I also don't underestimate the value of knowing something about the configuration files for KDE. Without that knowledge, my only solution would have been to reinstall KDE.

So, where can you learn how to use the Linux command line? The first place to look would be to download The PCLinuxOS Magazine Command Line Interface Intro Special Edition from the magazine's website. Pete Kelly, a.k.a. critter, created an awesome 12-part introduction to the command line interface that walks a user from the very basics of command line use through more complicated commands and topics.

Another excellent source of information to learn the Linux command line is The Linux Command Line, by William E. Shotts, Jr. It's a free download, released under the Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. This 527 page PDF ebook starts from the very beginning and walks you through all aspects of the Linux command line.

Sometimes, you just need a quick memory jogger, and that is where the Bash Cheat Sheet comes in handy. This PDF document doesn't provide any in depth explanations. Rather, it just provides the command with a very brief explanation.

Linux Fundamentals, by Paul Cobbaut, is another all inclusive PDF ebook that will be useful for Linux users of all experience levels. Everyone from the newest Linux noob to the most hardened-in-the-trenches veteran will find something useful within its pages. This ebook was just updated in August 2013, so the data is very up-to-date.

Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide, by Machtelt Garrels is a 223 page PDF ebook that covers all aspects of working with Linux, including some command line usage. It is released by The Linux Documentation Project, a.k.a. TLDP.

If you are interested in proceeding on to creating your own bash scripts (it would be best to learn your way around the basic command line first), then the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide, by Mendel Cooper, is the book for you. This 907 page PDF ebook covers all things related to creating bash scripts. I will personally attest to the value of this reference book. When I'm writing a bash script, this tome is never far away (and usually opened in a PDF reader on another desktop).

There are many other references available on the web. Just perform an internet search for them. If you prefer your reference resource to be in PDF format, just append "pdf" to your search criteria. These six resources should keep you plenty busy and get you off to a good start.

Summary

So, I was successful in resurrecting my KDE desktop from the throes of death. Sure, I could have simply reinstalled my KDE desktop from a current Live CD. But then, I'd have to spend a considerable amount of time tailoring KDE to how I like it to be, reinstalling all the programs I use, and getting everything just how I like them to be. Plus, if I re-installed KDE, what would I have learned in the process? Nothing, whatsoever. There's also a feeling of accomplishment when you're able to resurrect a seriously ill system.

While the Linux GUI desktops are very good and typically very stable, you'll do yourself a favor by knowing how to navigate your system and the command line. Fortunately, those skills may not be needed very often, but are priceless when needed.

PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions

Sudoku

SUDOKU RULES

There is only one valid solution to each Sudoku puzzle. The only way the puzzle can be considered solved correctly is when all 81 boxes contain numbers and the other Sudoku rules have been followed.

When you start a game of Sudoku, some blocks will be prefilled for you. You cannot change these numbers in the course of the game.

Each column must contain all of the numbers 1 through 9 and no two numbers in the same column of a Sudoku puzzle can be the same. Each row must contain all of the numbers 1 through 9 and no two numbers in the same row of a Sudoku puzzle can be the same.

Each block must contain all of the numbers 1 through 9 and no two numbers in the same block of a Sudoku puzzle can be the same.

Puzzle solution can be found here.

Tux Scrappler

SCRAPPLER RULES:

1. Follow the rules of Scrabble®. You can view them here. You have seven (7) letter tiles with which to make as long of a word as you possibly can. Words are based on the English language. Non-English language words are NOT allowed.

2. Red letters are scored double points. Green letters are scored triple points.

3. Add up the score of all the letters that you used. Unused letters are not scored. For red or green letters, apply the multiplier when tallying up your score. Next, apply any additional scoring multipliers, such as double or triple word score.

4. An additional 50 points is added for using all seven (7) of your tiles in a set to make your word. You will not necessarily be able to use all seven (7) of the letters in your set to form a "legal" word.

5. In case you are having difficulty seeing the point value on the letter tiles, here is list of how they are scored:

0 points: 2 blank tiles

1 point: E, A, I, O, N, R, T, L, S, U

2 points: D, G

3 points: B, C, M, P

4 points: F, H, V, W, Y

5 points: K

8 points: J, X

10 points: Q, Z

6. Optionally, a time limit of 60 minutes should apply to the game, averaging to 12 minutesper letter tile set.

7. Have fun! It's only a game!

Puzzle solution can be found here.

Vehicle Crossword

1. boat with large sail which can be raced

2. arctic transportation

3. 2-wheeled motorized vehicle

4. farmers use this to pull the planter or mower

5. wealthy people travel on this

6. huge tourist boat

7. military combat vehicle

8. flies with rotors rather than wings

9. 2-wheeled vehicle which comes in may sizes

10. long, narrow boat that must be paddled

11. farm implement that harvests grain

12. motorized camping trailer

13. long car which can hold many rich people

14. cleans & smooths the ice at the skating rink

15. Mom's car, often

Puzzle solution can be found here.

Vehicle Word Search

airplane        all terrain vehicle     ambulance

automobile      battleship              bicycle

canoe           cruise ship             combine

dogsled         ferry                   golf cart  (shows as separate words)

helicopter      limousine               minivan

moped           motorboat               motorcycle

motorhome       sailboat                scooter

tank            tractor                 train

truck           wagon                   yacht

zamboni

Puzzle solution can be found here.

Screenshot Showcase

Posted by: Actarus5       Running KDE4

Posted by: coffeetime       Running LXDE

Posted by: Crow      Running KDE4

Posted by: kensum       Running KDE4

Posted by: nymira      Running KDE4

Posted by: OnlyHuman       Running e17

Posted by: RobNJ       Running LXDE

Posted by: TerryH       Running Mate

Posted by: weirdwolf       Running LXDE

Posted by: xredded       Running KDE4