http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1266/issue_pdf by Imad Humayun

Issue 14

Table of Contents Issue 14................................................................................................................................................................1 .................................................................................................................................................................1 Editorial..............................................................................................................................................................3 On “making it”........................................................................................................................................3 GNU/Linux and WiFi........................................................................................................................................5 WiFi maniac needs aspirin and emotional support.................................................................................5 Firefox extensions: fun and games...................................................................................................................7 Or several ways to waste time................................................................................................................7 Personal privacy: on the web..........................................................................................................................13 Keep your privacy on the web with a technologically advanced onion...............................................13 Flying high with FlightGear............................................................................................................................17 A realistic experience............................................................................................................................17 Writing documents with OpenOffice.org Writer..........................................................................................23 ...because using a word processor isn’t enough....................................................................................23 Baby steps with The GIMP.............................................................................................................................31 Making a web banner using The GIMP................................................................................................31 Free Open Document label templates............................................................................................................39 Using the right tools to save time and effort.........................................................................................39 Managing users in Ubuntu..............................................................................................................................57 A short, practical guide to user management in Ubuntu and GNU/Linux............................................57 Creating a managed website—Part 1.............................................................................................................63 Focus on the message not the tools. Set up a content management system to deliver your site..........63 Spiff up your website with KImageMapEditor.............................................................................................67 A brief tutorial to a small application that can save you a large amount of time.................................67 Secure email servers from scratch with FreeBSD 6.1 (part 1).....................................................................75 Build a secure email server with FreeBSD, Postifx, ClamAV, Spamassasin, and MySQL.................75

Issue 14

Issue 14 By Tony Mobily Free Software Magazine presents another collection of great articles for its issue 14. Alan Berg takes us soaring with his review "Flying high with FlightGear" and Anthony Taylor shows us some curious Firefox extensions in "Firefox extensions: fun and games". In "Creating a managed website â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Part 1" Graham Oakes reveals a lot about content management systems. And, while we're talking about websites, Terry Hancock will "Spiff up your website with KImageMapEditor". As always, there's a lot more too... Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/issues/issue_014

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

Issue 14

Editorial On “making it” By Tony Mobily Before starting Free Software Magazine I talked to John, a friend of mine nearly twice my age. He sometimes has a rather bleak view of the world, and we disagree on many things. However, I always take pay great attention when people I generally don’t agree with turn out to be right. When I told him about the idea of creating Free Software Magazine, he said “it will take a long time to make it successful. Magazines take a while because people, readers, need to build up trust in them; and that, Tony, is not easy. You need to be consistent, and consistently good. Not easy. Not easy at all”. Some two years later (!), and after a lot of personal and professional “events”, here we are. A few similar magazines have come and gone, but we are still here. We are approaching 1 million page views per month (and that’s real, human page views!), we are consistently ranking in the top three most popular Drupal sites, and yes, we have become a point of reference for the free software world. To quote John’s words, we were consistent, and consistently good—or, to be a little more modest, at least good enough. We had the courage to change the magazine according to our readers’ requests (and sometimes demands!), which is not an easy task. We gave the magazine a much more practical approach (in fact, from this issue on the section “Mind Set” is gone) and moved the more philosophical articles to the web site. Plus, the web site itself has changed drastically twice: today, it is now a hub for well known bloggers who talk about freedom and free software. Advertising sales are finally starting (some two years later!), and we are receiving media kit enquiries more and more often. The core members of the Free Software Magazine team (myself, Dave, Gianluca and Alan) now all feel that we “made it”. Here, “making it” means that we are one of the few publication projects that lasted this long, and managed to provide free (as in freedom!) information for an extended period of time. And, things are looking bright right now. We have learned a lot in the process about the free software world, the community, marketing (!), system administration, ourselves, and another few hundred other things. But, this success would have been impossible without the fantastic help of the people who supported us along the way. Amongst those people, there are: the contributors who stuck with us since day 1; the other non-writers who kept us going; the angels at Open Hosting who gave us a fantastic deal before we were famous, and who helped us administer the server more than once for free; the established people in the free software world, who kept on sending us kind words of encouragement; the publishers, who believed in us and sponsored us before we had made it, hence giving us the possibility to get this far; and our readers, who supported us, helped us market the site, and gave a meaning to this whole project. There certainly are hurdles and challenges ahead of us. But, right now we will just sit back for a second—just for a second—and enjoy our achievements. Thank you all.

Biography Tony Mobily (/user/2" title="View user profile.): Tony is the founder and the Editor In Chief of Free Software Magazine

Copyright information Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/editorial_14

Editorial

Issue 14

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

On “making it”

GNU/Linux and WiFi WiFi maniac needs aspirin and emotional support. By Alan Berg The idea was simple: why not build my own little GNU/Linux based wireless network in a spare five minutes?

WiFi Maniac needs aspirin and emotional support Upstairs at my place there’s a play computer with lots of development tools, and... ok, a few games too, along with a WiFi router; downstairs there’s the study and an old laptop. Installing Fedora (http://fedora.redhat.com/) downstairs and Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/) upstairs was quick and painless. With a few clicks on the wizards and a sudden surge in adrenalin as I formatted the disk partitions, lots of package names whizzed by at great velocity and *puff* finished. Yes, an anticlimax of simplicity and stability. Just one small, tiny, insignificant task left, the WiFi connections. No problem, I’m not stupid. I have the power: I know how to Google. So five pages later, I need ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/) for the laptop and the Zd1211 module for the gam... um, I mean development machine. After an hour of looking at the Ubuntu machine, prodding it to see if it was still breathing, walking up and down, and nodding profoundly to my family as if I knew what I was doing, I realized the obvious: Ubuntu has the Zd1211 (http://zd1211.sourceforge.net/) driver already installed. With loud rounds of sarcastic applause ringing in my ears, I followed the readme instructions (for non root users). sudo ifconfig wlan0 sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid Sitecom key xxxxxxxxx sudo dhclient wlan0

The actions worked. And, being GNU/Linux, the actions always work. I was connected. I was the master of my WiFi universe upstairs and it only cost me two hours and a couple of dents to my ego. Luckily or perhaps not, my family hadn’t changed their collective opinion of my humanity, being a caveman I bluffed well. However, if I’d started with the black magic recipe or had read the right documents in the correct order in the first place, then the cost in real time for installation would have been less than a minute. But no one else knew that did they? Shh... it’ll be our little secret! If I’d started with the black magic recipe or had read the right documents in the correct order in the first place, then the cost in real time for installation would have been less than a minute Next the big challenge, Fedora Core 5. Core 5 sounded like a nuclear reactor and the WiFi turned out to require some real science. First, I tried the Zd1211 trick, but Zd1211 wasn’t installed. No Wlan0 interface would come up. So back to Google, which, in minutes, had turned up a tantalizing hint: ndiswrapper is a rather excellent utility that allows Windows drivers to work under GNU/Linux. The problem was that I needed to compile the wrapper. To compile you need the header files of the installed kernel. I dutifully downloaded both the 586 and 686 header files. Informed the compiler where to find the interfaces and then compiled. The code compiled cleanly and, with a highly motivated yelp of delight, I deployed the youthful binary. The wrapper didn’t work. What next? The wrong header files perhaps? Being of strong will—hardened by the day-to-day competition for food at the breakfast table—I sought out an ndiswrapper package and installed it. Failed dependencies! Finally, brute force won over intelligence, as it often does with me. I updated the kernel and installed the kernel source code and headers. Compilation worked, but guess what? I had the wrong Windows drivers. One and a half hours later finally all was good, everything works predictably, stably, and will do so until an asteroid hits the earth or my younger son decides to finger paint the internals of the hard drive. Even better, I have that feeling of killing the prey, climbing to the top of the mountain and looking down victoriously. And only for eight hours work. Or ten minutes if I did the same actions in the correct order a second time around. The moral of this story is clear. WiFi is standard functionality. GNU/Linux is shaping up as a desktop competitor against Microsoft. Tools such as Zd1211 and ndiswrapper are essential for that competition. I

GNU/Linux and WiFi

Issue 14 therefore welcome advances in the WiFi configuration field and I am happy to see that this is already occurring (http://www.devicescape.com/news/releases/release_05-01-06_opensource.php).

