Welcome From The Chief Editor

Chromecast On PCLinuxOS

Inkscape Tutorial: Creating A Feathered Background

ms_meme's Nook: PCLOS In The Morning

PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner

The "Worst Passwords Of 2014"

Game Zone: Daedalus - No Escape

Fonts Everywhere, Fonts For Everyone

Inkscape Tutorial: Creating A Water Drop Illustration

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: tbschommer

PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions

Screenshot Showcase

Welcome From The Chief Editor

I recently installed PCLinuxOS on my best friend's computer. It's an older Dell Vostro 1000, and it originally came with Windows XP. He bought it around the same time that Vista was being announced. He had expressed some concern over continuing to run WinXP, and has had a series of problems with WinXP slowing down periodically ... as WinXP is/was prone to do. When it would, he'd bring it over to me to clean it up. His computer was the ONLY computer running Windows that I would even attempt to clean and fix. For everyone else, I recommend installing PCLinuxOS, or finding someone else to fix their computer. If they choose the former, I will continue to offer assistance.

Now my best friend isn't exactly the most tech savvy person. But since WinXP is no longer supported, I suggested that he install PCLinuxOS on his computer. I've been giving him the "sales pitch" for most of the last year, off and on. You know the pitch ... no viruses, no malware, no spyware, improved security, runs faster on older equipment, yada, yada, yada.

He has also seen me run PCLinuxOS here at my house over the past several years, and he knows how few problems I've ever had with it running on my several computers. The problems I've had are miniscule compared with his every three to six month "clean up" and "update" needs. So, the "sales pitch" certainly fell on receptive ears.

So, we decided to wait until after the holidays were over. He brought his laptop over to me on January 20, 2015, and as soon as he left, I got busy installing PCLinuxOS on it. Now my wife also had the same model laptop, purchased around the same time as his. The screen went out of hers, so I took it over and hooked it to an external monitor. To this day, it's still in use, dedicated for use as the computer that runs my "scanning station."

I'm glad I didn't just hand him a Live CD/DVD and ask him to "have a go" at running it from the live disc. I had forgotten since installing PCLinuxOS on my wife's Vostro 1000 how Dell's configuration caused certain problems when installing PCLinuxOS. I was quickly reminded.

The first obstacle to overcome was that the installation would "hang" at detection of the video card. In this case, it was an "older" ATI/AMD chipset. So, after repeated failures, I decided to install PCLinuxOS using the generic VESA driver. Success! One hurdle overcome.

Having finally gotten PCLinuxOS installed, the next hurdle was getting the wireless card recognized and set up. This particular model used the infamous Broadcom 4311 wireless networking card. After a short trip to the PCLinuxOS forum to refresh my memory on what to do, I took his computer to a location near one of my routers and connected it to the internet via an ethernet cable. Once connected, I had to uninstall all the Broadcom "wl" drivers, and install everything related to the b43 Broadcom drivers. I also had to "blacklist" the Broadcom "wl" drivers, and add the b43 drivers to modprobe.preload.

Once I turned on the wireless (I had, in desperation, toggled the keystroke combination that toggles the wifi off and on with the "wl" drivers), I then had to switch from the device labeled "Broadcom" to the one labeled "wlan0." Voila! The wifi lit up without effort. All I needed to do was configure the WPA-PSK password, and we were off to the races.

Of course, I did a lot more tailoring and customization to his computer. I placed launchers on the top Xfce panel for frequently accessed tools and programs. I also made it possible for him to make network connections without the need to do so as the root user. I installed some "extra" programs that I knew he would like, as well as downloading some special hunting and fishing wallpapers that I set up to randomly change under Xfce's built in desktop slideshow.

He came over on Sunday, January 25, so I could show him the things he needed to do "differently" under PCLinuxOS. I took about an hour to go over everything with him, like how to regularly apply updates, how to connect to wireless networks, and the few differences of how you do things under Linux, versus Windows.

So, how did it go? To use one of his phrases, he was as "pleased as a pig in slop." To paraphrase him, his computer ran faster than it had ever run, and he was once again enjoying the use of his computer. He had previously abandoned using his computer under WinXP, since it just kept running slower and slower, and since he was concerned about the security vulnerability hype after support for WinXP had ended. Plus, just as before, he knows exactly where to bring his computer when it needs attention -- and I'll gladly supply all the support he needs. After all is said and done, chalk up another Windows to Linux convert!

Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity.

Chromecast On PCLinuxOS

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

One of the things "we" (my wife and I) wanted for Christmas was the Google Chromecast. If you're not familiar with it, it's a device that plugs into an HDMI port on your TV. With it plugged into your TV, you can "cast" any tab from the Google Chrome browser to your TV, in high definition. Instead of getting it for Christmas, we ordered it from Amazon after Christmas, using an Amazon gift card a friend of ours gave us for a Christmas present.

The Chromecast appliance (for sake of a better word) costs $35 (U.S.). It comes with an HDMI extension cord and an AC adapter. It connects to your 802.11 b/g/n network. Currently, it "officially" supports playback from YouTube, Netflix, HuluPlus, Pandora, Google Play, Plex, VUDU and a whole host of other content providers.

Once you have the Chromecast attached to your TV, you are instructed to travel over to http://chromecast/setup. When you get there, you are going to see something that might discourage or deter a less tech savvy user.

Thankfully, you can set up Chromecast with your smartphone or tablet. On your portable device, install the Chromecast app. Don't worry. The app will be useful, allowing you to stream content from your portable device to your TV, via the Chromecast. You can also use the app on your tablet or smartphone to personalize the background images that Chromecast displays on your TV when it's not streaming content.

As a side note, I'd like to mention something, and it's directed squarely at Google. Thanks a million Google, for leaving Linux users out in the cold. You use Linux to run virtually your entire business, and even base your Android OS on the Linux kernel. It really wouldn't hurt you to give a little bit back to the Linux community by at least supporting the same OS that you use to profit so much from. But that's OK. Us Linux users are used to adapting and overcoming these kind of obstacles, even if it means doing the initial setup from an alternate platform.

Next, you need to download the Google Cast plugin for the Google Chrome browser, which does work under PCLinuxOS. Firefox will not work with the Chromecast device, and I could find no plugins available to make it work. There are reports of Chromecast working with the beta version of Opera, via a special Opera plugin. Chromecast also works well with the Chromium browser. Most other browsers are "out in the cold" at this time, or so it would appear.

The above screenshot shows the settings for the Google Cast plugin. During the setup procedure, you can give your Chromecast device a unique name. Connect your Chromecast to your home wifi network by selecting your network, then providing your wifi password. The entire process takes less than five minutes to complete. We named our Chromecast "Paul & Laura & Ryan."

There are two ways to broadcast from your computer to your Chromecast, using the Google Cast plugin. First, you can "cast" the contents of any tab in Google Chrome to your Chromecast. Select "Cast this tab" button from the window for Google Cast. Playing the video "full screen" within the tab will maximize the size of the video on your TV.

The other way is to click on the "Cast" button under the video on content providers who support Chromecast. In the image above, from YouTube, the "Cast" button has been added to the far right side of the playback controls.

If you find that Google Cast is hesitant to send a video to your TV via Chromecast, there is the PlayTo for Chromecast plugin. This Google Chrome browser plugin will automatically detect videos on an open tab in Google Chrome and offer to send the video to your TV.

Increasingly, Chromecast is becoming the industry standard. A lot of that is due to its very attractive price. Although it is limited to streaming a 720p picture, that level of resolution looks excellent on my HDTV. VLC is working on adding Chromecast support, although no timeframe has been offered for when it might appear. All the developers say is that they are working on it. Popcorn Time, the program that streams torrents to your desktop, has added Chromecast support to the latest releases of their program.

Expect Chromecast to receive some significant competition. There is a Kickstarter campaign to build a new device called Matchstick. You can also learn even more here. It will be powered by the Firefox OS, and is expected to sell for $18 (U.S.). Matchstick is an open source platform, and they have opened up a full developer site for those working on building apps for the new platform. Amazon has already come to market with their $39 (U.S.) Fire TV Stick, which was advertised heavily (in the U.S.) in the days leading up to the Christmas holiday. There are also a whole host of cheap Chinese import devices, from which you will receive widely varying results, according to the reviews I've read. The old adages "buyer beware" and "you get what you pay for" should be heeded when buying one of these latter devices.

