I haven't visited in a long while, but if you look at my previous post, you may have noticed that I'm an Unreal Tournament fan. Anyways, as a programmer and Linux advocate, I have decided to also make my UT2004 benchmarking program for Linux. This isn't only for gamers, but also for those who would like to compare 3D benchmarking between Linux and Windows using the Unreal 2 engine. All details can be viewed at the website: http://www.unrealmark.net/linux.php

Felix Jodoin, a 13 year-old programmer and member of PLUG, has won a gold medal at the Winnipeg School Division Science Fair for his project, which involved creating his own custom distribution of GNU/Linux. Congratulations, Felix!

In a few short hours PLUG was able to haul 40-50 nearly complete computers from the University of Winnipeg to the Tux Cave (Syd's basement). They were in great shape and we have two recipients so far. The Urban Shaman Gallery of Contemporary Aboriginal Art will receive 5 pc's to be used as thin clients served by a Mac G5 server running Gentoo PPC64. The Orioles Community Centre will receive 5 as well. If you know of a worthwhile not for profit project to receive some computers send an email to info[AT]plug[dot]ca. See more pix here.

Huge thanks goes to the University of Winnipeg and all the volunteers who helped move them!!

It appears the HC-Linux project will come to an end once the server at Holy Cross school is 100% complete. Currently there is some clean up to do on the server and some documentation needs to be written for the administrator and users. The plan to expand this project to create an alternative to LTSP has been abandoned. I'll be moving the HC-Linux specific components of the site to generic areas as to not let our efforts go to waste. Ryan and I have decided to see how we can contribute to LTSP.

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..."

Adobe has recently released version 7.0 of it's PDF reader for Linux. I downloaded it from Adobe's FTP site and gave it a try. Installation was a snap using Adobe's basic installer, which if I remember correctly is the same as the installer that came with the 5.0 version. It loads quickly and I believe this puts Linux on par with the Mac/Win versions.

You can download your copy from Adobe's FTP Site.

I'm just officially announcing a project that we have been working on for several months. We are working with the Gas Station Theatre in Winnipeg to help them create a volunteer and membership database. We will be creating some online forums for discussing this project, in the same way we have done for the hc-linux project. The application will be web-based and will likely be done in PHP. Anyone interested in participating in this project, please send and email to info@plug.ca with a subject line indicating that you are interested in helping out with the project.

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.

I was trolling around OpenOffice Forums when I discovered a post about the structure of OpenOffice files. I was kind of amazed to discover a friendly file format lurking beneath the sxw.