Welcome From The Chief Editor

Graphics Tutorials: Gimp, Part 1

Forum Foibles: Featuring Family Foibler longtom

Mark's Quick Gimp Tip & Double Take

Forgot To Run aptupgrade? Don't Panic!

KompoZer: Let's Get Acquainted

Mounting A Floppy Under PCLinuxOS

Use LibreOffice Writer, AbiWord To Fill Out Forms

Forum Foibles: ms_meme's ABC Book

Eliminate Annoying Messages In KDE4

Linux Financial Apps: GnuCash

QEMU: The Other Virtual Machine, Part 2

Forum Foibles: Featuring Family Foibler longtomjr

Thunar Custom Action For Dropbox Public URL

Labels, Anyone?

Installing Avast Antivirus Home Edition On PCLinuxOS

Install & Configure ProFTPD On PCLinuxOS

ms_meme's Nook: Tra La La PCLOS

Create An ISO From A DVD or CD

Screenshot Showcase

Disclaimer

Welcome From The Chief Editor

Shhhhh! Be varry varry quiet! But the 3.2.18-x kernel has made its way to the regular repos. Without any fanfare, and without any announcement, the 3.2.18-x kernel has been freed from the testing repos. Remember that your kernel is not updated as part of your routine and regular updates. Instead, you will need to specifically install it from Synaptic. The new kernel will be installed right next to your currently installed kernel, allowing you an easy route to revert back to your old kernel, should the new kernel have some issues with your hardware. Also, remember that the first time you boot your computer with your newly installed kernel will take a little extra time, as all the modules and drivers are rebuilt for your new kernel.

If you are fearful about updating to the new kernel – don't be. So far, I've updated three of my computers to the new kernel and everything has gone just fine, except for a minor issue with a wireless adapter no longer able to connect using WEP. I had been meaning to change from WEP to WPA-PSK for some time now, and the situation just got me off of my duff and forced me to stop procrastinating.

Do you have to update your kernel? In one word, nope. If the 2.8.38 kernel is performing well for you, then you can continue using it. Remember that kernel updates are not a part of your regular and routine updates. Eventually, you will want to – and may even have to – update to the newer kernels. But for the moment, you can continue using your current kernel.

In other news … you may have noticed that The PCLinuxOS Magazine now comes in two new "flavors." As if he hasn't done enough for the magazine by providing the magazine's new web server, David Moore (a.k.a. YouCanToo) has undertaken the chore of converting the monthly magazine issues into *.epub and *.mobi ebook editions. These ebook editions now make it easy to view The PCLinuxOS Magazine on your B&N Nook, Amazon Kindle, and most other modern ebook readers on the market. YouCanToo will be creating ebook editions of all the magazine's 2012 issues, so keep an eye on the magazine's website to grab your copies when they become available.

Also, Leiche has released a new, updated 2012.06 version of the LXDE Live CD. Of course, if you've kept your installation regularly updated, you already have the "latest" version of LXDE. Still, if you are planning to install LXDE on a friend's computer in the near future, you may want to download and use the updated LXDE Live CD. It'll help streamline the installation and update process.

Until next month, I wish each and every one of you peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity.

Graphics Tutorials: Gimp, Part 1

by Meemaw

I've been using GIMP since I started using Linux. While I can do most of what I want to do fairly easily, GIMP contains many options that I haven't used much. In these articles, I will try to explain a little about GIMP and how to use it.

GIMP, of course, stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. The website is http://www.gimp.org/.  It can be found in most any distro's repository and PCLinuxOS is no exception. It can also be installed in Mac and Windows, so I use it at work in Win7, as well as at home with PCLinuxOS.  

When you open it, you are shown three windows as shown below:

While many of our graphics programs are displayed all in one window, Gimp has had them separate for years. GIMP 2.8 has been released now. It has a single window display, but has the option of leaving the windows separate. I really like the separate windows, because I can arrange the them the way I want them. However, it hasn't made it to our repos yet, so be patient – GIMP 2.6 works very well.

The window on the left of the screen is your main toolbox. The tools there are the ones you will use the most. For each tool, there is a corresponding config section, so the bottom of that window will change depending on the tool chosen at the top. The area at the top of the toolbox (where you see Wilber, the Gimp critter's eyes and nose) is the Drop Target area. If you have a file manager open too, you can drag the item you want to work on to this area and it will open in Gimp.

Going across the rows in order, the tools are as follows:

Rectangle Select - You can designate a rectangular area and manipulate it.

Elliptical Select - Create a circular or elliptical area and manipulate it.

Freehand Select - Create an irregular-shaped area by clicking your mouse along the outside of the area. Very handy!

Continuous Region Select - This selects connected areas.

Color Select - Selects areas of similar color.

Intelligent Scissors (Select from image) - Selects along an edge ….

Foreground Select - You can use this for cutting items out of photographs... complicated tool.

Path Tool - You can use this to create a path, which you can then edit

Color Picker - If you want to exactly duplicate a color in a picture, choose this tool and click on the color. You can use the selected color to edit your drawing.

Zoom - You can see your work close-up with the Zoom tool.

Measure Tool - Measures distances in your drawing.

Move Tool - Click on this to move your object into place.

Align - You can choose 2 or more objects or layers and align them

Crop - You can crop an image. Click and drag for your area, then press enter to crop.

Rotate - Clicking on this tool will let you rotate your object.

Scale - To resize your drawing or object

Shear - To skew an object. (Example: You can change a square to a diamond.)

Perspective - You can apply perspective to a 2 dimensional image to make it look more 3D.

Flip - Used to flip your object horizontally or vertically

Text Tool - To add text to your creation

Bucket Fill - To add one color to a large area

Gradient Fill - To create a gradient in your object

Pencil - Draws thin lines, like a pencil line, but not smooth. Works better for very small objects where the pixels have to be in exactly the right spot.

Paintbrush - This tool draws smoother lines than the pencil, and this is probably the most used tool.

Eraser - Erases the color from your image. Actually, it changes whatever you stroke to transparency, so it can also be used as a paint tool.

Airbrush - Paints like an airbrush, using a spray or fuzzy effect rather than a solid line.

Ink Tool - Draws lines more like a calligraphy pen.

Clone Tool - Use this to clone parts of an image.

Healing Tool - This will heal small blemishes in photos.

Perspective Clone - Advanced tool for cloning something into the image which may not look as it looks now (like cloning a face so it looks like it's a picture on the wall).

Blur/Sharpen - Softens or sharpens colored edges and blends colors together.

Smudge - Drawing with this through two colors will cause the colors to blend, although maybe not the way you want.

Dodge/Burn - Can make an area darker or lighter.

The window on the right contains the Layers, Channels, Paths and Undo tools, and we will use that as well, but I will cover it separately, in an upcoming article.

OK, let's experiment. Your center window contains all your menus (and all of your tools can be accessed from here as well). Click on File > New. You will see a window for a new image. Here you should designate the size of your image, and in Advanced Options, whether the background should be white, black or transparent. I clicked on the dropdown and selected 800 px x 600 px, then opened the Advanced Options and selected white, and clicked OK.

Select either the paintbrush or pencil, and draw a circle. Play with it a little bit just to get the feel of the tool. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle.

Playing more with your brush tool, make a face on your circle. Since some of us aren't artists (myself included!), your face will look different from mine. Getting the feel of the tool, you can make several strokes. If you make one you don't like, you can go to Edit > Undo, or press <CTRL> + <Z> to remove the stroke. If you use the keystroke CTRL-Z, you can hold down CTRL and press the Z as many times as you wish to remove as many strokes as you need.

Sooner or later you'll have to save your file. Just as with other programs, go to File > Save as...  and name your file, then designate a location in which to save it so you can find it again. The default file format for Gimp is .xcf, which is designed to save all your layers while you are working on your creation. You can save your finished product as any number of image types, such as *.jpg or *.png.

Lets add some color to our drawing. From the toolbox, you will see a color swatch (the black & white rectangles underneath the tools). Click on the swatch and the Edit Foreground or Edit Background color window will open. From here you can choose whatever color you want to use. The default foreground color is black and the default background color is white.

You will have several tabs in your window (top left corner). On the first tab, you will see the default color square (probably in shades of red & black) with a rainbow-colored vertical bar to the right of it. To the right of that you will see six horizontal bars of color with letters next to them. Those letters are for the following words, which are color settings you can adjust:

Hue: This is the color you want. You should probably click it in the vertical bar first, then all the other settings will display the color you are working with.

Saturation: This is how pale a color is (I think of it as how much of the color used). The slider will make it more or less intense.

Value: I think of this as how light or dark a color is, but Gimp's glossary says it is how much light is emitted by a color.