Notes and resources Fedora (http://fedora.redhat.com/) Fedora Update (http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/) Header files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Header_file) ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/) Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/) Zd1211 (http://zd1211.sourceforge.net/)

Biography Alan Berg (/user/8" title="View user profile.): Alan Berg Bsc. MSc. PGCE, has been a lead developer at the Central Computer Services at the University of Amsterdam for the last seven years. In his spare time, he writes computer articles. He has a degree, two masters and a teaching qualification. In previous incarnations, he was a technical writer, an Internet/Linux course writer, and a science teacher. He likes to get his hands dirty with the building and gluing of systems. He remains agile by playing computer games with his kids who (sadly) consistently beat him. You may contact him at reply.to.berg At chello.nl

Copyright information This article is made available under the "Attribution-NonCommercial" Creative Commons License 2.5 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/. Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/wifi_maniac

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

WiFi maniac needs aspirin and emotional support.

Firefox extensions: fun and games Or several ways to waste time By Anthony Taylor Firefox is more than just a web browser. It’s also a cross-platform arcade machine. No quarters necessary.

An ode to Ralph H. Baer I owe much of my life to Ralph H. Baer. Oh, he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t even know me. But that’s how it goes in these days. Much of life is owed to strangers. If you want a measure of success, I will give you a yardstick: wasted time. Or rather, leisure time. Ralph H. Baer has given many of us a legacy of time spent in front of a television, twiddling white squares around with a paddle. So it is Ralph H. Baer is a very successful man. In 1969, Ralph H. Baer invented Pong [1]. Doing so, he invented video games. I’ve sacrificed months of my life on the alter of video games since Dad and Mom purchased the family’s first Pong game back in 1977, a Sears model with detachable paddles. Blame the rainy Thorne Bay winters. Blame my budding geekness. Wherever blame may be placed, I wasted hours of my life irretrievably to those little white squares and the harsh electronic ping of the square ball. I’m obviously not the only one. There is a dictum among developers that the first program written for any new platform is “Hello, World”. There is a second dictum that the second program written must be Pong. These mandates are ignored at the programmer’s peril, though nobody really likes Pong. It’s just how things are done. Maybe we are simply trying to recapture the wonder of our childhood. If so, there’s entirely too much nostalgia in the world.

The Firefox extensions window Aside: installing Firefox extensions 1. Start Firefox. 2. Click the “Tools” menu item. 3. Select “Extensions”. 4. Down at the way-bottom-right of the “Extensions” window, click the “Get More Extensions” link. 5. Choose from the vast number of useful, semi-useful, and useless extensions. All the extensions reviewed here are in the Entertainment (https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?cat=6&app=firefox&appfilter=firefox&type=E) category.

Firefox extensions: fun and games

Issue 14

The games Pong! In the world of Firefox, there are not one, but two versions of Pong. Both offer the same great gameplay. One has the added advantage of using a square ball. The other includes the ability to play against others in an on-line Pong deathmatch. Eduardo Garcia Lopez is responsible for PingPong 0.7 (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1724/), a simple implementation of the classic game, replete with nostalgic touches such as the square ball and hard-to-control paddles. I bow to you, Eduardo. Your love of old games surpasses mine. Eduardo is not the only one to turn my more-or-less modern computer into the 1969 equivalent of a wooden box full of a handful of tubes and a pound of copper wire. Captain Caveman has devoted hours of his or her life to develop the finely-crafted PONG! Multiplayer 2.2 (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/554/). The good Captain’s effort has turned out a slightly more modern version of the game, with an octogon of a ball, and sound, and smoother paddle movement. There is ostensibly an on-line component of the game, but tales of my mad, mad PONG! skillz precede me. I have yet to find a challenger in the two times I checked the lobby. In the end, they are still just Pong. Both games attempt to take up residence in that empty pit where my childhood innocence once stood, wide-eyed with a paddle in its hand. Those times are passed, though, and now Pong just doesn’t suit. It’s like playing Aztec on an Apple ][ emulator. The memory of Pong is stronger than Pong itself. In the end, they are still just Pong Pacman In the long-ago, far-away years of the video arcade, no game captured the hearts and quarters of boys and girls like Pacman. Part of it was the mystery—who was this man of the Pac? Represented by a chomping circle of yellow, Pacman wore an eternal expression of mild amusement as he alternately ran from, and then toward, the evil quartet of ghosts. He typified the American dream: scarf pills and fruits while running from impossible fears, until the terrifying moment when he is touched by a ghost and the wedge of his mouth eats his own head. I still have nightmares. There are two Firefox options for this classic game. The first is Ingo Oppermann’s Pacman 1.1.0 (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2053/). Mr. Oppermann has gone for the 286-era computer game feel, rather than the realistic arcade experience. The graphics are rudimentary, the gameboards lack the tunnels of the original game, and the sound effects are present but elementary. This was a wise decision on his part. Arcades were highly overrated. The game has a simple, clean feel to it, and is quite playable. The second is the manlier PagMan 1.0 (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2160/), by mackers. Mackers has given a silent but sturdy reproduction of the original arcade game. The movement is a little choppy, but the game is both visually appealing and true to the original. I do miss the intermission chase scenes, though, and the tinny, synthetic music that has been emulated by the likes of Ms. Pacman, The Postal Service, and that guy who did Pacman Fever. All-in-all, both Pacman variants are worth a good ten minutes of playtime, at a minimum. Card tricks Want to know what I hate? Among other things, I really don’t like computerized card games that play themselves for me. A three-by-five pack of cards is probably a bit more convenient to tote around than a six-pound laptop, and the physical cards have the added benefit of not playing themselves.

