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With the Smoothwall firewall up and running without a hiccup, I moved on to some other pressing development issues at work. First up on the agenda was a database to track our vendors, contacts, purchased parts and manufactured parts, plus all the associated costs. I've nearly finished the first phase of that project. The tables and queries are done, as are most of the reusable functions. I've populated the tables with some test data and have had good luck at extracting the data we need for a multitude of purposes. For instance, we can now query the database for all the manufacturers of a specific purchase part, sorting from the shortest to the longest delivery time. Or grab all the parts that are delivered with net 30 day payment terms. As I've said, this is just the first phase, but it will allow us to plan much more efficiently. The next phase will allow us to print purchase orders for every model telescope we build, overriding the favored vendor where delivery time or payment terms require. Beyond that? I haven't given it much thought, but I'm sure the sky's really the limit with PHP and MySQL.

I spent most of Tuesday morning configuring a great internal communication app - phpGroupWare. It is as it sounds, allowing shared calendars, notes, project planning, tasks, todo lists, and much, much more. Everything's on the server, accessible by each user via a browser. This free app is so well thought out that even the training time for users should be minimal. When you're the one doing the building *and* training, that's critical.

We've also begun indoor testing on a 'scope bound for the Virgin Islands. Given that the telescopes are robotically controlled, I've done as much of this testing remotely as possible. Bear in mind that by "remote" I mean from my desk in the office - at the front of the building as opposed to sitting next to the telescope. Using the ssh -X command to the control computer, I can open the GUI tools to move the telescope around, find the home position, schedule faux observing sessions, and shut everything down. I could do that just as easily from my desk at home. Or from Cedar Rapids. Or from Paris, for that matter. The next fun addition to the regular testing protocol will be to put a webcam on the USB port of the control computer. I'll be able to open a separate xawtv session and keep an eye on the 'scope as I'm moving it around. And, yes - I'll install the telescope we're testing right now in the Virgin Islands while it's still cold in Iowa. Tough job, but ...

I've even been tweaking hard at home. You'll recall the random mp3 script I included in the GnomeTWEAK section of Penguin Shell several months back. It uses locate to find all the mp3 files on my machine and writes them to a playlist. mpg123 uses that list to play the files in random order. I modified the command a bit:

locate **.mp3 > /home/tony/mp3.list; mpg123 -Z --list /home/tony/mp3.list

This does fundamentally the same thing the original script did, but it writes the list to an actual file rather than redirecting its output to mpg123. Then mpg123 steps in to read, randomize and play the list. Until I modified the script to this form, I couldn't simply create a shortcut that would work to do this. This command (well, two actually, separated by the semi-colon) is now the "Execute" command for a new Random Music icon on my desktop. That means that when I sit down with Penguin Shell each night, the tunes are one click away and the selections and order are never the same. To paraphrase, "Variety and simplicity are the spice of life."

I did, however, have to take a quick departure from the Linux world on Tuesday evening. A friend of mine moved his computer back into his house, but really had no idea how to put it all back together. I took care of the hardware end in less than twenty minutes, and bolted when the desktop opened on ME. With that two minutes in Windows, my cumulative time for the month is quickly approaching three minutes. Life is good, isn't it?

Have a great Wednesday.

                 
Tony Steidler-Dennison       

GnomeTWEAK

A Clutch of KDE Tweaks

Today's GnomeTWEAK has more bang for the buck - a whole clutch of quick tips for KDE users.

• If you're running out of room on the panel, add an additional child panel. Right-click on the panel and select Add, Extension, Child Panel. You can add apps to this panel just as you do the parent.
• Dragging a file into the console window will offer you two options: pasting the URL of the file location into the console or changing into the directory containing the file.
• The cd command in Konsole, without any further parameters, will take you straight to your home directory.
• KDE offers drag and drop printing capabilities. Open a kprinter dialog, then drag and drop a file from the Konqueror file manager directly onto the Files tab of the kprinter window.
• To move all the buttons or applets on the Panel. grab the last one in line, hold down the shift key, and "push" all the buttons to the new location.
• Clicking the desktop icon in the Panel will minimize all the open windows at once.
• Double-clicking a window bar rolls up the window like a window shade. A second double-click unshades the window.
• You can maximize windows in three different ways. Click on maximize with the left mouse button to open to full screen. Click on maximize with the middle mouse button to maximize only vertically. For horizontal only, use the right mouse button.
• Konqueror will browse through tar archives, showing all the files contained in the tarball. Konqueror will also extract files from a tarball - just drag them out of Konqueror or to another location.
• Desktop wallpaper can be changed using drag and drop. Drag an image from a Konqueror window to the desktop and select Set As Wallpaper.
• You can also change the desktop background color with drag and drop. Simply drag a color from the color selector in any application to the desktop.
• You can view man pages in Konqueror. Use Alt-F2 to bring up a command line, then enter a hash (#) mark followed by the command name. The man page will open in Konqueror

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GnomeCORE

Get your favorite Linux flavor on CD: Pick your favorite Linux flavor and get it on CD for as low as $1.95. Find Linux gear, books, and software for Linux at Linux Central . Check out the selection today!