Red, Blue & Green: These are the colors that will be mixed for everything you do. Each individual slider can be adjusted separately to produce just the right color. To the right of each slider is a blank containing a number. Each color can be described with a series of numbers from 0 to 255 (0,0,0 is black and 255,255,255 is white. All other colors are in between.) If you have the numerical code for the perfect color, you can adjust the numbers in these blanks. If you are deciding on a color, each slider can be adjusted individually.

In addition, all colors can also be described with a 6-digit hexidecimal code. (000000 is black and ffffff is white. One shade of purple is 430da9.) If you know the code for your perfect color, you can enter it in the space provided in this window. (Also called HTML notation)

One of the tabs will have a printer on it and be the CYMK, referring to the printer colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black. This is not really supported in Gimp so they don't describe it much, but it is apparently to adjust your colors according to the cartridge colors of your printer. That would have been a great idea with one of my older printers - it printed everything several shades too dark.

One tab will have a paintbrush on it and it is the Watercolor wheel. It gives you a color square and you click the color you want. The more times you click, the more intense the color will be.

One tab will have the “color wheel” on it (also called the Triangle Selector). It is the multi-colored circle around a multi-colored triangle. Click the color (Hue) you want in the circle, then drag the white ring into the interior of the triangle to adjust Saturation and Value.

The Palette tab will have a grid of the colors contained in the color palette being used by Gimp. You can choose one of those, and go back to the first tab and edit your color there.

I use the first tab and the color wheel the most. Click on the vertical bar between yellow and orange. Looking at the horizontal bars to the right, you can adjust your color until it is an approximate skin tone, whatever color you want to make the face. The color will show in a bar underneath the color square or wheel. You can keep adjusting until you get it just right. There are also small swatches that will save up a record of the last 12 colors you used. Click OK, then choose the Bucket Fill tool and click inside your face. Your drawing should now have a skin-tone color in it. If you don't like the color after all, press your <CTRL> + <Z> to undo it, then go to your color window and adjust your color again.

NOTE: The Undo function keeps track of everything you do so you can click undo over and over to remove lots of things. HOWEVER, once you save your drawing, all the undo history is gone, so make sure it is the way you want it before you save it and close down Gimp.

Play with this a little, and have some fun! Next month we'll learn more about the interface and then add more to our drawing.

Forum Foibles: Featuring Family Foibler longtom

Mark's Quick Gimp Tip & Double Take

Find Answers Here

Mark Szorady is a nationally syndicated cartoonist with georgetoon.com.
He blogs at georgetoon.com/blog.
Email Mark at georgetoon@gmail.com.

Forgot To Run aptupgrade? Don't Panic!

by AndrzejL

Several months ago, there was a “demand” from PCLinuxOS devs to install and run the aptupgrade package. This was a crucial package. Everywhere on the forum, there were reminders about doing this. Why was it so important? Because it was upgrading apt, rpm and their libraries. Also, Synaptic Package Manager was upgraded.

Whoever did not upgrade it in time (they had a few months' window) should reinstall with a fresh copy of the latest iso after creating a list of all the installed apps and backing up their /home folder. Why? Because the packages created using the latest rpm would not be compatible with the systems that were not upgraded.

That was the suggested solution. Reinstall. BUT what if you do not want to or cannot install from scratch due to many personal tweaks and/or for any other valid reasons?

If you are desperate/brave/crazy enough (like me) and you are willing to take some risks (like me) – please continue reading. I don't have to tell you that I won't take any responsibility for a borked system right? Right.

Recently, I visited a friend who is dual-booting Windows XP and PCLinuxOS. I tried to install gparted, and noticed he had not upgraded his lappy for 10 months or so. I tried to upgrade it, but all I got was librpm dependency problems – no matter what I did. So, I said right – aptupgrade was not done.

So here is (more or less) what I did to fix it. (I am skipping all the investigation steps).

Open a terminal and run:

su

followed by

root's password

and then…

cd /root/

wget -c http://andrzejl.cyryl.net/WoTW/WoTW_files/aptupgrade/aptupgrade-1.0-7pclos2011.src.rpm

rpm -ivh /root/aptupgrade-1.0-7pclos2011.src.rpm

unxz /root/rpmbuild/SOURCES/aptupgrade-1.0.tar.xz

cd /root/rpmbuild/SOURCES

tar xvf ./aptupgrade-1.0.tar

cd ./aptupgrade-1.0

rpm -ivh --nodeps --force --ignorearch --ignoresize --ignoreos ./*.rpm

rm -f /root/aptupgrade-1.0-7pclos2011.src.rpm

rm -Rf /root/rpmbuild/

BE CAREFUL WHILE USING THE RPM COMMANDS!

Now, leave this terminal window open and follow this very important step.

Open Synaptic. When it reloads, you will get three or four errors (in one error window) about multiple versions of packages (like apt, libapt and synaptic) being installed. Write down the names of these packages and click on OK to clear the message from your screen. Now search for those packages in Synaptic. You will find that indeed there are multiple versions installed. Compare their version numbers and “Mark for complete removal” the older versions. Apply the changes. Wait for the packages to be removed and Synaptic to reload. Close and reopen Synaptic. There may be another message about duplicate packages. Write down their names, find them, mark the older versions for complete removal, apply, wait till finished, close and reopen Synaptic. Repeat till there are no duplicate packages error messages when starting Synaptic. I guess this could be done by using dupeclean package but I did it by hand just to make sure nothing really important would get removed when dealing with duplicates. When this is done close Synaptic.

Now go back to that terminal window that you had open and type in:

apt-get update

and when done

apt-get dist-upgrade

Wait for the question about installing/upgrading/removing etc., etc., etc. Read, understand and if all is ok – confirm by pressing y, followed by Enter.

Wait until it finishes and reboot. Why not use Synaptic to do the upgrade? Because I was afraid that replacing/upgrading so many crucial system libraries after such a long time of not upgrading the system at all could crash synaptic in the middle of the upgrade and could cause system-wide corruptions and multiple problems.

On a side note, at my friends house I recently got 937 packages to be upgraded, 36 new to be installed and 33 to be removed. Over 1080 MB of upgrades. After upgrading and rebooting, the system worked perfectly without the tiniest issue. Even funnier was that I forgot that I had testing section enabled and upgraded fully with it enabled. I said to myself to bite the bullet and  upgraded his kernel to the testing version as well. Kernel 3.2.16-bfs was installed without the tiniest hiccup.

So did you fully reboot? Check for updates using Synaptic as you normally would. In the future, don't forget to upgrade at least every 2 weeks and periodically check the forum for any important announcements for your distro.

KompoZer: Let's Get Acquainted

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

After spending some time on the web, there are many users who may wish to create their own personal web page. There are many ways to do it.

First, you can use a web interface to create a bare bones web page. Some web interfaces at least allow you a few customization options, like different backgrounds, text sizes, layouts, etc. But they all look like “cookie cutter” pages with their similar appearance.

Second, you can create a personal blog. Most of these use a web interface to allow the blogger to update the content of their site. Most useful for espousing your opinion, blogs typically don't allow for the downloading of additional files, unless you use cloud storage or some other off-site storage solution. Many of these also have a “cookie cutter” appearance.

Another way you can create a web site is to hand code your HTML. You can do this in a simple text editor, or in a special HTML editor that helps write the raw HTML code. There are many who subscribe to and like using this method. Many view it as a “rite of passage,” and proclaim it to be the “only way to code HTML like a man.” Without a doubt, this is the best way to create a custom web page, but it's also the easiest to get wrong.

Fortunately, for the rest of us wimps, there are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors – like KompoZer. Working a lot like a WYSIWYG word processor, such as LibreOffice Writer, you create your web page much as you would a term paper or typing a letter. You can position your images and text exactly where you want them, without having to learn a lot about HTML coding. Of course, it's a lot of help to know HTML coding. The more you know, the more you can do with the generated HTML code to customize it even further.

Background

Back in February 2004, then Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony wanted to create a simple, easy to use, open source WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on the Mozilla Gecko engine. He hired Daniel Glazman, a former Netscape employee, as the lead developer to help create Nvu (pronounced “N view”).

Development on Nvu stopped in 2006, and a community fork of the Nvu source code continued on – as KompoZer. The current version in the PCLinuxOS repository is 0.8b3, released in February 2010. It is based on Gecko 1.8.1. The Gecko engine is currently at version 11, but the older version that KompoZer is based on continues to work well, even in the newer Gecko engine.

Despite the “K” in its name, KompoZer is not a KDE application, no more than the Linux kernel is. Instead, KompoZer is a Gtk+ application. Versions exist for Linux, Windows and OS-X, giving it cross platform support. It is developed by Fabien Cazenave in his free time.

Meanwhile, Daniel Glazman went on to create another WYSIWYG HTML editor from scratch, based on Gecko and XULRunner, and called BlueGriffon. While the core program is released as GNU free software, many of the functions, add-ons and the manual are available only after paying for the modules you select. If you were to buy all the modules, add-ons and the manual, you could end up paying around $100. Without the purchase of the modules, many of the features of BlueGriffon are crippled and non-functioning.