Or several ways to waste time

Issue 14 Mr. Stephen Clavering has produced a very-complete Cards 0.98 (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1562/) extension for Firefox. It suffers only from one great problem: clicking on a card causes it to automatically move to an appropriate stack. This leads me to wonder: What’s the point? There is nothing so patronizing as a game that won’t let you play it yourself. Randomly clicking on cards causes them to fly about the gamefield willy-nilly, not allowing you the chance to not notice the black queen that could go on the red king. Except for that complaint, Cards is an excellent extension with 39 games, the majority to which nobody knows the rules. There is nothing so patronizing as a game that won’t let you play it yourself Rocks Remember Asteroids, the cool game in which you destroy space rocks by striking them with your spaceship? Mackers, fresh from the PagMan victory, has given to the world Mozteroids (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2157/), an impossible-to-control variant of the old vector-graphics classic. Don’t get me wrong, Mozteroids looks pretty, in a pixelated sort of way. But the ship either spins too slowly, or too quickly, and moves as if it has been blindfolded and spun around until it cried, and its brothers teased it and called it a crybaby. It blows up nicely, though. So do the rocks. The ship either spins too slowly, or too quickly, and moves as if it has been blindfolded and spun around until it cried, and its brothers teased it and called it a crybaby

Look out for the alligators! Amphibious delight Mackers, mackers mackers. You have given us PagMan and Mozteriods. Who could ask for more? And yet you insist. Your piece de resistance? Froggr (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2165/). A subtle, strange game in which you push a hapless frog in front of a convoy of tankers carrying toxic chemicals, or perhaps under the wheels of the never-ending stream of fast-moving sports cars. Or perhaps the poor beast is eaten by a hungry, grinning alligator. In all the various ways the frog can die, none is more satisfying than pushing it into a cave at the far end of the field, where it is turned to stone in a wide-mouthed monument to traffic-avoiding, alligator-starving amphibians everywhere. This is perhaps my favorite game of all.

Or several ways to waste time

Issue 14 Falling-block puzzles Mr. Stephen Clavering has done it again, in a good way. His Blockfall (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1403/) game is an aestheticly pleasing version of Tetris. It starts off slowly, but increases speed at an adequate rate. The blocks are pleasantly shaded, with excellent hues. In a fit of madness or genius, Stephen has included two additional modes: hexagonal blocks, or triangular blocks. Both are substantially more difficult than the regulation square block. If you think you are a tetris master, you might consider this a challange. Mackers provides an excellent Tetris entry with Xultris 2.2 (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2155/). Although this is a more prosaic rendition of Tetris, the gameplay is quite traditional and quite fun. The animated blue-flame background is a nice touch. Also-rans There are other games available for Firefox, as well. There’s a really nifty car race game called Xoom (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2159/) (by none other than the prolific mackers). There’s a Minesweeper-like game called Mines (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1049/). There are more, many more. Explore the Entertainment (https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?cat=6&app=firefox&appfilter=firefox&type=E) section of the Firefox extensions repository (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/). These are all quite fun little games. As tastes vary, you may find you enjoy some I didn’t, and despise some I enjoyed. This is the spice of life.

Why games? With all the high-tech, attention-grabbing, CPU-sucking, highly-graphical games in the world, it’s difficult to understand the goodness and fun of these silly little games written in the least-efficient manner possible. Firefox was never designed as a gaming platform, and yet its extensibility has drawn a few adventurous game programmers. Why is this important? In the install instructions, there is no distinction between OS X and MS-Windows, GNU/Linux or *BSD. These are the first games, the trials and experiments. With a little luck, we’ll see bigger, more advanced games written in a truly platform-independent manner, downloadable and playable with the ease of Firefox extensibility, with no question of your platform-of-choice. And if we don’t, these games are still fun diversions, enjoyable in the most fundamental video game tradition: the tradition of Pong and Pacman. I give thanks to Ralph H. Baer. Smiling at me from the bottom of my Firefox window, Abe Vigoda seems to amiably agree.

Notes and resources [1] Winter, David “PONG-Story” (http://www.pong-story.com/),

Biography Anthony Taylor (/user/9" title="View user profile.): Tony Taylor was born, causing his mother great discomfort, and has lived his life ever since. He expects to die some day. Until that day, he hopes to continue writing, and living out his childhood dream of being a geek.

Copyright information This article is made available under the "Attribution-Sharealike" Creative Commons License 2.5 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/.

Or several ways to waste time

Issue 14 Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/firefox_extension_fun_games

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

Or several ways to waste time

Issue 14

Or several ways to waste time

Personal privacy: on the web Keep your privacy on the web with a technologically advanced onion By Robin Monks With internet privacy being invaded more and more by governmental agencies, advertising programs and statistical systems (not to mention ISPs gone bad), personal privacy would seem to be a lost cause. But all is not lost! Thanks to some great free software you can make your online presence private once again.

Tor: The onion router An onion router is the most effective way to be anonymous on the internet; it allows you to: • protect your location (that is, your IP address) from websites; • mask the destination of packets you send; • mask the origin of packets from sites and other nodes; • protects the packet’s contents via encryption; It works by “routing” your traffic through various nodes like the layers of an onion. Each node has no idea where the packet came from; also, nobody (except the exit node) actually knows where your traffic will end up. The exit nodes change constantly, which means that you might appear to be from Spain one minute, and from France the next. This makes requests to sites, for all general purposes, untraceable. Each Tor client also has the option of becoming a node or exit node in the network; since traffic from all (except the exit nodes) is encrypted, donating some of your bandwidth to become a node will actually increase your security: even if somebody logs all of your traffic, they will be unable to determine if the logged traffic is yours or if it’s just being routed through your system. This way, deciphering data is as hard as taking the eggs out after you baked the cake! Thanks to Tor’s encryption, routing and constant path switching, Tor is an asset to any surfer. Tor baffles tracking software, crackers and traffic loggers, not to mention being a pretty cheap way to get some extra security over Wi-Fi or on public PCs. On top of all that, Tor also provides a feature called “hidden services” that allows you to run a webserver and get a Tor address (eg: http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/ leads to the Tor “hidden wiki”, you’ll need a version of Tor installed and running in order to view that link) for other uses. A Tor *.onion URL, for all extensive purposes, cannot be traced back to the host machine. (You’d need to ensure that the server is secured, error pages don’t give out your IP, etc.) This makes Tor hidden services a perfect tool for government change groups in countries like China.

Installing Tor There are two methods of getting Tor easily. The first, and easiest, method of connecting to the anonymous Tor network is with the prepackaged TorPark (a Tor and Firefox combination). TorPark is also great on a flashdisk while traveling. The second method, which also allows you to run a Tor node as well as a client, is the official Tor distribution, which is available for most any OS and comes with a nice installer for Windows. Both of these methods use entirely free software; TorPark’s launcher is released under the GPL, Firefox is MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license and Tor itself is free software under the 3-clause BSD license. I’ll walk though the installation via of both of these methods below.

Personal privacy: on the web

Issue 14 TorPark

TorPark running the Harvard Tor test, and passing. TorPark (http://torpark.nfshost.com/) is by far the easiest way to get up and running with Tor. TorPark comes pre-assembled in a zip file. Just download the zip, extract it to a folder and run. TorPark doesn’t require any pre-configuration, the handy launcher configures Tor and launches a bundled copy of Firefox with some handy privacy extensions pre-installed.

TorPark’s startup screen. There are some downsides to TorPark though. Firstly, it only enables Tor on the bundled Firefox. Second, it only runs on Windows (although the author seems willing to develop a version (http://torpark.nfshost.com/faq.html) for Mac). TorPark’s real power shines though when it is used on a USB flashdrive. You can take TorPark to a public library or traveling and not have to worry about privacy; plus, you can take your favorites and extensions with you. The official installer

Keep your privacy on the web with a technologically advancedonion

Issue 14

The official Tor installer. Installing Tor with the official installer takes around five minutes and requires only moderate technical knowledge. First, you’ll need to download the installer from the Tor website (http://tor.eff.org/download.html.en) (for this article I used the “Windows development” branch 0.1.1.19-rc). The Tor installer configures Tor, Vidalia and Proxify automatically. The Tor installer is designed to be simple to use. Just answer a few questions, and Volia! Tor’s installed. There is no need to change the default settings unless you know what you are doing, or just want to tinker around with Tor. After the wizard is complete launch Tor. The next step is to go into the browser of your choice and to change the connect settings and set up your proxy to point to Proxify, in most cases that’s 127.0.0.1 and port 8118. Firefox users can download the FoxyProxy extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2464/) which sets up Tor with Firefox automatically.

