WACKYD, LIBWACKY and the WACKY Protocol
wackyd (pronounced wacky-dee) is a daemon that controls the LED lights on your extended keyboard. By default it sets the lights in motion in a Knight Rider pattern. Knight Rider was a very stupid American television show. Its only redeeming social value was, of course, the blinking lights. To wackyd that pattern looks like this: xoo,oxo,oox,oxo wackyd implements the WACKY protocol which allows it to serve as a notification system. It listens for instructions on a remote port. You’ve got mail? Change the keyboard pattern. You want to let a co-worker know that the boss is coming? Change HIS keyboard pattern. The possibilites are endless… Check out WACKYD on JoeDog.org … Read entire article »
Filed under: Desktop
How is your Linux desktop set up normally?
I’m currently using Fedora 16 with Cinnamon (sp?) w/ 2 monitors and set up my apps the same each morning when I come into work. Desktop 1, Left screen: Upper/left corner I’ll have a Pidgin buddy list open for AIM conversation w/ other co-workers during the day. The chat windows for it is laying along the bottom of the left screen taking up about half the vertical aspect – A gnome-term w/ multiple tabs sits above that for IRC, ssh sessions, etc.. Desktop 1, Right screen: Chrome Browser w/ multiple tabs Desktop 2, Left screen: Firefox, multiple tabs Desktop 2, Right screen: Remmina session into my Windows VM – on that desktop just one thing is running.. XenCenter (the only reason I need a windows vm.. grr). Desktop 3, Left screen: Filezilla Desktop 3, Right screen: … Read entire article »
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A Bulletin Board for Organizing Text Notes
This piece did not set out to re-define the term, “computer bulletin board,” that is the easiest way to describe Wboard, a window that provides a background for text notes and allows you to manage and save groups of notes easily. description and source code for Wboard are at http://hubpages.com/t/2d1cfe. … Read entire article »
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Linux Games: No Gravity
No Gravity (classic) is a space arcade game with 5 game modes and it has very nice graphics, it is inspired by Wing Commander, a famous game of a few years ago that made history for the space shooter. No Gravity runs on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, Amiga... Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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Bulk renaming using Thunar
Thunar is a lightweight file manager that comes with Xubuntu and other Xfce-based distributions. It has several useful features not found in other popular file managers, like 'Bulk Rename'. To use this feature, select a group of files in the Thunar file pane and hit the F2 key, or choose Rename from the Edit menu. A window appears with 'before and after' views of your file names, and a drop-down list showing the renaming possibilities. Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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Linux Mint 13 gets back to desktop basics – Australian PC World
Bucking the trend of increasingly experimental desktop interfaces, the developers behind the Linux Mint are adopting a simpler desktop for the next version of the open-source Linux distribution. Linux Mint 13 will feature an entirely new user interface ... Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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Using Plop Boot Manager for USB Boot
Portability is a huge advantage that Linux enjoys over most other desktop operating systems as most major distros work very well when installed to a flash drive. However, there are still machines in service that just won’t play ball when it comes to USB booting. Fortunately, I found a nice little utility that can work around this problem. Carrying data around on a flash drive is handy, but with Linux, it’s possible to carry around an entire work environment. Unfortunately, however, there are some older systems that won’t boot from USB. For example, I have a Sempron 3000+ system with 2GB of RAM that won’t boot from USB, even though it’s a usable system for some things. If the BIOS doesn’t support booting from a flash drive, there’s not much that GRUB can … Read entire article »
Moving Away from Menus: Is Ubuntu’s HUD Change We Can Believe In?
Canonical and the Ubuntu folks have taken a lot of risks in the Unity interface that ships with Ubuntu Linux. One of the things that the company has been leading towards is the Head-Up Display (HUD), a new tool for controlling applications that moves away ... Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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Standard Windows & Linux Drivers for PCI Express SSDs Released by NVM Express Workgroup
The NVM Express Work Group announced the completion of several key ecosystem components: a standard Windows(TM) driver, a Linux driver and an NVM Express Test Suite. These components enable broad adoption of PCI Express (PCIe)-based solid-state drives (SSDs) that support the NVM Express specification. The NVM Express specification defines an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for PCIe-based SSDs utilized in both enterprise and client systems. … Read entire article »
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Beyond the desktop: Ubuntu Linux’s new Head-Up Display – ZDNet
Summary: Following on the heels of changing its interface from the GNOME 3.x shell to Unity, Ubuntu is proposing a new, radical change to the desktop Linux interface: Head-Up Display. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s ... Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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Object and Camera Path Tracking in Blender – "Monkey See Monkey Do"
Blender has a useful set of constraint-based animation tools which make it fairly simple to animate motion of objects or of the camera along controlled paths. I expect to use this a lot, so I want to make sure I understand how it works. Here I'm going to work out a simple example using the "Suzanne" monkey meshes in Blender 2.49 to demonstrate simple path and tracking constraints with a mesh and with the camera. Because everything is better with monkeys. Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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iFollowOffice Turns to Virtual Bridges and Savvis for On-Demand Virtual Desktop Services – DABCC.com
Organizations can manage desktops centrally, while users can access both Windows and Linux desktops from any location or device — including PCs, tablets, smartphones, laptops and thin clients. “When we partnered with Savvis, we saw a significant ... Read the full story here. … Read entire article »
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Is Steam Finally Coming to Linux?
A job posting from Valve has sparked new speculation that the developer might be bringing their popular Steam service and library of Source engine games to Linux. The listing, for a Senior Software Engineer, states that one of the position’s responsibilities will be to “port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.” … Read entire article »
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The Best Photo Management App for Linux
Linux may not have a ton of super advanced photo managers, but it has a few solid programs, the best of which is easily the near professional-grade digiKam. Full story @ LifeHacker … Read entire article »
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Ubuntu TV is Coming. Will it Find Success Among the Masses?
By now you’ve probably heard Canonical’s big announcement out of CES 2012: Ubuntu is coming to your TV (or so Canonical hopes). But what’s received less attention amid all the fanfare is the role of Unity, the Linux desktop environment on which the new TV interface is based. Since Ubuntu TV could have important, if surprising, ramifications for Unity, here are some observations to keep in mind. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Desktop