Getting Acquainted

When you first launch KompoZer, you will see the KompoZer Tip Of The Day dialog box (which can be disabled, if you choose).

After that, you will find the main window displayed, as below.

So, let's break down the different areas of the KompoZer window. Let's start with the toolbar.

The KompoZer toolbar gives you one-click access to many tools you will need when creating your HTML page. The first three icons on the toolbar should be self explanatory to any user. Hovering your mouse over any of the toolbar icons will get you an explanation displayed in a tooltip. We'll discuss the functions of most of these buttons in greater detail in future articles. Right now, we're just getting familiar with them.

Publish enables you to publish the files that make up your website. Typically, these are all stored in a directory on your hard drive that mirrors the directory and file structure on your website.

Browse allows you to open the saved version of the file currently being edited or worked on in your default web browser. Be sure to save your edits before using the “Browse” button, or your new edits won't appear in your web browser.

Undo allows you to undo your most recent edits. Redo allows you to put your most recent edits back in, after you've removed them with the “Undo” action.

Anchor places an anchor tag in your HTML at the current cursor position. Let's say you have a rather long document, and you create an index or table of contents for that document. By inserting anchor tags at the appropriate places within that document, you can link from the index or table of contents directly to that specific anchor tag, without your user having to scroll through the entire document to get there. Anchor tags are typically given a unique name, with # used as a prefix.

Link allows you to insert a HTML link into your document. That link can be to a local file, or to a resource hosted on another site. The “Link” button will bring up the “Link Properties” dialog box, where you can enter all the pertinent information for your link.

Image allows you to insert an image into your document at the current cursor position. KompoZer will display the “Image Properties” dialog box that will allow you to enter the necessary information for your image.

Table allows you to insert a table into your HTML document. Tables are a very powerful formatting tool when creating HTML pages. KompoZer will display the “Insert Table” dialog box, allowing you to define the initial structure of your table. The table will be immediately placed into your document at the current cursor position, using your definitions as a guide. If you double click your mouse cursor on the table in your document, you can further tune your table's appearance to exactly what you want.

Form allows you to insert and set up a form in your HTML document. We've all dealt with forms and form elements within web pages. You use form elements to sign into the PCLinuxOS forum, when you insert your username and password to gain access there.

HTML allows you to open up your HTML code for editing in an external editor, if you have one set up.

CSS Editor allows you to edit the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) for your HTML document, which applies a style sheet to your HTML document. The default with KompoZer is to embed the style definitions into the HTML header. It is possible to import an external *.css file to control the styles of a group of pages.

Finally, at the far right of the toolbar is the KompoZer logo. Mouse over the logo and a tooltip will appear, declaring “This is KompoZer.” Otherwise, that's all it does.

Text Formatting Tools

The next two “toolbars” relate to your text formatting. They appear like in the image below.

Starting with the top row, let's review the text formatting features. At the top left is the formatting style of the text. The default is for body text. The other choices are paragraph, headings one through six, address, preformatted, or create an generic division.

Working left to right, the next control allows you to apply a class to either the text being entered, or the selected text. The ! applies emphasis to the text, while the !! applies strong emphasis. Basically, applying emphasis to text is akin to making the text italic, while strong emphasis is similar to making the text bold. Selecting them both makes the text bold italic.

The next control formats the text as a numbered list, while the next one formats the text as a bulleted list. Next are the controls to indent and outdent text. The outdent control is disabled, unless you are dealing with text that has previously been indented.

The next two controls don't make a lot of sense to me, as they are implemented in KompoZer. They are called “Definition Term” and “Definition Description.” I'm unable to find any documentation about them, and in playing around with them, I can find no rational use for them.

The last three controls on the top row of the text formatting toolbar deals with layers. With KompoZer, you can design layers into your web page. Briefly, the use of layers allows precise positioning of an element within your layout.

On the second row of text formatting controls, starting from the left, the first control allows you to select the font to use. The default is “Variable Width,” but I usually prefer to select a specific font to use for my web pages. It boils down to personal preference of how you want your page to appear. My personal preference is for a sans serif font, such as Helvetica, Arial or Liberation Sans.

The next control sets the font color and the text background color. Clicking on them allows you to bring up a color selection dialog box where you can define or select the colors of each. Right next to those controls are the two controls to allow you to make the text larger or smaller.

Next are the controls to determine whether your text is bold, italic or underlined, just as you would find in a word processing program.

The last controls determine the alignment of the text in your HTML document. You can choose left aligned, centered, right aligned, or justified. Again, these controls work pretty much as they would in a word processing program.

Site Manager

One of the neat functions of KompoZer is that it allows you to manage your web site. Typically, when you are creating or working on your site, there are a number of files that comprise the whole. You would normally store a copy of things to your hard drive, arranged as they would be on your website. With KompoZer, you can upload your all of the elements of your site or just the changed pages to your web host.

Page Layout Area

The largest element of your KompoZer window is the area where you enter and arrange the elements of your HTML page. Think of it as your canvas. Or think of it as your blank page as you might have in a word processing program. Just as you might do typing out a letter or a term paper, you enter the information for your web page exactly the same way.

At the bottom of the page layout area, you see three “tabs” on the left. The “Design” tab is the default view, and displays the information you are entering in a WYSIWYG manner. That is, how it appears on your screen is pretty close to how it will appear when a visitor to your website might see it in their browser. The “Source” tab allows you to view and edit the generated HTML code, something you might want to do when you use or add elements to your web page that aren't supported by KompoZer. The “Split” tab allows you to have a WYSIWYG display of your page content in the top part of the window, while displaying the generated HTML code in the bottom part of the window – in a split view.

At the bottom right of the page layout section of the Kompozer window is a control that determines how your page layout window appears. The default is the “Normal” setting. You can also set it to the “Preview” setting, (although I can't see any difference between the normal and preview settings). You can also set it to the “HTML Tags” setting, which displays the HTML tags for each element of your page in your WYSIWYG page layout window, right next to each individual element of your page. To be perfectly honest, I never alter the view. I choose, instead, to switch between the design tab and the source tab when working on my pages.

Status Bar

At the bottom of the KompoZer window is the status bar. The status bar will display the general HTML tags of the current section of your HTML page.

Summary

Now that you've gotten a quick overview of some of the features of the KompoZer window, you should be better able to find your way around KompoZer. Don't worry – there's lots more that we haven't even touched on yet. Next time, we'll talk about setting up your site, and get started creating your first HTML page

Mounting A Floppy Under PCLinuxOS

by Darrel Johnston (djohnston)

I cringe when I read an article about someone who is running Linux on an “old” computer from 2005. Old? That’s not old. I’m still using a Dell Pentium III from 1999. I’ll bet most of the personal computers made in 2005 did not come with floppy drives. My Dell did. And, unlike USB devices, the floppy drive is not polled by the hardware or the software to see if a volume has been inserted or removed. The user must manually mount and unmount each floppy disk inserted into the drive.

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to use GUI tools to enable the floppy drive for easy use. We can also create GUI tools to mount and unmount floppy disks, and to read and copy the contents of floppy disks. We must begin the setup in PCC, the PCLinuxOS Control Center. Click Local disks in the left pane of the window.

If the Floppy drive icon option is not showing in the right pane, the system is not reading the hardware device. Check the computer’s BIOS settings and all drive cables. Click the Floppy drive icon in the right pane.

The default options presented should be the correct ones. The image above is difficult to read. The options are:

Mount point: /media/floppy

Device: fd0

Name: H1440

Type: auto

Options: umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,flush,exec

Click the OK button.

Click the Yes button to save the /etc/fstab modifications. Close the PCC window. Your /etc/fstab file should contain a new line:

/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,flush,exec 0 0

It would be handy to have a standard place to access the contents of a floppy disk. We can create a shortcut to the floppy in our favorite file browser. I am using PCManFM in the illustration. The instructions presented will also work in Thunar, Nautilus and Dolphin. Open the file browser and navigate to the /media directory.

Drag and drop the floppy folder icon from the right pane to the bottom of the left pane.

We now have a shortcut, or link, in the left pane of the file manager window we can click on to access the contents of a mounted floppy disk. At this point, we can manually mount and unmount a floppy disk that is inserted into the drive. We can do both from a terminal as a regular user. Insert a floppy disk into the drive and open a terminal. To mount the floppy for use, enter the command:

mount /dev/fd0

To unmount a floppy, enter the command:

umount /media/floppy

Once mounted, the contents of the floppy disk can be accessed in the file manager by clicking the floppy disk icon in the left pane.