Tor’s server configuration screen. Tor’s UI also makes it easy to set up your own Tor node. Just right-click on the Onion icon in the system tray, select “Configure” and click the “Server” tab. You can also view traffic reports by clicking “Bandwidth Graph” in the system tray menu.

Conclusion I hope this meager article has opened your eyes to a new level of privacy on the web. But don’t stop here! There are many other ways to protect yourself with free software too, many of which you’ll find in the Free Software Magazine Archives (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/search/node/privacy+OR+security) (chances are whatever you’re looking for is in there, somewhere...) And also be sure to check out resources like FreshMeat (http://freshmeat.com) and SourceForge (http://sf.net). Now that your internet surfing is private again, it’s time to work on those pesky neighbors...

Keep your privacy on the web with a technologically advancedonion

Issue 14

Biography Robin Monks (/user/35" title="View user profile.): Robin Monks is a volunteer contributor to Mozilla (http://mozilla.org), Drupal (http://drupal.org), GMKing (http://gmking.org) and Free Software Magazine and has been helping free software development for over three years. He currently works as an independent contractor for CivicSpace LLC (http://civicspacelabs.org)

Copyright information This article is made available under the "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs" Creative Commons License 2.5 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/. Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1508

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

Keep your privacy on the web with a technologically advancedonion

Flying high with FlightGear A realistic experience By Alan Berg FlightGear is a top notch and highly accurate free software flight simulator. The software has no kill or be killed situations. Don’t expect arcade like dogfights and precision bombing. Such features are not included. However, with a large range of planes to choose from and with most of the world covered by accurate maps expect a realistic experience as near to a holodeck as software only can allow. FlightGear is platform agnostic, the simulator has been compiled and run under Linux, Windows, BSDUNIX, SGIIRIX, Sun-OS, and Macintosh. A flying experience makes a pleasant change of pace for me. During previous reviews of Bzflags (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/bzflags) and the battle for Wesnoth (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/wesnoth_interview_player): I have been beaten bruised, bashed, shot at and exploded hundreds of times by my irritatingly accurate elder son Nelson. Let’s raise the level of complexity and see who’s the better flyer. If you can’t beat’em then change the rules I say! Expect a realistic experience as near to a holodeck as software only can allow

Before your first attempts at flying Preparation is everything. Preparation is important before any major journey as a newbie pilot. Before running FlightGear for the first time there are a couple of potential issues to note. The first is that the basic download is rather large at 148MB (version 0.9.10). This is made worse still if later you wish to have all the models for the airplanes, flying saucers and maps of the world. For example the map of England is a tasty 58MB in size. For broadband connections this isn’t a real issue, but for road warriors and countryside dwellers this may set a high barrier for first use. A well thought out alternative approach is to buy the three DVD collection (http://cdrom.flightgear.org/) that comes with source code and a highly extensive range of maps and models. This is a good kickstart for the hours, days, and weeks of pleasure to come. The next issue to note is that flight simulators in general are graphics-hungry beasts. FlightGear uses the OpenGL API and concentrates on realism and not an over abundance of irrelevant wow factors. A quality experience is not only dependent on the graphics card itself, but also on the drivers that allow the cards to run at their optimum. Running FlightGear with my old but trusty ATI 9000 card was a little shuddery until I updated to the newest catalyst drivers. After reinstallation I had a responsive ride. That is apart from the sheer stupidity of my many avoidable (by a trained monkey) crashes. And yes I did my best to ignore the nervous laughter of Nelson as I slam dunked my stress ball onto the table for the fifteenth time. Personally, I found using the mouse with the keyboard to pilot an airplane a lot less pleasurable than with a joystick. If you are like me and slowly get addicted to detailed realism then at some point you should spoil yourself with a yoke and associated pedals. Not that it would improve my flying. But hey, “nil desperandum”. I found the short reference (http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/FGShortRef.html) an excellent aid, which I promptly printed and stuck on a notice board next to my computer. This is a good kick start for the hours, days, and weeks of pleasure to come

Beginnings Okay, so I downloaded and installed the minimum package. Loaded in a Jumbo jet and waited for inspiration to hit me. Ten minutes later I realized this was no arcade game. Where was god mode? Where was the power up on engine four? You actually have to understand a little theory before beginning. I decided next to read the shortest tutorial I could find. With one click I had hit pay dirt (http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/flight_simulator_tutorial.html). So, I need an easy to manipulate first plane to fly. The Cessna 172p Skyhawk (1981 model) looked good, and the San Francisco airport (default) and a clear noon day sky gave me enough elbow room to epileptically bounce my first attempts into the sky. There are two ways to run FlightGear, the first is through the command line and the second the more user friendly method is to use a graphical wizard called fgrun. Fgrun can in principle enable all the features that are available through the command line; therefore I chose the wizard to run the simulator. After choosing the

Flying high with FlightGear

Issue 14 flight options mentioned previously (partially shown in figure 1), I was off and running. Literally, you find yourself on the runway with an airplane moving forward. A moment of personal crisis and potential washing expenses: I spilled some tea then revved the engine, a cheap escape. I didn’t manage to stay on the runway, but I did finally manage to get the so called easy to fly plane in the air. Having read the tutorial, I realized to rev the engine up I needed to press “page up”. I know you don’t believe this incredible fact, so I have included figure 2. Yippee, my first flight. Pressing ‘v’ allows you to easily change views. This gives you a good idea where you are in orientation relative to the ground. I found the helicopters perspective the most intuitively descriptive. The next important milestone was a professional landing. After a number of tries I realized that unless you like simulated broken teeth then you need to go back to the tutorial and read the relevant procedures. So “shift + b” toggles the break and your speed needs to be around 172 km/hour at height X. And, yes, the guidelines really do work. I landed well... perhaps not where one would normally land, but pretty near. Scared a few trees and bounced up and down like jelly on a washing machine. But that’s our secret... right? A moment of personal crisis and potential washing expenses: I spilled some tea then revved the engine

Figure 1: Now shall I fly the jumbo or the UFO?

Figure 2: Alan makes his first flight, sort of After landing I was really quite motivated and practiced navigation, banking, loop the loop and all the other fun things such an easy to pilot airplane lets you do. After a couple of flight hours I had built up most of the basic skills that would be required in a real life situation. It took me ten minutes from scratch to show Nelson how to take off and land. He was really pleased, especially with the A10 looping through 3D clouds. I have the feeling that if ever I meet Nelson in battle with a TIE fighter I won’t last long. I’ve just sharpened his skills up considerably. Yes, very annoying indeed. I had built up most of the basic skills that would be required in a real life situation

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Mapping reality Now that I was addicted, I decided to try and expand on the range of features used. Installing extra airplanes is as simple as it will ever get. You download a tar gunzip archive file and expand the archive into the home directory of FlightGear under the subdirectory \data\Aircraft. The next time you run the wizard you will see the new model as an extra choice. I particularly liked the concord, X15 and YF-23 models. Though I must admit Santa Claus (figure 3) did come in a close second. There are tutorials on building your own models. So if you want to help space tourism with your own special design, why not try here?