Recently, there was a thread in the PCLinuxOS forum about how to save money in the new year. It centered around "cutting the cord" for cable TV, and replacing cable TV with over the air HD broadcasts and streaming media. With the increasing adoption of high speed internet connections, more and more people are doing exactly that. Chromecast definitely makes "cutting the cord" much easier.

Inkscape Tutorial: Creating A Feathered Background

by Meemaw

Many of the wallpapers and Impress backgrounds I have seen seem to have a kind of "whispy" or feathered background. Solid colors are nice, and so are gradients, but this tutorial I found gives us another option. We will use Spiro and Clones in Inkscape, along with a few other skills we have learned along the way. In this one, I went into Document Properties and unchecked the page frame and shadow checkboxes at the bottom so I have lots of room to work without seeing the page outline in the background.

First, click on the pen tool. In the tool config at the top of your window (shown below), click on the Spiro tool, then draw a curved path with 5 points.

All segments should be curves. As soon as you finish the curve, it will change to a spiro curve.

Click on Path > Path Effects to open that window. You will see that the Spiro spline is already present in that window as it is a default in Inkscape now.

Next, we will add a triangle "brush" to our spiro curve using the Path Effect Pattern on Path. Using the pen tool, draw a triangle. While it is selected, copy it to the clipboard using Edit > Copy (or <CTRL> + C). With the Path Effects dialog open, choose Pattern on Path from the dropdown, then press the Add button

In the Path Effects dialog, click the clipboard icon to paste the triangle we copied there. The triangle is the pattern ("brush") we are putting on our path (the spiro). Your spiro should now look something like this.

Now, we will unset the fill and the stroke of the tapered curve that we are going to use. Right click on the "None" label next to fill in the bottom left corner, and choose "Unset Fill" from the menu that appears. Right click on the black box next to stroke in the bottom right corner, and choose "Unset Stroke" from the menu that appears.

Next, we need to clone our path, move the clone away from the original, change the color to something other than black, and duplicate it several times. Select the path with the select tool, then make ONE clone of it, using Edit > Clone > Create Clone or ALT + D. Separate your clone from the original curve so you have room to work.

The curve selected is the clone, and I’m going to separate them more. Change the color of the clone either with the palette at the bottom or the Fill/Stroke dialog. Only the clone should change color. If both objects change, you are probably changing the color of the original and you should grab the other curve and work on it instead. Shown below, the clone is the only one that changed color.

Duplicate the colored clone 30 or so times using Edit > Duplicate or CTRL + D. Now, we are going to use the tweak tool to jitter the position of our 30 clones, as well as jitter some the saturation and lightness values of the clones.

Using the select tool, click and drag around the clones to select all 30. If you aren’t sure, look in the status bar at the bottom of your window, which should say something like "30 Objects selected...." Click on the tweak tool in the toolbox, then look at the configurations across the top of your page. The Tweak tool has three modes for moving objects but you want Move Objects in Random Directions.

Now click and drag the tweak tool over the clones and watch them move. If they don’t look like they are moving much, you may need to play with the Width and Force values of the tweak tool. I used 25 for Width and 20 for Force. The selection outline of the objects will disappear when using the tweak tool, so you won’t see all the dotted lines around everything. Your end result should look something like this:

With the 30 clones still selected, open the Fill / Stroke Dialog, and lower the opacity of the clones. The tutorial used 30%, so I did too.

With all clones still selected, go back to the Tweak tool, and this time set the mode to Jitter Colors. Make sure the only 2 values checked/toggled are Saturation and Lightness. On my desktop the channels show as toggle buttons in the toolbar, since my screen is wider. In a smaller window they will be hidden in a dropdown. Click and drag over the clones and watch their colors change slightly. If they change too much, consider tweaking the Force value.

If we want to, we can play with the original that all our clones are based on, as well as our triangle "Brush".

Select the black original, and change to the node tool. The familiar node editing handles should appear. Move the nodes of your spiro to make a better curve. Notice that your creation will update with the changes to the black original path. Play around with it until you get something that you want.