But, we still have to manually mount and unmount the floppies from a terminal using the command line. That, too, is easily overcome. We will create two desktop files, one for mounting a floppy and one for unmounting. Open a text editor. Enter the following text:

[Desktop Entry]

Type=Application

Icon=/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/devices/media-floppy.png

Name=MountFloppy

Comment=Mount a floppy disk

Categories=FileManager;X-MandrivaLinux-System-FileTools;

Exec=mount /dev/fd0

StartupNotify=true

Terminal=false

MimeType=x-directory/normal;inode/directory;

X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.18

Save the file as floppy_mount.desktop. In the same text editor, enter the following text as a new file:

[Desktop Entry]

Type=Application

Icon=/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/devices/media-flash.png

Name=UnmountFloppy

Comment=Unmount a floppy disk

Categories=FileManager;X-MandrivaLinux-System-FileTools;

Exec=umount /media/floppy

StartupNotify=true

Terminal=false

MimeType=x-directory/normal;inode/directory;

X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.18

Save the file as floppy_unmount.desktop. We have now created two desktop files that can be used to mount and unmount floppy disks. The files can be copied to your desktop or to any folder owned by you. For convenience, we also want the entries to show up in the PCLinuxOS menu. The system wide menu entries can be found in /usr/share/applications. However, the two desktop files are not provided by any installed package, and we don’t want to go to the extra effort of creating them again, should we reinstall the operating system at some point. For that reason, copy both floppy_mount.desktop and floppy_unmount.desktop files to ~/.local/share/applications. That is, copy the desktop files the the .local/share/applications folder in your home directory. The .local folder is hidden, so set your file browser to show hidden files before copying. Once copied, you will see two new entries:

MountFloppy   and UnmountFloppy , in the File Tools section of the PCLinuxOS menu. I chose two standard icons that should be installed by default on any PCLinuxOS version. Change the Icon= line in the desktop files to choose any other icon you wish

Use LibreOffice Writer, AbiWord To Fill Out Forms

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Lordy, lordy. I love that I subscribe to Windows tips and news email lists. Often times, it’s like that quote from Forrest Gump: “Momma always said life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

What’s that? You’re surprised that the editor of a Linux magazine would subscribe to and read such things? Don’t be, because it’s resulted in quite a few articles of how to do things in Linux. If nothing else, those Windows articles get the gears turning. I always read those articles with the thought of “how is this of interest to Linux users?” Plus, it’s helpful to stay informed on what the Evil Empire and Darth Ballmer are up to.

Such was the case once again on May 23, 2012, when I received the Windows Desktop newsletter from TechRepublic. Featured in there was a tip on how to use Microsoft Word to fill out forms. I got to thinking, “I can do that in LibreOffice.”

To prove that I could, I downloaded the 2011 Form 1040-EZ tax form from the IRS web site. Sure enough, you can do it in LibreOffice and AbiWord. Not only can you do it in either of those two applications, but you can do it much easier. Take that Microsoft Word!

What follows is an explanation on how to do it. We’ll start with the Microsoft Word method, which can easily be replicated in LibreOffice. It’s a bit involved, but it’s easier than it sounds. You just got to know which hoops to jump through. Then, I’ll show you the much simpler ways, in both LibreOffice Writer and AbiWord.

Step One: Obtain & Convert The Form

This step is common between all three methods I’ll show you, so I’ve separated this step to stand alone. Obtaining the IRS Form 1040-EZ to use as an example was easy enough. I simply went to their website and downloaded the latest version available, snagging the PDF of the form for 2011.

Next, open the PDF file in Gimp. Yes, Gimp will open PDF files, in case you didn’t know. Just right click on a PDF file and select “Open With...” then Gimp. You will get this window:

Click on the page you want to import. In the example above, it’s only the first page of the single page tax form. The second page contains only the instructions for filling out the form. Click the “Import” button in the bottom right corner of the window.

Once the form opens in Gimp, save it as a PNG file. You could save it as a JPG file, but I chose the PNG format because of its lossless compression and better results.

The Microsoft Word Way, In LibreOffice Writer

Using the same method as described for Microsoft Word, we can achieve the same result from LibreOffice Writer. Only the terminology is different, since Word and Writer call the same functions by different names.

Step Two: Set Your Document Background

Actually, this is where the bulk of the “trick” lies. Open a new LibreOffice Writer document, move your caret cursor into the header area and click on the blue tab to enable editing of the header.

With the header now selected for editing, go to the “Insert > Picture > From File...” menu item and insert the PNG file we made in Step One. Double click on the image after you have it placed in the header.

On the left side of the dialog box that appears, select “Original Size.” We don’t want the image of our form to fit neatly within the margins of our document. Being a PDF form, it was intended for users to print out, then fill out manually. Thus, our form already has “margins” included (just not OUR margins). Your LibreOffice Writer window should look something like this:

Step Three: Set Up Text Wrap

With the background image of your form still selected (as denoted by the small green resizing marks around its edge), select the “Format > Wrap > In Background” menu item. This moves your image to the background of the document, and allows you to enter text over the top of it. Using this method to send your image to the background of your document is a key step in getting this to work.

Step Four: Fill Out Your Form

To deselect the background image, click your mouse in the gray area surrounding the document display. Now, you should have your normal text entry caret cursor flashing, awaiting your input. Using tabs and spaces, move the caret to the locations where you need to enter data on the form.

Note that you may need to modify your margins to be able to “reach” all the areas of your form. You may also have to play around a bit with fonts and font sizes to get the proper line spacing for your entered text. For me, I found that 10 point Liberation Sans worked well, and gave me fairly good line spacing that matched up with the line spacing on my form.

Here’s an example of the tax form filled out in LibreOffice Writer (with fake information, of course):

The Simpler LibreOffice Writer Way

Leave it to the folks who produce FOSS to find a easier way to do things. LibreOffice Writer is no exception. The instructions that follow presume that you have already completed Step One and made a PNG file of your PDF form.

Step Two: Set Your Document Background

Select the “Format > Page...” menu item. Navigate to the “Background” tab. In the upper left corner of that tab is the “As” drop down. It defaults to Colors. Click it and choose “Graphic” from the drop down list. Then, click on the “Browse” button and select the PNG file you made from the PDF in Step One. Don’t close this dialog box out – yet. Click on the “Apply” button.

Step Three: Set Your Margins

Then, select the “Page” tab, and set all of your margins to 0.00 inches (or whatever other measuring units you are using). Remember, our form graphic already has margins included, so we really don’t need to worry about margins.

Click on the “OK” button to accept your changes and close out the dialog box. You will get the following message box displayed:

Select “Yes” to dismiss the warning box.

Step Four: Fill Out Your Form

Voila! Your blank form should now appear as the background graphic in your LibreOffice Writer document, similar to that pictured above. Just as with the previous method, you will have to mess around with the choice of font and font size to get a line spacing that matches up with that of the form. Again, 10 point Liberation Sans seems to work fine for me with this particular form. As you enter your data, it will appear over the top of your background image. Once more, use a combination of tabs and spaces to move the caret to the positions on the form where you need to enter text.

The Ultra-Easy AbiWord Method

Sometimes, it seems downright criminal that AbiWord is as often overlooked as it is. In case you’re not familiar with it, it’s a small, but powerful, cross-platform word processor. In keeping true to its FOSS origins, it does one thing, and does it well – word processing.

Using AbiWord to fill out forms is the easiest of all the methods described here.

Step Two: Set Your Document Background

Select the “Format > Page Background > Page Image” menu item, then select the PNG file you created from the PDF in Step One.

That’s it. It’s very, very easy.

Step Three: Set Your Margins

Since Form 1040-EZ already uses 0.5 inch margins, I set the margins in AbiWord to match.

Step Four: Fill Out Your Form

Voila! Just type in the information for your form. Just as with the previous methods, you will most likely have to play with the font and font size combination to achieve proper alignment with your form. Once again, I found that 10 point Liberation Sans seemed to fill the bill quite nicely. As with the previous two methods, use a combination of tabs and spaces to move the text entry caret to where you need to enter data on the form.

Summary

Without a doubt, we can do many of the same things that Microsoft Word does. In many cases, as illustrated here, we can do it much easier, thanks to the FOSS developers keeping things simple. There may be easier ways to do this in Microsoft Word, but to be honest, I wouldn’t know. I haven’t (thankfully) used Microsoft Word in years. I did go back and review the comments to the original TechRepublic article, and no one else had mentioned anything about an easier way to do it in Word, either.

It just goes to show you that expensive commercial software is not always better. It’s just … well … more expensive

Forum Foibles: ms_meme's ABC Book

Eliminate Annoying Messages In KDE4

by AndrzejL

I had to move from a Packard Bell EasyNote W3301 laptop to my Acer Travelmate 2420 due to a hardware failure. I moved the hard drive from one lappy to another. This was a little “hacky,, but it worked.

The first thing I noticed was a “Battery broken” annoyance each time my machine would boot to KDE4. Yes, thank you, I know the battery sucks and that I cannot afford a new one. Now please bugger off and stop rubbing the fact in.

I finally got rid of it. Here is how.