Figure 3: FlightGear is known for its 100% realism. Santa Claus is coming to town Another nice feature of the simulator is the ability to place other fliers on the same map and potentially interact. Working direct from behind my cable modem at home I set the following parameters in the fsgun wizard for multiplayer mode: Multiplayer tick box: (ticked) Callsign: What ever you want. Hostname: mpserver01.flightgear.org in:10 out:5000

And I was in. Extra points were won by the developers of the program. A Google Maps based service (http://mpmap01.flightgear.org/) showed me where I was in respect to the rest of the players (as shown in figure 4).

Figure 4: Callsign AlanB on a specially written Google maps. Notice how I appear to have crashedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;15 feet When I get the necessary time with Nelson we will practice formation flying and chicken against each other.

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The inevitable interviews After explaining the very minimum of features I thought I would call some expert and not so expert witnesses in defense of this great product. Expert witness X Flight Simulator Engineer for almost twenty years—Allen Cook AB: How long have you been a flight simulator engineer and for which companies have you worked for? AC: I have worked for 18.5 years for Link-Miles/Thomson/Thales Training and Simulation. AB: What do you think of FlightGear? AC: Reading the blurb, many of the techniques employed are the same as used for real flight simulators. If it does all it says with some degree of realism and accuracy, then it could provide useful training for would be pilots or navigators. AB: How does it all stack up against a real ultra expensive flight simulator? AC: These “desktop” type simulators are generally only used for procedural training or aircraft familiarisation, instrument and navigational training. The original Link simulator provided this kind of training for a single aircraft type with the exception of an out the window visual, but with some basic motion and force feedback. The patent for the original Link Aviation trainer was filed in April 1929. In order for the training to be “positive”, however, there needs to be comprehensive objective tests for each aircraft type and variant, coupled with subjective testing by a current qualified and experienced pilot. These tests need to be frequently updated and monitored in order to keep pace with navigational data bases and aircraft updates. The level of training proficiency gained from these types of devices can then augment higher level simulation or real aircraft training. If instruments or navigational or aircraft handling were inaccurate or misleading, this could provide “negative training”, which for obvious reasons would be highly undesirable for would be real-life pilots. However, as an educational or entertainment tool, it should provide a good taster of what it really takes to fly a real aircraft. AB: Can anything in FlightGear be improved? AC: Every single aspect of a simulator can always be improved. However, as mentioned above, the most important thing is to provide positive training. Witness Y A ten-year-old man flying for the first time—Nelson Berg AB: So how does it feel to be a pilot? NB: A bit scary because you don’t know 100% what the plane is going to do. AB: Which airplane did you enjoy flying the most? NB: The A10 with the 3D clouds. AB: Any suggestions for improving the game? NB: I’d like a real arcade mode. AB: How hard was it to land? NB: Very hard.

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Issue 14 AB: Will you fly again? NB: Yes, I look forward to flying again? AB: Why? NB: Because it feels like you are part of the game. Sorry simulation.

Conclusions So, there you have it, from an avid ten-year-old game player. FlightGear, though it doesn’t fall under the category instantaneous gratification, does grab the attention and keeps it. Better still from a parental point of view, you have an opportunity to teach your kids the basics of flying via “positive training”. Of course, it goes without saying that you need a bit of patience yourself and some pre work. But where else can you fly a realistic model of concord for the price of electricity and some good old fashioned humiliation.

Acknowledgements Allen Cook currently resides in Perth, Australia, where he is a consultant hungry for new opportunities and challenges.

Notes and resources An excellent first tutorial (http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/flight_simulator_tutorial.html) Atlas map server (http://atlas.sourceforge.net/) FlightGear home (http://www.flightgear.org) FlightGear WIKI (http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/flight_gear/flight_gear.cfm) OpenGL (http://www.opengl.org)

Copyright information This article is made available under the "Attribution" Creative Commons License 2.5 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/. Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/flightgear

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

A realistic experience

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A realistic experience

Writing documents with OpenOffice.org Writer ...because using a word processor isn’t enough By Marco Marongiu Everybody uses word processors, but very few people use them in the right way. Maybe it’s time you learned to use your word processor with... style! Despite their obvious advantages, WYSIWIG word processors have a fundamental drawback: people get interested in the final layout of the document too soon, and concentrate less on the content, which is exactly the opposite of what one should do when writing a document (and, by the way, it’s also the opposite of what happens with systems like LaTeX, where you are required to take care of the content first, and concentrate on the visual side later). With WYSIWIG word processors people get interested in the final layout of the document too soon Taking care of the layout too soon has inauspicious consequences. Suppose you are writing a report, for example. You start writing and, before you’re finish, you start messing around with fonts, font sizes, text alignment, colours and so on; you also mark important keywords in a bold, italicised typeface so that they stand up clearly through the document. Then you bring the document to your boss for a review; he likes the idea of the highlighted keywords, but he doesn’t like the formatting and asks you to make them just bold. Now, since you didn’t mark keywords logically as such, you have to select them one by one and change the formatting. And you start crying of course, because you know you’re going to waste a lot of time doing a stupid and boring job. Not to mention that when you take the document to the boss to review it again, he will also ask you to change the fonts and alignment of the titles... or worse, ask you to put the italics back because he likes it better the way it was. Well, I’m here to help you in doing first things first. A little history It all started in 1989, with the first release of Microsoft Word. Soon after, in 1991, Word 2.0 was released and it finally brought WYSIWIG text processing to the masses. WYSIWIG, as you may already know, is an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”, which means that you can set the layout of a document on the screen, and that will be the layout of the printed document. Everybody uses a word processor nowadays. You do, too.

What you need To make the most out of this article you need: • a PC • a good Word Processor, like OpenOffice.org Writer (http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html) is! • patience and relax: don’t hurry • a simple, short document to write, like a letter

Step 1: start OpenOffice.org Writer

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Figure 1: The graphical interface of OpenOffice.org Writer Start the program. Probably you already have a “OpenOffice.org Writer” item in your menu; in GNOME it’s usually in the “Applications” menu, under the “Office” submenu. Or you can run the oowriter command straight from a terminal window. Once you start it, you’ll see a window like the one in figure 1. This is the graphical interface of OpenOffice’s Writer module.

Step 2: start writing

Figure 2: Start writing, concentrating only on the content Start writing. Care only about the content. Don’t be concerned about the fonts, don’t be concerned about font sizes, don’t be concerned about anything but the content. Start writing. Care only about the content. Don’t be concerned about the fonts, don’t be concerned about font sizes, don’t be concerned about anything but the content

Step 3: once finished, think about the style Once you are done with the content and you are happy with the things you wrote, it’s time to do a kind of document make-over.

...because using a word processor isn’t enough

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Figure 3: Doing things with style: start here Open the “Format” menu and look for the “Styles and Formatting” item (see figure 3), or just press the F11 key. You will get a pop-up window where you can select and modify existing styles, or create your own.

Figure 4: Modifying the default style Many of the styles are based on the “Default” style. Hence, if you want to change, say, the font of nearly the whole document you can start modifying this one. Look for the “Default” item in the pop-up window, right click and select “Modify...” (see figure 4).

Figure 5: Changing the “Default” style A new window pops up. From this window you can define almost all aspects of the style. For the moment just change the font family, by choosing a beautiful Bitstream Vera, sans-serif font (one of my favourites, and it’s released under a free license too!). As soon as you press the “Ok” button you’ll see how the fonts of the entire

...because using a word processor isn’t enough

Issue 14 document suddenly change to reflect your choice.