There's a GNU program in any basic Linux install that can be pretty handy for moving around directories. It's called pushd and it can, in effect, let you move through directories in a more lateral fashion.

pushd really serves a couple of functions. First, it allows you to change directories:

pushd /usr/local/src

changes to the /usr/local/src directory.

pushd, with the same command syntax, puts your directory history in a stack, displaying the contents of the stack as each directory is added. It's similar, in a way, to a history file, though you have to manually add the directories to the stack using a convention similar to that above.

pushd then lets you change from one directory straight to another in the stack. For purposes of illustration, let's say your stack looks like this:

/usr/local/src
~
/etc/X11
~/mp3
/var/www/html

The top directory is the most recent, or the top of the stack. In other words, it's your current working directory. To change from /usr/local/src to ~/mp3, you only need enter the command:

pushd -3

This swaps the ~/mp3 directory (the third directory below the current directory) on the stack, moving it to the top and cd'ing into it. Each directory that you change to using the pushd command is added to the stack and available to the pushd command.

The stack display isn't quite this clear using pushd. The stack is actually displayed horizontally rather than vertically. The directory to the far left is the current working directory.

So, if you working on files in multiple directories, keep pushd in mind. Though it's a few more keystrokes at the front - adding the directory to the stack - it'll save you many more in the long run.

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GnomeFILE

BlackHole Spam/Virus Filter 1.0.8

http://iland.net/~ckennedy/blackhole.shtml

"Blackhole Spam/Virus Filter provides spam and virus filtering using dot files in all the major MTA/SMTP servers for UNIX and similar systems. It also can be used as a qmail-queue replacement or a Postfix Content Filter to cover the entire SMTP servers userbase. It is different from other, similar programs, in that it scales for thousands of users from being in C and not executing external programs for most of its work. It is uses flat config files or MySQL to store the configs of each user. Almost every type of check in existence for spam is implemented. It can be setup like an access list with each check type (over 15 checks currently) having its own separate rules for action and scores to choose action precedence. Subject tagging, custom headers, and detailed report logging can be fully configured from the config file, there is a global config file for default users setup, and it works with clamscan, which gives a fully Free spam/virus solution which matches any commercial offering."

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GnomeVOICE

Utter Mandrake (Dis)Satisfaction
Scribbled by Malcolm Andrews

"I just read your short paragraph on Mandrake as was interested because I just removed my copy and re-installed XP.

"After a week of trying to browse our network and installing the latest versions of Samba, I have just given up. I want to spend time doing things with computer not configuring them.

"Interestingly the last time I was satisfied with a Linux install was Slackware and Corel Linux.

"Although it took a lot of reading, to compile Slackware and get Samba working, I managed it in a day, not bad on a 386. In fact by the end of the day I had networking, 4 serial terminals and mail, I could browse the net what ever.

"Corel was the best Linux I have ever used and look forward to buying a copy of Xandros (When I can spare the $200.00 AUD) for a copy. To give you an idea of the usefulness of the old version I downloaded the ISO one day and installed it on a spare PC. The most amazing part of the installation was that, after entering my domain name Corel found:

1. The correct path to my DHCP server.
2. The ISDN Modem connection to our head office.
3. The path to the Router in our head office.
4. The IP address of the proxy server.

"When I installed Mandrake the other day it choked when trying to find the DHCP server so I had to assign an IP address to the machine. SWAT did squat, the gnome browser kept on finding the other computers on the network (after I typed in the relevant IP address' ?) and I kept on mounting the shares but it just never worked. I even installed webmin but the module for windows networking still did not help.

"It never ceases to amaze me that major distributions of Linux have not looked at Corel and attempted to develop their user interfaces to a higher standard.

"Just one instance is the following. When I went to install extra software with Mandrake I knew that I would have to insert a CD. So to test the smarts of Mandrake I selected a package and waited for it to ask for a particular CD. Well the CD started spinning but at no time was a test for the presence, as CD done no error messages nothing. So I then inserted a music CD and up popped a dialog box asking me to insert the correct CD.

"My point here is that why doesn't the package manager attempt to mount a CD? An attempt to mount a CD when one cannot be read would surely create and error of some kind. This could then be used to prompt the user to take some action.

"Two distributions that I am currently satisfied with are Clarkconnect and Smoothwall, both of these works, as I would expect them. I use Smoothwall for those clients that only have a POTS Internet connection and Clarkconnect for those with Broadband.

"Anyway enough of my ranting, suffice to say that I would have expected Mandrake to be better at version 9.x"

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GnomeCLICK

Libranet Home

http://libranet.com/index.html

It's a bit more in advance of the review than normal, but today's GnomeCLICK is a pointer to the home page of Libranet, the next distro on our review platter. The site's not huge, but it does offer the official line on this Debian-based distro. The site does have many nice screenshots of Libranet in action. It also includes a list of the "push" apps - those that Libranet considers to be the best of the installed pack. It's good background for the upcoming Libranet review.

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