Open konsole and type in:

systemsettings

followed by the <Enter> key.

The KDE4 Control Center will pop up. Now go to Hardware > Power Management > Global Settings.

Now click on the Configure Notifications button. A new window will pop up. Look for a Broken battery notification entry and click on it.

Now uncheck the Play a sound and Show a message in a popup boxes. Click on the OK button to close the window, then close KCC and Konsole.

On next reboot/log in, the annoying message won’t bother you any more

Linux Financial Apps: GnuCash

by Meemaw

The fourth installment of our series is GnuCash http://www.gnucash.org/, which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The User Guide is at http://www.gnucash.org/docs.phtml. GnuCash is in the PCLinuxOS Repository.

Starting the program for the first time, the following window appears:

If for some reason you already have a set of accounts saved, you can click Cancel and open them from the main window. Instead, we will create a new set of accounts, so click OK. You will be presented with a series of windows that will help you create your set of accounts.

GnuCash has several ‘pre-made’ sets of categories, or account types, as shown in the left side of the window below. You may add as many as you wish. I have added the “Common Accounts” set. If you find that you need a category you don’t have, it can be added by hand, and any of the existing categories can be edited to your preference.

While you have your category list open, you can edit any of them. Click on each Asset account (at least the Checking and Savings) and enter an Opening Balance.

When you finish, you will have a window like the one below. Equity is Assets minus Expenses. Since there have been no expenses entered yet, Equity is the total of the asset accounts.

If you remember, iFreeBudget’s left side tree looks pretty much the same. GnuCash also uses double-entry bookkeeping, which means that everything is an account, even the categories. It also means that each transaction is entered twice, once as a debit from an account, and once as a credit to another account. When you enter a transaction into your checkbook, the transaction’s corresponding entry to a category is made automatically. After you add your transactions, you will find that the categories also have balance amounts in them as well.

Double-click on the Checking Account to open it. We will enter our transactions here. From the View menu, you can set your register to be single- or double-line display, and choose a basic ledger, auto-split ledger, or a transaction journal. The ledgers aren’t that much different, but the transaction journal shows both entries for each transaction (double-entry bookkeeping), and unless you are used to it, it may confuse you a bit. I chose the basic ledger.

The two lines colored yellow at the bottom of the display are for entering your transaction. All you really have to enter is the date, check number, payee, category and amount. In the double-line display, you have a line in which to add notes about a payment. (Prom dress for daughter?) GnuCash memorizes your transactions and payees, so if you start to enter a payee you already have, it will be filled in for you. All you will then have to do is tab over to the amount and change it if it’s different. Notice also that each account you open is a tab at the top, so if you want, you may have your checking and savings accounts open at the same time and just alternate between tabs.

When you save and close the accounts, you will see your main screen again. Notice that the Expenses categories now have amounts in them.

The Reports menu has many reports that can be viewed, and you can customize your own report if you wish.

GnuCash does Scheduled transactions two different ways. The first way is from the check register. If the transaction you have been adding is supposed to happen on a regular basis, you can go to the toolbar and click on the button that looks like a calendar with a plus sign.

Scheduled transactions can also be created from clicking on the Actions menu.

You will see several items in the Tools menu. You can set up Online Banking from here. I don’t do online banking from any financial program, but it looks pretty straightforward, as long as you have all the required information.

The Price & Security Editors are for your investment accounts.

The Loan Repayment Calculator is quick & handy to figure out your payment if you are borrowing money. Just clear all the options, then enter your loan amount, interest rate, future value and number of payments. Click “Calculate” and the payment amount will be calculated. In the example below, I set the amount I want to borrow as the Present Value, and zero as the Future Value (because I want the loan to be paid off). I put in the interest rate and number of payments, leaving the Periodic payment blank. Clicking “Calculate”, we see that the monthly payment is now filled in.  

The Close Book item is for an account you are closing.

You can pull up a General Ledger for your accounts as well.

Notice that you have a menu item called Business. If you want to manage your business accounts, you can use GnuCash. You can use the business categories rather than the standard set, and the program includes menu items to create Vendors, Customers, Employees, Payment Vouchers, Jobs and Invoices. In addition, the accounts you use include Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable. If you have a business, this may be a good program to manage it.

I have found GnuCash to be a good program that works well. The only problem I see is that it saves two files in addition to the data file every time it saves. Again, this is my personal opinion. However, if you set the program to auto-save every ten minutes and you work with it for an hour, you will have a file list in your save location that looks something like this:

My main file is the first in the list, but you will see several sets of files that include a log and an application file. If you open the program every day, this can fill up your /home folder pretty fast. The Preferences can be set to solve some of that, as you see here:

You can set to save every 30 minutes or hour, and only save the log files for 5 days or less. Set it however it works best for you.

Next month we will look at KMyMoney

QEMU: The Other Virtual Machine, Part 2

by Patrick G Horneker (phorneker)

In the last article, we installed FreeDOS on a virtual machine with QEMU, and placed the disk image in the ~/vm directory.

We already learned some parameters that we used when invoking qemu, namely -hda to specify the hard disk image to use, -cdrom for the CD image we used to install FreeDOS, -boot d to tell QEMU to start using the CD/DVD image, and -m 32 to tell QEMU to allocate 32MB of memory to FreeDOS.

QEMU comes with many more parameters than this, as we are using QEMU to emulate a old school PC.

So far, we typed the following to start QEMU:

qemu -hda freedos.img -cdrom iso/fd11src.iso -boot d -m 32

Once installed, we will need to launch QEMU and have it boot from the emulated hard disk.  For this, we only need the name of the hard disk image.  Hence, we can start QEMU with the following:

qemu -hda freedos.img -boot c -m 32

This will launch QEMU and give us the following:

The virtual CD-ROM drive is present, but there is no virtual CD in the drive.  If we supplied a CD image with the command, then you will be able to access the CD-ROM from drive D on FreeDOS.  However, notice there is no floppy drive available.  When we try to access the floppy on FreeDOS, we get the following:

We could add a floppy drive to our QEMU command line.  There are two ways to do this, and it depends upon the physical hardware available on your machine.  Older machines come with internal floppy drives, and they can be used directly within QEMU.  Over the past few years, desktops do not come with internal floppy drives, and to use floppies on these, you will need an external floppy drive (these should be very inexpensive by now, if you can find them in the first place).

To use a floppy disk image, you supply -fda to represent the first floppy drive, and -fdb to represent the second floppy drive.  Back in the day, internal floppy diskette controllers could only support up to two floppy drives.  This was always the case for every PC built.

QEMU supports either a disk image or a physical device (internal floppy drives only).  

-fda /dev/fd0 tells QEMU to use the first physical floppy drive on your machine for floppy access.

-fda /dev/fd1 tells QEMU to use the second physical floppy drive on your machine.  Note:  This parameter is not valid if your machine has only one floppy drive.

External Floppy Drives

External floppy drives can be used to create floppy images for use on QEMU.  On QEMU, floppy images are mounted the same as physical floppies that are inserted in a internal floppy drive.  Since external floppy drives are USB mass storage drives, they have device names such as /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd.  The USB mass storage driver uses SCSI emulation for disk operations, and hence must be explicitly mounted before reading and writing to the disk.  This is not the case with internal floppy drives.  

To create a disk image from a floppy inserted into an external floppy drive, we need to find the device name for the external floppy drive.  First, insert the floppy you want to use in the external drive.  On most PCLinuxOS desktops, an icon should appear representing the floppy.  Open a terminal window and type in ls /dev/sd* to get a list of disk devices.

/dev/sda  /dev/sda1  /dev/sda2    /dev/sda3  /dev/sda5  /dev/sdb  /dev/sdc  /dev/sdd  /dev/sdd1

On my laptop, when docked, the external floppy has a device name of /dev/sdd.  /dev/sdd1 refers to the FAT16 partition on the floppy.  /dev/sdd refers to the disk drive and the unformatted (raw) disk inserted into the drive.  The latter is what we want to use to create the disk image.

(/dev/sdb refers to the built-in memory card reader and /dev/sdc refers to the card reader built into my Epson Stylus NX415 all-in-one device.)

With the terminal window open, go to an empty directory (I use ~/vm/floppies to store floppy disk images) and use the dd command as follows:

dd if=/dev/sdd of=<name of disk image>.img bs=512

where name of disk image is the name you assign to the disk image.  The bs=512 tells dd that each block size on the disk image is 512 bytes in length.

Creating Blank Floppy Images

Just as we can create hard disk images with qemu-img, we can create floppy disk images the same way.

In a terminal window, we just type the following:

We now have a blank floppy disk image to use with QEMU.  On PCLinuxOS, there is no need to run sudo or su to accomplish this as mkdosfs formats a disk image (or physical disk) with the FAT16 filesystem.