Step 4: logically restyle individual parts of the document Now it’s time to think about the text from a logical perspective, and apply styles according to the logic. In the specific case of our letter, it’s easy to decompose it into a few blocks, each one playing a specific role: 1. the address; 2. the opening, that is: the salutation that opens the letter; 3. the body of the letter, where the real content of the message is; usually, that’s the biggest part of the letter; 4. the closing, that is: the salutation that ends the letter; 5. the signature, that is: your name (and some room for the real signature that you will write by hand). Each of these parts need different formatting. Start formatting the body.

Figure 6: Starting the real styling: we select the body of the letter to redefine its style Select it with the mouse, then go to the styles pop-up. The “Text body” item is active: as shown before with the Default style, just right click on it, select “Modify...”, then change the style however you want. In my case, I just added some vertical space at the end of each paragraph (want to know how to do it? keep reading!) and indented the first line, but you may want to experiment by changing different parameters and seeing the results of your customisations: it’s an interesting experience!

Figure 7: Customising the signature style You can customise all the other parts of the document in the same way, for example: select the signature, look up the “Signature” style in the pop-up and apply it; if you don’t like it, just customise it the same way as above. Go on and customise all the other parts.

...because using a word processor isn’t enough

Issue 14 Think about the text from a logical perspective, and apply styles according to the logic

Step 5: adding you own styles In the letter above, I intentionally “forgot” to put in a subject line. Now I’ll show you how to add one, customise it and create a style out of it.

Figure 8: Creating a new style from selection First of all: type in the subject line. Once you are done, select it, right click and select “Paragraph”: that’s where you will define how a subject line should appear.

Figure 9: Creating a new style from selection: styling the text In this case, I just wanted the line in a bold face, so that it stands out and you can easily locate what the letter is about; I also added some room below it. In figure 9, you can see how you can set a 1.00cm space below the paragraph.

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Figure 10: Creating a new style from selection: making the style out of the text Having done that, press the rightmost button in the pop-up and select “New style from selection”.

Figure 11: Creating a new style from selection: naming your style You are then prompted to name your style. It is better that you adopt some kind of naming convention, so that you can easily recognise your styles from the bundled ones. In this case, I chose to prefix my own styles with the word “My”, e.g.: “MySubject”, “MyFirstLine” and so on. Having dealt with with the subject line, repeat the same steps to create new styles every time OpenOffice.org doesn’t provide one that fits your needs.

Updating existing styles: an easier way Going through a tabbed pop-up window to personalise a part of a document is not a hassle (or, at least, that’s my opinion but yours could be different). Really, is there no easier way to modify an existing style?

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Figure 12: Updating a style from a selection Well, actually there is. As before, select a part of the text you have already styled (in figure 12, I selected the closing of the letter, styled with “Complimentary close”), then modify it using the normal tools available in the interface of the program (e.g.: click on the buttons to align the paragraph to the centre, change margins interactively using the cursors in the upside ruler and so on). After you’re done, click the rightmost button in the pop-up again, choosing “Update Style” this time. The style is automatically updated with the changes you made to the text.

Summing up: is it worth it? This was just a little example, and you may well wonder if the procedure shown is general enough. Well, actually it’s not. The aim of the article was to show why using styles should be preferred over sloppy formatting, not to give a general procedure on how to write documents. It isn’t wise, for example, to write a document of some tens of pages and leave it to the very end to style the text. Styled documents are ready for automation So, for longer documents, what you should do? Well, now that you know that styles are important, just apply them on the go. When you are writing a level 1 heading, mark it as such! When you are writing the body of the text, do the same. Once all your text has been completely marked, you can make any changes to your document and you won’t be worried if your boss wants dark red, widely spaced headings or wants to change the font of all the text body. (Even if you don’t have a boss that requires you to write reports, you are exposed to the same problems anyway. Using styles will solve them!) Another advantage is that styled documents are ready for automation. What do I mean by that? Well, many things... Inside-document automation Big documents always have a table of contents. If you styled your documents marking the headings, then OpenOffice.org can create and update the table of contents for you because it knows which parts are headings and where they are (the page number). Creating a tables of contents by hand is a real pain; worse, updating it when parts of the document are changed can lead to suicide! So, why not let something else take care of it for you? For this functionality look in the “Insert”→“Indexes and Tables”→“Indexes and Tables...” menu. Outside-document automation You may want to know that an OpenOffice.org has a lot of XML under the hood. Therefore, if you logically marked the parts of your document and you know what you are doing, you can extract information from the document even if you don’t have an OpenOffice.org installation at all! Of course, if the whole document is just a sloppily-formatted, Default-styled document, it provides the same amount of structural information that a plain text files does (which means: almost nothing). However, if you write your documents wisely then you

...because using a word processor isn’t enough

Issue 14 can, for example, automatically create a pretty web page with all your documents’ titles and abstract. So, if you’ve never written your documents with style, it’s never too late to start. Begin today, and after a short time you will ask yourself why you never did it before!

Biography Marco Marongiu (/user/26" title="View user profile.): Born in 1971, Marongiu graduated in applied mathematics in 1997; he's now a full-time system administrator for a European ISP. He's also a Perl programmer and technical writer and lecturer by passion, and is interested in web and XML related technologies. Marongiu has been a Debian User since version 1.1.10 and he helped found the GULCh Linux Users Group (Gruppo Utenti Linux Cagliari), the first one in Sardinia. He recently became a father to his first son Andrea, and he's been trying to reorganise his life since, so that he can start writing technical articles again and holding seminars.

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

...because using a word processor isn’t enough

Baby steps with The GIMP Making a web banner using The GIMP By Rosalyn Hunter Have you been planning on getting around to learning how to use the GIMP someday? Well now that the GIMP has had its tenth anniversary, it’s about time to start. In this article, I will walk you step by step through the process of making a web banner using the GIMP. Hopefully this kickstart will encourage you to do more playing on your own. Long regarded as one of free software’s “killer apps”, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a tool that has amassed a large number of users and is one of the most popular free software applications today. The different versions of GIMP vary slightly in the way they are laid out. For this tutorial, I have used version 2.2.10 the most current stable version at the time that I am writing this article. The best way to learn from this tutorial is to open GIMP up and follow along as I explain how to make a web banner. It’s virtually painless, so take a seat and let’s begin.

Opening GIMP GIMP saves the status of your open windows, so starting the program can sometimes cause a dizzying cascade of windows to open that can be quite overwhelming to the new user. The only window that you absolutely need to have open to begin is the tool window. It is the small window containing all of the icons. It is titled “The GIMP”. To start, close all other windows until you need them.

The GIMP main tool window The only window that you absolutely need to have open to begin is the tool window Now that we are alone with the main GIMP window, let's take a look at it shall we? It has three menu items: File, Xtns, and Help. The File menu has your basic Open and New options as well as something called Acquire. If you have a scanner, you can configure GIMP to work with it, and your scanner interface will be found here. Acquire also has an option called screen shot which will allow you to grab an image of a window. Xtns has plugins and scripts for advanced users. Ignore it for now. Help is very useful for new users, so take some time to see what the options do later. Now we will return to the main part of the tool window. The major part of the tool window is taken up by several little icons. If you hold the mouse over each icon, text will pop up explaining what it does.