You can also change the "Brush" we used to create the curve design. Click on the Show Pattern Source button in the Path Effects dialog, and somewhere on the Inkscape canvas, your triangle should appear (you may need to zoom out to see where it appears. if it is far from your drawing, select all 3 nodes and move it closer.)

Can you see my triangle? Now, using the node tool, edit the triangle shape, adding and moving nodes. Your changes should update as you go on the black original path, and also the blue clones. Cool, huh?

Let’s do a bit more. Group your clones together, then duplicate the group 2 or 3 times, rotate each one a bit, and change the opacity of each group. When I got close to what I wanted, I found that I wanted it a bit more blue with less white, so I duplicated the whole grouping once more.

Now, you can finish this one of two ways. You can draw a rectangle over the area, and use a clipping path to create a rectangular background, or you can go back to Document Properties, make your page visible by checking the page border checkbox, place your finished texture over it and export the PAGE as a bitmap.

After I finished the background, I then used it to create a background for a LibreOffice Impress presentation.

The great thing about this project is that you can always go back and change the curve, or the brush (or both) and the color and have another feathered background to use for whatever you want.

ms_meme's Nook: PCLOS In The Morning

MP3           OGG

PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner

Chicken Bacon Ranch Enchiladas

Ingredients

Enchiladas
4 - cups shredded chicken
9 - slices bacon, crisply cooked and crumbled
1 - packet (1 oz) ranch dressing & seasoning mix
1 - pouch (8 oz) roasted tomato Mexican cooking sauce
2 - cups shredded Mexican blend cheese (8 oz)
20 - flour tortillas for soft tacos & fajitas (6 inch)

Garnishes, as desired
    Chopped fresh cilantro
    Chopped fresh tomatoes
    Chopped red onion

Directions
Heat oven to 375º Lightly grease 13x9-inch (3-quart) baking dish and 8-inch square (2-quart) baking dish.

In large bowl, mix chicken, half of the crumbled bacon, 1 tablespoon of the ranch dressing & seasoning mix, the cooking sauce, and 1 cup of the cheese; mix well. Divide mixture among tortillas, and roll up, placing seam side down in baking dishes. Set aside. If you want to freeze the smaller baking dish of enchiladas at this point, cover the baking dish with foil, and label before placing in the freezer. Use within 1 month.

In 10-inch skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Cook onion in oil until softened. Add chilies, and cook until most of the liquid from chilies evaporates. Stir in flour. Slowly add chicken broth, stirring constantly to prevent lumps.

Once broth is incorporated, cook another minute or until slightly thickened. Stir in sour cream and remaining ranch dressing & seasoning mix, and simmer 1 minute.

Remove from heat, and pour over enchiladas. If baking both baking dishes, pour the sauce over both; otherwise, pour all of it into the 13x9-inch dish. (To make just enough for the smaller pan of enchiladas later, divide the recipe for the sauce in half. Top with remaining cheese and bacon.

Bake about 20 minutes until cheese is melted and sauce is bubbling. Cool 5 minutes before serving with garnishes.

The "Worst Passwords Of 2014"

SplashData News Release

"123456" Maintains the Top Spot on SplashData's Annual "Worst Passwords" List

The 2014 list of worst passwords demonstrates the importance of keeping names, simple numeric patterns, sports and swear words out of your passwords.

Los Gatos, CA - January 20, 2015 - SplashData has announced its annual list of the 25 most common passwords found on the Internet -- thus making them the "Worst Passwords" that will expose anybody to being hacked or having their identities stolen. In its fourth annual report, compiled from more than 3.3 million leaked passwords during the year, "123456" and "password" continue to hold the top two spots that they have held each year since the first list in 2011. Other passwords in the top 10 include "qwerty", "dragon", and "football".

As in past years' lists, simple numerical passwords remain common, with nine of the top 25 passwords on the 2014 list comprised of numbers only.

Passwords appearing for the first time on SplashData's list include "696969" and "batman". While Valentine's Day is less than a month away, "iloveyou" is one of the nine passwords from 2013 to fall off the 2014 list.

According to SplashData, the passwords evaluated for the 2014 list were mostly held by users in North America and Western Europe. In 2014, millions of passwords from Russian accounts were also leaked, but these passwords were not included in the analysis.