To use this disk image, we need to supply -fda floppies/blankfloppy.img to the command line, preferably before the -hda parameter.  So now, our command line to invoke QEMU looks like this:

qemu -fda floppies/blankfloppy.img -hda freedos.img -boot c -m 32

Now, when we access the floppy drive (by typing a:), we get what we expected:  A:>_ .

By supplying the -fda parameter, we tell QEMU that there is a floppy drive available on the emulated machine, and there is a floppy in the drive.

The CD/DVD-ROM Drive

We already know that we can use CD/DVD images on QEMU.  The -cdrom parameter supplies QEMU with a CD/DVD disk image to use for the emulated CD/DVD ROM drive.  The -hdb parameter is the same as -cdrom as it represents the same device.  However, images and physical devices supplied with -cdrom are used as read only devices, where devices supplied with the -hdb parameter are available for reading and writing.

We already used -cdrom for installation of FreeDOS.  We can use -cdrom for CD/DVD images we want to use with FreeDOS.

FreeDOS comes with a DOS ATAPI driver which was installed with the distribution.  The ATAPI driver does not support writing to blank CD or DVD discs.  But then, CD or DVD writing was never supported under DOS.  

We can use -cdrom for production use of QEMU.  To use it, we need a CD/DVD image, or we can supply a physical CD/DVD device.

On my laptop, the DVD burner has a device name of /dev/sr0, which could be used.  If you are using an external drive, your device name will vary (such as /dev/sdb).

While you may use a physical CD/DVD drive, it is more efficient, performance wise, to use CD/DVD ISO images on QEMU because of the overhead needed to access the physical drive on QEMU.

For purposes of this article, let us use the original -cdrom parameter.  Our command line now looks like this:

qemu -fda floppies/blankfloppy.img -hda freedos.img -cdrom iso/fdsrc11.iso -boot c -m 32

Serial and Parallel Ports

Just as old school PCs have serial and parallel ports to communicate with devices such as printers and (landline) modems, QEMU can emulate these ports using the -serial and -parallel parameters.

QEMU can emulate four serial and three parallel ports.  (For FreeDOS, these are devices named COM1: through COM4: for the serial ports, and LPT1:, LPT2: and LPT3: for the parallel ports.)

For each emulated port, we need to supply either a -serial or -parallel parameter with the name of the physical device or file to be used.  The order of the parameters matters here.

When you supply the parameters, the first -serial parameter supplied emulates the first serial port, the second -serial port emulates the second serial port, and so forth.  The same is true for the parallel ports.

I recommend physical devices for emulaton of serial ports as they are devices that can read AND write data.  The parallel port emulation can be either a physical device or a file.  I recommend a file for this parameter.  QEMU does not recognize the CUPS system for printing, and the use of physical devices for parallel emulation could interfere with the opeation of CUPS as QEMU bypasses the CUPS system to write directly to the physical port.

What to use for serial ports

-serial /dev/ttySx:  This uses a physical serial port on your machine.  Usually, this port can be found on legacy machines.

-serial /dev/ttyACMx:  This appears when you wish to use a cellular phone (not a smartphone) as a modem, or have a USB landline modem plugged in.

-serial /dev/ttyUSBx:  This appears when you have a serial to USB adapter plugged in.  This device also appears when you begin to synchronize older PalmOS devices using a cradle or direct connection to the device.  However, I do not recommend USB cradles for such devices being used because the device does not appear until the device is ready to be synced.  For older PalmOS devices, I recommend using a serial cradle attached to a serial to USB cable instead.  This way, the device name is always available which is what QEMU expects for serial device access.

What to use for parallel ports

-parallel /dev/lpx:  This uses a physical parallel port on your machine.  This parameter is invalid for machines without parallel ports, such as netbooks, Ultrabooks, intel-based Macs, and newer desktops and laptops.  If your machine has a parallel port, by all means use it.  QEMU bypasses CUPS and sends output directly to the parallel port.

-parallel file:filename:  I recommend this parameter for emulation of the parallel port.  QEMU will write any output for the emulated parallel port to filename.  When you exit a QEMU session, filename will be available on the directory where you launched QEMU, and contains raw output that would have gone to a physical printer.

I recommend you make filename a PostScript file, i.e. give the filename a .ps extension.  For example, we could use -parallel file:printer0.ps to emulate a PostScript-enabled printer connected to a parallel port.  Then, configure DOS applications to output PostScript.  After you leave QEMU, you can then view printer0.ps with Evince, Okular, or gv, or send it directly to a printer with the lpr command.

If you have an Epson printer (all-in-one or stand alone), you can configure DOS applications to print to an Epson printer (any model).  In this case, you can give filename whatever you want.  Why?  Epson’s ESC/P-R is an object oriented superset of the ESC/P and ESC/P2 printer control languages, and hence newer Epson printers are backwards compatible with even the oldest Epson printers.

Many Hewlett-Packard printers still use the PCL 6 control language.  In this case, you may configure DOS applications to print to most Deskjet and LaserJet models.  You may give filename a .pcl extension so you know this file contains PCL coding.

If you configure filename to output to Epson or HP control languages, you will need to print the file using lpr -r command where -r tells lpr to send the data as-is (the r stands for raw output).

Even then, output to PostScript guarantees that output from DOS applications will print correctly after the QEMU session using the lpr command.

Building the Command Line

For purposes of this article, we shall configure FreeDOS to use a 56K modem and a PostScript printer.  This was a typical configuration for an old school PC.

For actual hardware, I shall be using a Zoom 56K USB Modem for the serial port.  This modem is Linux compatible and provides the /dev/ttyACM0 name we need for -serial.

If you wish to use a cellular phone (not a smartphone) as a modem, be sure to check your carrier’s Terms of Service to see if such usage is allowed before connecting your cell phone.

For the parallel port, let us configure -parallel file:printer0.ps.  All output to LPT1: from FreeDOS will be written to printer0.ps.  DOS applications running on FreeDOS need to be configured to write PostScript output.  I recommend using any of the Apple Laserwriter drivers or Generic PostScript drivers.

Using this hardware, our QEMU command line now looks like this:

qemu -fda floppies/blankfloppy.img -hda freedos.img -cdrom iso/fdsrc11.iso -boot c -m 32 -serial /dev/ttyACM0 -parallel file:printer0.ps

Be sure to plug in the USB modem before invoking QEMU with the above command line.

Mounting QEMU disk images

Under PCLinuxOS (and other Linux systems), you can mount a QEMU image and access it like any other directory.  This is useful for installation of DOS drivers without having to access a floppy drive.

Open a terminal window and login as root, then type in the following:

mkdir -p /mnt/freedos

mount -o loop,offset=32256 /home/patrick/vm/freedos.img /mnt/freedos
cp /home/patrick/<name of directory where DOS driver files are> /mnt/freedos
umount /mnt/freedos

For QEMU images, you need to mount the image using the -o loop,offset=32256 parameter.  This is where the filesystem created by FreeDOS starts on the QEMU disk image.

This section is important as the next hardware components to be configured require DOS drivers to function.  We need a way to get the drivers into FreeDOS.

Besides the above, we could download the required DOS drivers, and transfer them to a memory card, or burn them to a CD-R/DVD-R, then mount that for a hard drive and transfer the files that way.

Audio Hardware

QEMU emulates some audio hardware.  Typing qemu -soundhw ? (Yes, type the question mark to get information on all sound cards supported by QEMU.)

For FreeDOS, we can configure the Sound Blaster 16 device.  We will need to download DOS drivers for these devices.  Drivers for these devices can be downloaded from

http://support.creative.com

To download, click on Sound Blaster, then scroll to the bottom of the next page.  Where it says “If your Product is not Listed above”, click on the text link labelled “Please click here”.

Go to the list that appears and select Others.  Then, under Archived Products, click on Sound Blaster 16.  Then, click on Next.  Scroll to the bottom of the next page.  Under All Downloads, click where it says Windows NT 4.0, then select DOS from the popup menu.  Click on Submit, the link to the DOS driver will appear in the results.  The file is 1.15MB in size.  On this page is the link to the driver download.  Click on Download and agree to the end user license.  The file will download to the Downloads directory on your user space, and is called sbbasic.exe, which is a self extracting DOS executable.

Now, let us add the audio support to the command line

Since we are going to use the Sound Blaster 16 for audio support, we need to add -soundhw sb16 to the command line.  We shall insert this parameter before the -serial and -parallel parameters.  So far, the following is our QEMU command line to invoke the emulator:

qemu -fda floppies/blankfloppy.img -hda freedos.img -cdrom iso/fdsrc11.iso -boot c -m 32 -soundhw sb16 -serial /dev/ttyACM0 -parallel file:printer0.ps

All of this is actually one line of code, but is formatted to two lines for clarity.  We have what we need so far to emulate a old school PC as a standalone machine.  Since this is a large one line command, it would be a good idea to create a shell script to run this emulator without having to type all of this code.