Baby steps with The GIMP

Issue 14 The bottom of the window shows the tool options. This will change as each tool is selected above. The tools can be changed to do many things allowing you a great deal of freedom. Since GIMP is an image processing program it is best to begin with an image. Select the file menu and open an image file. I started with a digital photograph that I took named sunset1.jpg. I suggest that you simply open an image currently on your computer to practice with.

My starting image: sunset1.jpg I want to use this image to make a web banner to put on a new webpage called “My nature page”. The size and shape of this image is wrong for a web banner, so I first need to cut down the image. To do this, I use the crop tool.

The crop tool The crop tool is the one that looks like a little craft knife. When you select the tool the cursor changes. Make a box by holding down the left mouse button and pulling it across diagonally from the top to the bottom. Select the most important part of the image. Your selection will be highlighted. Once you have drawn the box, you can adjust the size by selecting one of the dark squares on the corners and moving it while holding down the left mouse button. The size in pixels is displayed in the crop/resize tool window that pops up when you use this tool. You can change the units to inches or whatever you like best by selecting the little px next to the number. To specify a size, grab a corner of the selection and move it slowly while looking at the tool window. I resized my image to have a width of 1600 and a height of 500. When you are satisfied with the selection, hit the crop button. Once you crop the image, all of the rest of the image is gone! If you really didn’t want to erase the rest of the image? Don’t panic. Click the right mouse button over the image screen and a menu will pop up. Go to edit, and the top menu item says “undo crop image”.

Making a web banner using The GIMP

Issue 14 GIMP has a long undo buffer and you can go back several steps if you need to. However,the best way to make sure that you don’t destroy the original image is to save your new image under a different name. GIMP has a long undo buffer and you can go back several steps if you need to Right-click on the image to open the menu, then under the File menu choose “Save as...” to save the image with a new file name. I saved my cropped file as sunset1banner.jpg. Redundant menus There’s more than one way to get to the menus in GIMP. For example, you can merge layers by right-clicking on the layers dialog box and selecting Merge Visible Layers..., you can right-click on the image and select the Layer option which has Merge Down as an sub-option, you can use the Layer menu found on the top of the image window, or you can use the keyboard combination Control + M. You can save a file using the menus on top of the window, or by right-clicking and using the Save as... option in the File submenu found there. The main GIMP window won’t have a save button, because you must save each window separately. In this tutorial, I tend to get to the menus by clicking the right mouse button over a window; however,you can also use the File menu on the top of the window. There are also keyboard combinations that do specific functions such as control-z for undo. To learn more about these combinations, look at the online GIMP manual (http://docs.GIMP.org/en/). GIMP almost always gives you options after you press Save. You have lots of control over the quality of the saved image. Take the defaults for now, as you understand more, you may want to change the settings. We now have a long, banner-shaped image, but you can’t easily read text over a very colorful image, so we need to lower the contrast a bit. This can be done using layers.

Using layers A layer is a separate level of the same image. In GIMP you can put different images on different layers, just as in old cell animation, where images were painted onto layers of clear plastic over a paper background. To begin, open the layers dialog box. To do that, go to the tool window and select: File/Dialogs/Layers. The layers dialog box will pop up somewhere on the screen. Move it so that you can easily see it. I usually like to stretch the window a bit to make it longer. The layers dialog box currently shows one layer marked “background”. It shows a thumbnail of my image. To add another layer on top of this one, we click the new layer button. Look on the bottom of the layers menu. There are some icons. The left-most icon looks like one piece of paper. Clicking on that icon creates a new layer.

Making a web banner using The GIMP

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The new layer button First, a window will pop up asking you details about the new layer. You can change the name of the layer, but for now just use the default name “New Layer”. You have the option of making the image white or transparent. Choose white. Click OK and your original image will turn white. No the image is not gone. It is just as if we placed a nice white sheet of paper on top of it. Look at the layers dialog box. There are now two layers shown. A white layer on top called “New Layer”, and the background, our original layer. To the left of each is an eye. This shows the visibility of the layer. Go to the eye next to the New Layer, click on it, and the original image will reappear. The eye toggles the visibility of the layer. Please notice that New layer is still selected in the layers menu. If you make changes to the image now, you will only be making changes to the selected layer whether you can see the changes or not. Now click the place where the eye was on the layers menu, and turn visibility back on for the New Layer. The screen will appear white again. The goal is to subtly introduce the impression of the picture beneath onto the white layer above. We can do that by using the opacity button that you can find on the layer’s dialog box. Make sure that New Layer is selected, and hold down the left mouse button over the opacity slider. Slide it to the left and you will begin to see the opacity change. You can now see the background image through the white layer. To my eye the image looked best at 69.9% so I stopped at that opacity, and tried to save the image. The program would not let me save. It gave me the error “jpg can’t handle transparency, flatten image”. You may ask, “Isn’t the image that I am working on now a jpg?”. The simple answer is no. GIMP requires a special format to save all of this complex information. The default image format for GIMP is XCF, and if you want to save all of your layers as they are for later, then you must save the file in XCF format. We can do that now by selecting File/Save as... and change the last part of the filename to .xcf instead of .jpg. In the lower left hand corner of the save image box there is a line that says “Select file type (by extension)”. This means it reads the letters after the dot to determine how to save the file. Only XCF files save directly. Every other type must be exported by the program. Isn’t the image that I am working on now a jpg? The simple answer is no. The default image format for GIMP is XCF.

Exporting to jpg So now we know how to save the file in XCF format, but what you probably wanted to save was a jpeg file. You are probably wondering, “How do I save what I am seeing as a jpeg so that I can show it on my

Making a web banner using The GIMP

Issue 14 website?”. To do that we must make one image out of the layered image. We also must remove any transparency. In order to combine the two images into one, go to the layers menu and right-click over the image thumbnails. A menu will pop up. Select “merge down” and the two layers will be combined into one layer. This image still may contain transparency data, so you have to flatten the image. right-click in the layers menu, and select Flatten Image found at the bottom of the menu. Now you can save this file as a jpeg. To save, go to the image window and select File/Save as.... Change the last part of the filename to .jpg. I saved my file as sunset1bannerwhite.jpg.

Shading the banner After saving this jpeg file, I realized that I didn’t want the banner to be white. What can I do about it now? Quite a lot, because the changes can be undone. To do this, I right-click on the image, and choose Edit/Undo Flatten Image, and keep undoing until I have the two layers that I originally started with. The image window will show a white screen again. Deja vu. Because I like the ethereal quality of the orange light shining through the blades of grass, I want to tint the image orange like the sunset. To do this, I select the color picker tool, it’s the one that looks like an eyedropper dropping something. To follow along, pick a color that you like from your background image.

The color picker tool First, make the new layer invisible by clicking the eye next to it so that you can see the original image. Make sure that the background image is selected on the layers dialog box. The cursor will change to look like a dropper. Pick a color by clicking the tip of the dropper on the image. The color chosen is shown in the color picker tool window. I picked the most intense orange that I could find. It took me several tries to find the color that I wanted. You should pick a deep color because it will fade when we reduce the opacity. The orange color appears in both the color picker window and on the main GIMP tool window. This means that this color will be used with whatever drawing or painting tool is used next. Select the layers dialog box and change the selection back to the New Layer. Turn the visibility back on. Then select the tool icon that looks like a bucket of paint. This is the fill icon.