SplashData's list of frequently used passwords shows that many people continue to put themselves at risk by using weak, easily guessable passwords.

"Passwords based on simple patterns on your keyboard remain popular despite how weak they are," said Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData. "Any password using numbers alone should be avoided, especially sequences. As more websites require stronger passwords or combinations of letters and numbers, longer keyboard patterns are becoming common passwords, and they are still not secure."

For example, users should avoid a sequence such as "qwertyuiop," which is the top row of letters on a standard keyboard, or "1qaz2wsx" which comprises the first two 'columns' of numbers and letters on a keyboard.

Other tips from a review of this year's Worst Passwords List include:

- Don't use a favorite sport as your password -- "baseball" and "football" are in top 10, and "hockey," "soccer" and "golfer" are in the top 100. Don't use a favorite team either, as "yankees," "eagles," "steelers," "rangers," and "lakers" are all in the top 100.

- Don't use your birthday or especially just your birth year -- 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992 are all in the top 100.

While baby name books are popular for naming children, don't use them as sources for picking passwords. Common names such as "michael," "jennifer," "thomas," "jordan," "hunter," "michelle," "charlie," "andrew," and "daniel" are all in the top 50.

Also in the top 100 are swear words and phrases, hobbies, famous athletes, car brands, and film names.

This is the first year that SplashData has collaborated on the list with Mark Burnett, online security expert and author of "Perfect Passwords" (http://www.xato.net).

"The bad news from my research is that this year's most commonly used passwords are pretty consistent with prior years," Burnett said. "The good news is that it appears that more people are moving away from using these passwords. In 2014, the top 25 passwords represented about 2.2% of passwords exposed. While still frightening, that's the lowest percentage of people using the most common passwords I have seen in recent studies."

SplashData, provider of the SplashID line of password management applications, releases its annual list in an effort to encourage the adoption of stronger passwords. Slain says, "As always, we hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites."

Presenting SplashData's "Worst Passwords of 2014":

Rank | Password | Change from 2013
1 | 123456 | No Change
2 | password | No Change
3 | 12345 | Up 17
4 | 12345678 | Down 1
5 | qwerty | Down 1
6 | 123456789 | No Change
7 | 1234 | Up 9
8 | baseball | New
9 | dragon | New
10 | football | New
11 | 1234567 | Down 4
12 | monkey | Up 5
13 | letmein | Up 1
14 | abc123 | Down 9
15 | 111111 | Down 8
16 | mustang | New
17 | access | New
18 | shadow | Unchanged
19 | master | New
20 | michael | New
21 | superman | New
22 | 696969 | New
23 | 123123 | Down 12
24 | batman | New
25 | trustno1 | Down 1

SplashData offers three simple tips to be safer from hackers online:

Use passwords of eight characters or more with mixed types of characters.

Avoid using the same username/password combination for multiple websites.

Use a password manager such as SplashID to organize and protect passwords, generate random passwords, and automatically log into websites.

About SplashData, Inc.

SplashData has been a leading provider of password management applications for over 10 years. SplashID Safe (www.splashid.com) has grown to be most trusted multi-platform password solution for both the consumer and enterprise markets with over 1 million users worldwide. SplashID Safe's popularity continues to rise as the number of user names, passwords, and account numbers most people have to remember is rapidly multiplying. At the same time, the risk of this kind of sensitive information falling into the wrong hands has never been greater. SplashID Safe helps solve this dilemma by creating an encrypted digital safe available on smartphones, computers, USB keys, or online, offering the peace of mind of being able to access critical information whenever needed while maintaining the security of 256-bit encryption. SplashData was founded in 2000 and is based in Los Gatos, CA.

Editor's Note:

While SplashID Safe and SplashID Safe Pro don't appear to be available for Linux users, they are available for the major portable device platforms. With that in mind, we also realize that a lot of PCLinuxOS users have portable devices -- either iOS or Android powered devices -- and this information about the service holds some interest for those users. Furthermore, the information provided in this press release mirrors perfectly the information we have previously run in The PCLinuxOS Magazine regarding password security. As such, it bears repeating, and this news release accomplishes that goal.