Shell Scripts to make QEMU launch easier

The first thing we should do is create a bin directory in your userspace (if you do not already have one).  Having a bin directory here allows you to run shell scripts from your home directory simply by typing the name of the script.  ~/bin has already been configured with your PCLinuxOS installation as part of the listing of directories to search for programs to run, so you do not have to configure anything else.

Open your favorite editor (e.g.  kate, gedit, emacs, or vim) and type in the following:

#!/bin/bash

qemu -fda floppies/blankfloppy.img -hda freedos.img -cdrom iso/fdsrc11.iso -boot c -m 32 -soundhw sb16 -serial /dev/ttyACM0 -parallel file:printer0.ps

The last two lines are actually one line.

Save the file to whatever you want to your ~/bin directory (for example freedos) and exit the editor.

Then, open a terminal and type the following:

chmod a+x ~/bin/freedos

Now, typing freedos will launch QEMU with the command line options we created.   Since this is a text file, we can change any parameters we want when we need to

Forum Foibles: Featuring Family Foibler longtomjr

Thunar Custom Action For Dropbox Public URL

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Dropbox users on KDE can right click on a file in their Dropbox/Public folder in Dolphin or Konqueror and get the URL of the file to share with others. Dropbox users on Gnome can right click on a file in their Dropbox/Public folder in Nautilus and get the file to share with others. However, users of Xfce’s Thunar file manager had to resort to logging into their Dropbox account, via their web browser, and obtaining the URL of a file in their Dropbox/Public folder by right clicking on the file, then selecting to copy the URL to their clipboard. In fact, any user can do that on any desktop, but it’s a much slower process with many more steps.

Until now.

I recently made a Package Request in the PCLinuxOS forum for a command line utility we didn’t have in the PCLinuxOS repository. Now that the new command line utility has been graciously provided by our packagers, it’s possible to create a Custom Action in Thunar that gives Xfce users the same ability as their KDE and Gnome brethren. The packager who packaged the utility seemed to be a bit puzzled by my request, and about why I wanted it. Now that the cat is out of the bag, let me show you how to do it.

Step One

Open Synaptic, and make sure you are fully updated. Then, search for and install the “xclip” command line utility. Don’t worry. It’s a relatively small utility and it won’t take up much space on your system. The xclip utility copies information from the command line to your desktop clipboard. That information can be whatever textual data you obtain from the command line, or it could be entire files. It’s a handy little utility that I’m sure you can find other uses for. Check out the xclip man page for a full description of its capabilities.

Step Two

Now, you will need to install the Dropbox command line utility, called simply dropbox.py. Being a Python script with no external dependencies, it won’t mess up your system. Follow this link and download it to the Downloads folder on your computer. The file is only 91 KiB in size.

On my computer, I went to the hidden .local folder in my /home directory, and created a new folder there called “dropbox-script.” I placed a copy of dropbox.py inside that new directory. I then set the file as executable in the “Permissions” tab of the file’s property settings.

Step Three

Next, we’ll make a small custom bash script to handle the calls to the dropbox.py script. Here’s the bash script that I wrote:

#! /bin/bash

s=`~/.local/dropbox-script/dropbox.py puburl "$1"`

zenity --info --text="$s" && echo "$s" | xclip -selection c

I got my inspiration for this script from a Nautilus script that I found. As far as I know, Thunar can’t just use Nautilus scripts without alteration. So, I set out to alter the original Nautilus script so that I could use it with Thunar.

Of course, the first line identifies the script as a bash file. The second line feeds the results of the call to dropbox.py into the variable named “s.” Notice that I have pointed the bash script to the folder where I stored a copy of dropbox.py. The third line displays the result of the call to dropbox.py in a Zenity dialog box, and then uses xclip to copy that result to your desktop clipboard.

I stored the bash script as puburl.sh in my /usr/bin directory. Don’t forget that you can only write files to the /usr/bin directory as the root user. (Hint: save a copy somewhere in your /home directory, then copy the file to your /usr/bin directory as root). Don’t forget to set the file as executable in the “Permissions” tab of the file’s property settings.

Step Four

Now we need to set up the Thunar custom action. If you’ve never created a Custom Action in Thunar, never fear – it’s relatively easy. Here’s a quick review. First, select the “Edit > Configure custom actions...” menu in Thunar. This will display the dialog box below.

Of course, you can see that I already have the Dropbox URL custom action set up. You will need to select the “+” button at the top of the row of buttons on the right to create a new custom action in Thunar. This will bring up a dialog box similar to the one below.

Fill in the fields as I have done in the image above. On the top line, type in a brief name for your new custom action. This is the text that will show up in the Thunar context menu. On the second line, type in a more descriptive phrase for your custom action. On the third line, type in the command you want to run. Notice that we are passing the Thunar command parameter “%f” as part of the command we want to run. The parameters are listed in the bottom half of the dialog box. Finally, click on the icon and select your own custom icon for the new custom action. DO NOT click on OK – yet. You now need to click on the “Appearance Conditions” tab at the top of the dialog box.

In the “File Pattern” line, type a single asterisk (“*”). Then, click on each of the check boxes to place a checkmark in every one of the appearance conditions. NOW you can click on the “OK” button. You will be taken back to the first dialog box. Select the “Close” button. Your new custom action will now appear at the bottom of the context menu when you right click on a file in Thunar.

Putting It To Use

Thanks to the dropbox.py script, it knows if you are in Dropbox’s Public folder or not. If you click on a file NOT in your Dropbox/Public folder, you will receive the Zenity dialog box below.

However, if you click on a file that IS in your Dropbox/Public folder, the public URL for that file will be displayed in the Zenity dialog box.

In either case, the text displayed in the Zenity dialog box is copied to your desktop clipboard when you select the “OK” button. I suppose the script could be enhanced to not copy the error message to the clipboard, but it works well enough for me, as is. I tend to subscribe to the K.I.S.S. principle – Keep It Super Simple.

Now, all that’s left is to paste the URL to your file in the Dropbox/Public directory from your clipboard into your email, chat client or instant messenger window to share the file.

Too Good To Be True?

Unfortunately, it was recently announced that new accounts created after July 31, 2012 will no longer have a “Public” folder. While you could create a new folder in your Dropbox folder called “Public,” it won’t have the same functionality as the Public folder created by the Dropbox installation. I first discovered this news from this entry on the Scripting News website. I confirmed it by checking at the Dropbox help site. No reasons or explanation for the change has been offered, and there’s only speculation as to the reason for the change at the Scripting News website. Current users will be allowed to retain their “Public” folders and all the functionality it now possesses – for now.

The resulting change will allow users to share links to any file in any of your Dropbox folders – even links to entire folders. However, the dropbox.py script, as it’s currently written, will only work with the Dropbox/Public folder as it is created by and setup by the current Dropbox installation.

Hopefully, someone will update the dropbox.py script to support the new change that allows users to obtain a link to any file in any of your Dropbox folders. Once that happens, the dropbox.py script will have even greater appeal and functionality. Until then, you can still use the laborious method of logging into the Dropbox website and right clicking on files in “other” directories to obtain the URL of a particular file or directory to share with others. It may take a while for the dropbox.py to be updated, since someone will have to figure out how to calculate the hash values that Dropbox applies to the files and folders when creating the link URLs.

Fortunately, this custom action – as well as the right click context menu items in KDE and Gnome – will continue to work with the Dropbox/Public folder, just so long as you are either a current Dropbox user, or just so long as you sign up for your Dropbox account before July 31, 2012. Again, for the time being, the functionality of the Dropbox/Public folder will remain intact for the aforementioned users.

Summary

Now, thanks to this relatively simple Thunar custom action addition, Xfce users can enjoy the same convenience feature as their KDE and Gnome cousins. Of course, the whole thing is possible, thanks to the xclip utility. It allows us an exceptionally easy way to get the necessary information to our desktop clipboard

Labels, Anyone?

by Meemaw

So, I’m at work, creating mailing labels for some postcards, using LibreOffice. It’s giving me trouble, too, kicking out a blank label sheet after every sheet printed. I find myself wishing I had gLabels on my Windows7 computer, because the process is easier in gLabels. I actually have VirtualBox installed at work and have two or three virtual desktops of PCLinuxOS. However, if I enable the printer in VBox, it is disabled and won’t work in Win7.

I end up using LibreOffice in Win7 and putting up with the extra pages. If you don’t do many labels, this is the procedure in LibreOffice. After you have your label information in a spreadsheet, you save it and create a new database in LO, designating your spreadsheet as a database. Second, create a new document (choose New > Labels) in LO, and arrange the fields you need from your designated database. Next, choosing Tools > Mail Merge Wizard, proceed through the steps to merge your database into your label pages. After you merge and save, then you print your labels. This is when LO doubles the number of pages needed and kicks out a blank page after every printed one. There’s got to be a better way!!!