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The fill icon When you click this on the white screen the entire screen changes to the color that you have selected. It is a common error to forget to change the selection in the layers dialog box. If you did that here, some portion of the background image would be dyed. Just remember that you can undo mistakes. Grabbing the opacity slider with the cursor, reduce the opacity until it looks good. I chose 47%. To save this intermediate, merge down and flatten the image. Then you can save it as a jpeg. I named mine sunset1bannerorange.jpg.

Adding Text To add a title we can write text on top of the image. The text tool is the one that looks like a large letter T on the tool window. Select the T and click on the image.

The text icon In earlier versions of GIMP, you first had to make a new transparent layer to put the text on if you wanted to keep the text seperate from the image. Now this is done automatically. When you click on the image, a window pops up to take the text. The words that you type can be seen on the image. On my image, the words were tiny and orange. I forgot to change the color back to black! The settings for the text tool can be found at the bottom of the tool window when it is selected. There are settings for font, size, color, etc. Clicking on color reveals a window that will let you choose from a spectrum. If you click all of the way to the left, you can choose black. Then press OK. The words on the banner are now black. If you prefer a fancier title font, change the font settings. I chose â&#x20AC;&#x153;freemono bold obliqueâ&#x20AC;? and increased the size to 100px.

Making a web banner using The GIMP

Issue 14 To move the location of the text, select the move icon. The move icon is the one that looks like a plus sign made out of arrows. When you select it and then click on the image, the cursor changes to a pointing hand. Holding it down over the words allows you to move them around until they are in the desired position.

The move icon

Resizing images To finish the banner, flatten the image, and save it. I saved my image as titlebanner.jpg, and then put it into my webpage. When I looked at my page, I found that the image was much too large. To change the size of the image, right-click on the window containing your image to open the menu, choose the Image sub-menu, and select Scale Image.... A window pops up asking you to set the new size. I set the length to 800px and pressed enter. It automatically adjusted the height to 250px so the ratio of width to height remained the same. Adjust your image to the size that you want, then click Scale. I saved this smaller banner as titlebanner800.jpg. GIMP is a great tool for making images for websites

My nature page When I put this new banner on my web page, it finally looked the way that I wanted it to. GIMP is a great tool for making images for websites. The background image The background image on the nature page was made in much the same way as the banner was. An image treebranches.jpg was loaded and a white layer was placed over it and shaded to form a nice background color. The background image was changed to make a tileable image by using Filters/Map/Small Tiles... found by right-clicking on the image.

Making a web banner using The GIMP

Issue 14 As you can see from this brief tutorial, GIMP allows you to take an image and alter it through a wide variety of methods. This tutorial only scratches the surface of what GIMP can do. To learn more, I suggest that you read the GIMP manual, try other tutorials, and simply play around with the program. Perhaps soon, you will find GIMP as indispensable a tool as I do. Enjoy.

Further reading and resources Help for GIMP is extensive. The program documentation contains an entire color manual that you can read with a browser. You can also get help by clicking on the help button found in the main GIMP window. Use “context help” to get specific help for a tool or menu item. List of GIMP resources: • GIMP.org (http://www.GIMP.org/)—The official GIMP website. • GIMPguru.org (http://www.GIMPguru.org/)—The site for those using GIMP to edit photographs. • GIMPsavvy.org (http://GIMP-savvy.com/)—A pretty complete looking book that can be bought or downloaded by tarball. Designed for an older version of GIMP. • manual.GIMP.org (http://manual.GIMP.org/)—Official GIMP manuals in several languages. • GIMPtalk.com (http://www.GIMPtalk.com/forum/board.php)—A forum for GIMP users.

Biography Rosalyn Hunter (/user/36" title="View user profile.): Rosalyn Hunter has been on the internet since before the web was created. Born into a family of instructors, she has made it her life's goal to teach others about the important things in life, such as how to type kill -9 when a process is dead. She lives in a little house on the prairie in the American West with her husband, her three beautiful children, a cat and a dog.

Copyright information This article is made available under the "Attribution-Sharealike" Creative Commons License 2.5 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. Source URL: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/make_banner_gimp

Published on Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com)

Making a web banner using The GIMP

Free Open Document label templates Using the right tools to save time and effort By Solveig Haugland If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder, with the OpenOffice label templates will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels.

Using the right tool for the job I believe in using tools. And if the tools are easy to use and free, so much the better. That’s why I’m a big proponent of using templates. Templates are one of the best ways to save time, effort, and be sure that your documents are consistent when they need to be. Templates make life easier when you use them for letters, documents, brochures, etc., but they really make life easier when you use them for labels. The spacing for your label documents has to be extraordinarily precise to make sure that the text is printed exactly where it needs to be—I’ve tried making my own and while it’s possible, it’s really not worth it. It’s not worth it primarily because there are so many excellent pre-existing templates to use instead. There might be a few sheets of labels somewhere without a corresponding OpenOffice.org label template, but they’re rare. You can print on virtually any label sheets you want with the templates included in OpenOffice.org, and the templates available on the web, such as those from WorldLabel. This article is about how to use the OpenOffice.org templates, in particular the WorldLabel templates, to print the labels you need. I’ll talk about how to download them, install them, use them as they are, and how to customize them with graphics and other features. I’ll also touch on how to use the OpenOffice.org label wizard; you can use the label wizard each time, or save the template you create in the same template repository with your WorldLabel templates.

About WorldLabel WorldLabel lets you download free templates (http://www.worldlabel.com/Pages/openoffice-template.htm) in OpenOffice.org format. You can download label templates in .stw or .ott file format for Openoffice.org 1.1x and 2.0 versions for Writer. You can look them up by the number on your Avery label sheet box or read the description. There’s a huge number of templates including those for CD and DVD, video, mailing, shipping, and diskettes, and with square or round corners. The templates are XML Open Document Format (ODF), Public Domain, licensed under GPL.

Downloading WorldLabel templates The first step, of course, is to get the templates onto your computer. First, make a directory where you’re going to put them. Create a directory at C:\labels or home/labels, for instance, though you can put them wherever you want. Next, go to the URL for OpenOffice.org templates. • If you want letter-size templates (this is what you want in the US) go to this URL (http://www.worldlabel.com/Pages/openoffice-template.htm). • If you want A4 sized templates go to this URL (http://www.worldlabel.com/Pages/openoffice-a4.htm). You can also just download one template at a time. You’ll see a list of templates. Find the one you want, by its corresponding Avery number (this is printed on your box of Avery labels), by the dimensions, or by the

Free Open Document label templates

Issue 14 name if you know the WorldLabel name.

Figure 1: WorldLabel templates To download the template, find the “Download” link, under the version you want. If you’re using the current version of OpenOffice.org, use the link under the 2.0 version for .ott files. Then right-click on “Download” and choose “Save Target As...”. When the dialog box appears, specify the labels directory that you made, and click “Save”. Repeat the downloading steps for any additional templates you want.

Installing the templates in OpenOffice.org Once you’ve got the WorldLabel templates, you should add them to the template repository and tell OpenOffice.org where they are. Strictly speaking, you don’t have to do any of this, since you can simply choose File→Open and find the template file. However, OpenOffice.org has a specific way to organize templates which is easier to use once you’ve got it set up. This applies to any template that you download, as well as any template that you create. There are several ways to do this; I’ll show you three. Copying to a directory Copy your templates to the appropriate directory. The directory is (OpenOffice)\share\template\language. Just paste your directory of templates into that location.