LinuxWorld's new print magazine is premiering at the conference, which is one reason so many people have asked me about it, since I'm one of the editors. Be sure to check out the new publication! I've seen preview copies and - I think - it's pretty cool.

Lockergnome Linux E-Books

Yes, this is a repeat. I only got one response, which of course could mean that most people just aren't interested, but I thought I'd give it one more try!

Much of the content of these newsletters is actually going to be updated, expanded, and repurposed into ebooks available here through Lockergnome. My questions to you folks are: what that I've covered so far are you dying to get an ebook about? What didn't I cover there that you'd like to see added for the ebook? I'm also always interested in knowing what you want to see covered here.

Selective Memories

One reader writes:

"When did Penguin Shell turn into a commercial for Red Hat? What's wrong with Gentoo? Now a log of your experiences installing my favorite distro would make some decent reading."

Hmm, so aside from my covering a variety of distributions and saying I'm lining up more, making sure to include solutions for people regardless of what they're running, and previously running a press release from an entirely different company (Ximian and their desktop, I believe it was), a single press release from Red Hat makes this newsletter a commercial for them? I included the release because it is a major change in direction for the company, which makes it interesting to me, and hence I figured it would be interesting to some readers.

Gentoo is, in fact, in my list for one of the distributions to cover. However, it's not really a beginner's distribution, is it? So, I didn't want to put it too early in the list since the distribution coverage has so far been in the EGGS section. I'll probably migrate discussion of Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, and those babies down to the CHICKS section.

If you go to my Web site and look through my list of articles in the LinuxPlanet/LinuxToday.com section, you'll find out that Gentoo is one of my favorite distributions. You'll also find coverage of my experience installing multiple versions of Gentoo.

Patience, grasshopper.

Digitally Yours,              
Dee-Ann LeBlanc       

GnomeEGGS

Learning about Commands, Part II

In addition to man and info, there are two other major commands that will give you information about the tools available in your Linux toolbox. whatis gives you a short blurb explaining what a command is used for, and apropos finds searches for commands whose descriptions contain the keyword you specify. Let's start with whatis, since ultimately this command is responsible for making both itself and apropos work.

The whatis command works as follows. You feed it a command - for example, let's say ifconfig - and whatis looks in its database for the listing corresponding to this command. In the case of ifconfig, I get:

$ whatis ifconfig
ifconfig             (8) - configure a network interface

Whenever you install new programs, you're adding new commands, man pages, and more. The whatis database has to be refreshed if it's going to reflect this new information, so many distributions update it by default on a regular basis. You can run this update manually at any time by typing (as the root user):

/usr/sbin/makewhatis

The apropos tool is, in a way, the opposite of whatis. With whatis, you have to know the name of the command you're looking for. With apropos, you don't know the name of the command, and use keywords to try to find it. Case isn't important here; apropos ignores whether things are in upper or lower case. Say that you want to find all of the instant messaging clients installed on your system. You might try something like:

$ apropos instant
Gaim v0.59.8 [gaim]  (1)  - Instant Messaging client
XRegisterIMInstantiateCallback [XOpenIM] (3x)  - open, close, and otain input method information
XUnregisterIMInstantiateCallback [XOpenIM] (3x)  - open, close, and otain input
method information

You can do this using the pipe symbol: |. This symbol tells Linux to take the output from the command on its left, and send it as input to the command on its right. Try this example on your own machine:

apropos pdf | more

Next week: How man pages are organized ...

Submit a Resource | Discuss | Recommend It!

GnomeCHICKS

Compiling Software from Source, Part IV

You might remember from last week that I'd gotten to the gnome-vfs package and ended up with it telling me to install the same library I'd just finished installing. Oops! Well, I tried running make install again for that library, just in case I forgot that silly step, but that didn't fix the problem. So, this probably means that the bonobo libraries aren't being installed where gnome-vfs expects them. The specific message is:

configure: error: Library requirements (libbonobo-2.0 >= 2.0.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.

I open a separate terminal window and type locate libbonobo | more to see where the libraries were installed. There's lots of them in /usr/lib, /usr/local/include/libbonobo-2.0, /usr/local/lib/... and I think I saw pkgconfig pass by there as well. So, I type:

$ locate libbonobo | grep pkgconfig
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/libbonobo-2.0.pc

That's likely what it's looking for, so why isn't it finding it? Ah ha:

$ echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH
 
$

PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/"

and try ./configure again. Nope. Same error. I use echo again in the compilation screen and yes, the environment variable is set correctly. Time to use ./configure --help | more for further assistance.

That's it for this week. I'm going to keep going with this series until:

1. Lots of people beg me to stop.
2. I stop running into new and interesting problems.

http://www.majorgeeks.net/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=175957

Submit a Resource | Discuss | Recommend It!

GnomeMAN

Stu writes:

"Got a question - Scribus looks good! But is there Linux Software that does like newsletters, cards, etc.??"

That's a toughie. I found a card generator for Web servers, but it's for ecards. At this date, there doesn't seem to be something that's exactly what you're looking for (that I can find). You could try to get Scribus or OpenOffice.org to do it. Or, you could use one of the tools that lets you run Windows software under Linux and use one of the many Windows programs available to Windows users. (Hopefully someone will see me saying there's nothing there, and start building something to prove me wrong!)

The Windows-under-Linux tools that could suit your needs include:

• VMWare
• Win4Lin
• CrossOver products
• WINE