Ubuntu, a popular GNU/Linux distribution has the slogan "Linux for human beings". Like other distributions that aim for ease of use on the desktop, Ubuntu comes with several graphical tools for system configuration.

A default installation of version 5.10 includes the following:

• Add Applications
• Device Manager
• Disks
• Language Selector
• Login Screen Setup
• Networking
• Printing
• Services
• Shared Folders
• Synaptic Package Manager
• Time and Date
• Update Manager
• Users and Groups

Our meeting on Thursday January 19 will feature a demonstration of each tool. It is at 7:30pm in room 2M70 at the University of Winnipeg. (the boardroom on the second floor of the Manitoba building)

We are aiming to have multiple presenters. If you could cover one or more of the above tools, let us know on our mailing list, Sparkplug. Also, the demonstration of the printing configuration tool would be enhanced if someone could bring a printer.

story contributed by Mark Jenkins

There has been a long standing bug in the French Canadian Keyboard layout for Red Hat and Fedora Core systems. If you try to set the keyboard layout to French Canadian in Gnome Keyboard preferences applet, you get the error:

Error activating XKB configuration.
Probably internal X server problem.

Unfortunately, because this is considered an "upstream bug", Red Hat has labelled the keyboard layout bug as "WONTFIX". Here is a solution to the problem for anyone who isn't willing to wait for Red Hat to fix the problem.

Have you ever received a file attachment from a Mac user in MacBinary or BinHex format? Those formats are actually "wrappers" that Mac uses to send binary files via email. For instance, files such as image files and executables are often encoded in this manner. I have received recently received several files in this format and didn't know how to decode them so that I could get to the attachments. I was searching the internet for programs to deal with this problem, one of which is mcvert, but it didn't seem to work properly. But luckily I discovered that most GNU/Linux distributions come with a command line program called megatron that will convert your files back into their original form.

This started off as another one-liner that seemed too trivial to bother posting as an entire story. I didn't realize this was even possible until I read about it at the Mozilla Wishlist FAQ. But then I started wondering "What if..."

I was playing around with the transparency in xorg 6.8.1 and it's pretty interesting. After trying it out it provides an excellent visual experience yet I struggle to find a real-life purpose for this feature in dialy use of your system.

There is a great set of instructions for setting this up here and you can view a screenshot that I took here.

It really slowed up my Toshiba Laptop, but I don't have much for graphics so with a decent graphics card (and properly loaded drivers) I'm sure it would run smooth.

I'm sure a lot of you may already know about some of the stuff I'm going to talk about. But I'm so happy I can do stuff like this, I thought I would:
a) share the tip for others who don't already know it and
b) archive it for my own personal reference.

This all started when I had to back up a Windows drive before installing Linux for a friend. There was no CD burner, so the only real option was some kind of network backup, but alas, the network card was inoperable in Windows (95). I figured that booting from a Knoppix CD might be the way to go. All I had to do was remount /mnt/hda1 read-write and tar up the existing files, copy the tar file to the backup server and start installing. As it turns out, there was only one problem with that plan. The drive was mounted read-only and couldn't be unmounted and remounted read-write because Knoppix had created a swap file on the drive. Rather than messing with turning off swap and deleting the swap file, I decided to stream the tar command over ssh.

If you've ever converted a Windows user to Linux, one of the questions that inevitably comes up is "How do I print mailing labels?" It is usually very easy in Windows because the Avery mailing label software is built right into Microsoft Word. Until now I've been forced to use various kinds of kludges involving creating pdfs using command line tools and shell scripts. But I finally found a great tool for creating mailing labels in Linux. Read on if you want to find out a little about it.

After becoming tired of restarting my "X-Thin Pro X server for windows trialware" after 30 minutes of use I began to look for alternatives.

Ever wanted to back up a MySQL database? Wanted to test out some new database tables or fields? Afraid to lose all that valuable data you've been socking away all these years? You're not alone. Jason and Syd have had many (mis)adventures trying to do nifty tricks with MySQL. But we finally found out just how easy it can be to do stuff that sometimes seems complicated.

Read more if you want to find out the secret...

When sitting at my workstation I often want to phone someone. I have most of my numbers stored at my.yahoo.com and find that positioning my mouse pointer and clicking and loging on and typing the name/company I want is a pain in the ***. So, being the lazy person I am I created a text file with my phone numbers and got grep to do the lookups.