In gLabels, you save your spreadsheet as a .csv file to use. After designating your .csv file in gLabels, you add merge fields, arrange the fields where you want them, and print the labels.

It would have been nice to do that, but I still have the printer problem I mentioned above.

While I’m ranting about it in IRC, it is suggested to me that a pdf would be a much easier document to print...

Wow!!!  I can do that!

In LibreOffice, I save my merged labels, but instead of printing them from there, I choose “Export Directly as PDF” from the toolbar. When I pull up the document, it is the correct number of pages and can be printed from my pdf reader. (The example is only 2 pages.)

In gLabels, I save my labels, and choose “Print”.  However, it is possible to “Print to File”, so I choose that instead, designate I want the file to be a pdf and name the file. When I click “Print” the pdf is created.

This can be done with personal address labels as well.

I have several mailing locations that I use all the time and I have sheets of identical labels for them. I have now saved each sheet of labels as a pdf so I can print it any time I need a new sheet.

Installing Avast Antivirus Home Edition On PCLinuxOS

by AndrzejL

Yes, yes, yes. I know … Linux does not need antivirus software. True. BUT then – if you are dual booting with Windows, you may want to be able to check the other OS once in a while for rootkits/malware/spyware/rougeware/viruses and so on and so forth. Even if you are not dual booting, another way of using this would be to use your remaster to check your computers at home that are using Windows from the LiveCD/LiveDVD level. Seems useful, right? You can access the Windows partitions with read/write permissions under your PCLinuxOS. Nastiness cannot hide itself from the antivirus with a few entries in the registry. Sounds really good. So how does one install Avast on the PCLinuxOS?

First, we need to download a copy of it. It’s legal and free, if you are using it at home on non-commercial machines. For more info read the Terms and Conditions.

Open your favorite terminal and issue this command:

wget -c http://files.avast.com/files/linux/avast4workstation-1.3.0-1.i586.rpm

Now wait for it to finish downloading.

Done, right?

Now, you need to gain root privileges. Issue those commands:

su

Enter the root password when asked.

Now, for the installation part - issue this command:

apt-get install avast4workstation-1.3.0-1.i586.rpm

and wait for it to finish.

Done?

Great. Now issue those two commands:

echo '' >> /etc/rc.local

echo 'echo 128000000 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax' >> /etc/rc.local

Done?

Close the Konsole window and go to Kmenu. (Ed. Note: If you are using something other than KDE, you can search for applications.)[a] Type ava in the search box.

There you go. That’s your Avast Antivirus. Click in it. The registration box will pop-up.

Click on the “Click here to obtain registration key” link. You can choose what browser you want to use.

Fill out registration form correctly and wait for the e-mail from Avast with your product key.

Copy and paste the registration key into the Registration window and click OK.

You have just installed Avast Home Edition for Linux workstations.

Close the avast window and reboot your machine. When it’s fully rebooted open Avast and upgrade/configure it to your liking.

Avast does not have to be installed on KDE4. It can be installed on any other DE available with PCLinuxOS. If you want to, you can scan the files from the command line. Type in

avast --help

for more details and the command syntax.

Avast configuration files and viruses database are stored in the ~/.avast folder.

If the menu entry was not created and you are planning on creating your own launcher use:

avastgui

in the command box.

Icons are available here:

/usr/lib/avast4workstation/share/avast/icons/

If you follow this how-to and you get E: Couldn't find package avast4workstation-1.3.0-1. i586.rpm error, then open Dolphin in your /home/login directory. Go to View > Show Hidden Files (make sure it’s ticked),

Then, look for the file .bashrc, and open it with kwrite. Look for this line:

alias su='su -'

Put a comment in front of that line # so it looks somewhat like this:

# alias su='su -'

Save the file.

Reboot. Redo the howto from step one. It should work without problem for you now.

Special thanks for this solution by Old-Polack.

Install & Configure ProFTPD On PCLinuxOS

by D. Moore (YouCanToo)

This how-to focuses on how to setup and configure a ProFTPD server on your PCLinuxOS based computer. ProFTPD stands for “Professional FTP Daemon”.

Installing ProFTPD on PCLinuxOS

Open the Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for proftpd.

Mark it for installation.

NOTE: If you have any other ftpd service installed, it will be removed.

Click apply, and then click apply again. Now Synaptic will install ProFTPD. When finished click "Close" and then close Synaptic.

How to configure ProFTPD

We need to edit the proftpd config file. In your favorite text editor as the root user, open the /etc/proftpd.conf file.

We need to change the following options.

We should change the ftp server display name.

ServerName     "ProFTPD Default Installation"

Example:

ServerName     "brainiac"

Make sure all ftp users are "jailed" within their own directory. No snooping allowed!

#DefaultRoot ~

Uncomment this line and change to to read:

DefaultRoot ~

Now save your configuration file and exit your text editor.

Our basic configuration is now complete

Now we need to start our proftpd service. In a console window as root, enter the following command:

service proftpd start

You should see something like this:

[root@laptop etc]# service proftpd start

Starting proftpd              [  OK  ]

[root@laptop etc]#

If you see [ FAILED ], go back and double check your work, and try again.

Congratulations if you got the "OK.” Your ftp server is up and running.

Adding a new ftpuser

By default, the proftpd daemon reads the host's /etc/passwd file for logging in users. This means that to add FTP users, you simply need to create new system accounts for those users in your /etc/passwd file.

In a console window as root enter in the following:

adduser -d /path/to/the/ftpuser/home/directory -s /usr/bin/bash ftpuser*

where *ftpuser is the ftpusers name.

---EXAMPLE: ---

[root@laptop etc]# adduser -d /home/mastermid -s /usr/bin/bash mastermind

[root@laptop etc]#

Setup a password for the ftpuser:

passwd ftpuser*

where *ftpuser is the name of the user.

--- EXAMPLE: ---

[root@laptop etc]# passwd mastermind

Changing password for user mastermind.

New password:

Retype new password:

passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

[root@laptop etc]#

NOTE: the password is not echoed to the screen.

That's it folks. Your new ftp server awaits your every command.

For those using Webmin, you will need to download and install the proftpd module. Log into your webmin admin page and click on the "webmin" tab and then select "Webmin Configuration."

In the main screen click on "Webmin Modules."

Now, mark the “Standard module from” and enter proftpd. Then click the “Install Module” button. Webmin will now download and install the ProFTPD module for you.

Now in the left hand pane, click on the "Un-used" Modules and then click on "ProFTPD Server" Webmin will tell you that it can not be loaded, click on "Module Config"

You will need to make the following changes to the configuration.

Test config file after manual changes?   Select YES

Path to ProFTPD config file        /etc/proftpd.conf

Path to ProFTPD executable         /usr/sbin/proftpd

Path to ProFTPD PID file           /usr/var/proftpd.pid

Now click on save and you should see the global configuration GUI.

If you did not make the changes to the ProFTPD config file earlier in this HowTo, you can make them by clicking on the "Edit Config Files" icon. You can start and stop the ftp server by scrolling to the bottom of the window and clicking on the "Start Server" or "Stop Server" button.

For more detailed information about ProFTPD or different ProFTPD server configurations, visit their website at http://www.proftpd.org/

ms_meme's Nook: Tra La La PCLOS

                                       MP3              OGG

Create An ISO From A DVD or CD

by AndrzejL

Sometime ago I created a slideshow video from a collection of wedding photos for a friendly couple. I made DVD video with nice background music out of it and gave it to them as an anniversary gift. I used xsane/Imagination/mencoder/avidemux-qt/devede/K3B to accomplish this – all of which are available in PCLinuxOS repositories, just in case you wondered. I wanted to keep a backup of this DVD on my HDD in a ISO file format, just in case they asked for another copy. How would I create ISO file from a CD/DVD media? Its VERY simple. Use the dd command. This is how it’s done:

Assuming that:

A) Your system identifies the CD/DVD drive as /dev/sr0.

B) Your destination folder is based in your home folder.

C) The filename you want to use is file.iso.

Open a terminal and issue this command, followed by [ENTER] key:

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=~/file.iso

Where:

if=/dev/sr0 means read from /dev/sr0 (raw format)

of=~/file.iso means copy the media to a file named file.iso located in your /home/user/ folder i.e. backup media to ISO image.

Now you can, for example:

A) Burn the ISO to a CD/DVD to make extra copies, using K3B/Brasero/SimpleBurn, or any other optical disc writing application.

B) If it’s, let’s say a Linux LiveCD, you can use ISO to boot it in VirtualBox (also available in PCLinuxOS repositories).

C) Do many other things with it.

Screenshot Showcase

Crow     06-18   KDE

cstrike77   06-04   KDE

ferry_th   06-04   openbox

ff103    06-01   KDE

gandy   06-01   KDE

GermanTux   06-03   xfce

LKJ   06-11   Gnome

parnote   06-01   xfce

Ramchu   06-09   KDE

T6   06-03   KDE

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