Game Zone: Daedalus - No Escape

by daiashi

About The Game

Ever wanted to play Unreal tournament or Quake 3 Arena from a top down 2D perspective? Daedalus - No Escape brings you exactly that, the same feel and control as in an arena FPS but from top down, in a dark sci-fi mood inspired by Alien Breed.

In control of a space marine, walk the arena and defeat your opponents using powerful weapons. No feelings, no mercy, only your gun does the talking.

Features:

single player, multi-player

game modes: highscore, deathmatch, last man standing, team deathmatch, capture the flag

different control schemes: FPS-like, fixed camera

9 cool weapons

lots of maps

map editor

original soundtrack

Windows, Linux and Mac support

The game reminds me of a cross between Alien Breed and Alien Swarm. It is a little fast paced, similar to what a top view of Unreal Tournament would be like. Enjoy.

System requirements:

Fully updated PCLinuxOS and Steam

Hardware:

    Minimum:
        OS: Linux (32 or 64bits)

        Processor: dual core

        Memory: 2 GB RAM

        Graphics: OpenGL 3.0 compatible graphics card

        Hard Drive: 300 MB available space

About The Company

The game itself was created by Patrice Meneguzzi, a 33 year old software engineer in France. He has 11 years under his belt working on web-based applications using HTML, CSS, Java and Javascript. He is a avid gamer and artist. Patrice's ambition for the game started back with Alien Breed and Quake 3 Arena.

Some Gameplay Screenshots

Getting It To Run

Install Steam (if you don't have it installed already), then start it. You will need to create a new account, if you do not already have one. Once you have Steam up and running, go to the store tab. Click on the Linux tab if you wish and search for Daedalus - No Escape. Click on and download the demo. If you have updated your system, including graphics drivers, you should be good to go. http://store.steampowered.com/app/315830/?snr=1_7_tabpaginated__222_1

Fonts Everywhere, Fonts For Everyone

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Fonts, fonts, fonts. Everywhere you look there are fonts. Some fonts are simple and easy to read. Some fonts are elegant and fanciful. Some fonts are whimsical. Some fonts are casual. Some fonts scream formal. Some fonts are artful. Whatever the case, you use fonts every day, yet I bet you don't really give them a whole lot of thought.

The pages of this magazine's PDF utilizes a strict set of fonts to display the text on your screen. Restricting the use of fonts this way helps insure that the magazine has a unified and coordinated appearance. Typically, the fonts used in the magazine are Liberation Sans (body text in the articles), Liberation Serif (highlighted text in the articles), Liberation Mono (code examples), and Bitstream Vera Sans (headlines). Typically, you'll see these four fonts used in either regular, italic, bold italic or bold typefaces. Usually, 10 point type (font size) is used for the article body text (except for Liberation Mono, which is downsized to 9 points so it doesn't look so huge next to the better spaced proportional fonts), 30 point type for headlines, 14 point type for the table of contents, and 18 point type for the page numbers. Additionally, you may also notice the Walkway Expand Black font used at the bottom of each page, as well as in the magazine's masthead.

Like all other computer operating systems, Linux makes use of fonts to draw information on your screen. Linux can use Postscript Type 1 fonts (encompassing genuine postscript fonts from Adobe, which can take on file extensions such as PFA and AFM under Linux, and PFM and PFB under Windows), TrueType fonts (TTF files), and OpenType fonts (OTF files).

What are the differences?

To gain a better understanding of fonts, we first must understand the differences between the different types of fonts that are available. Postscript files have been around the longest, and are the font format preferred by commercial printers. Before postscript files came along, most fonts were nothing more than bitmap renderings of letters. Thus, bitmapped fonts didn't render well, and certainly experienced severe limitations when it came to scaling to other sizes.

TrueType fonts were "invented" by Apple (and subsequently licensed by Microsoft, in exchange for Apple licensing Microsoft's TrueImage postscript compatible page description language) to allow font designers to determine proper, scalable appearance of their fonts. TrueType fonts were designed jointly by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s as an open format to compete with Adobe's closed format (and expensive to license) Postscript files. TrueType fonts gave users the same appearance on their computer screens as the finished document would look like from their printer. TrueType fonts can be scaled to virtually any size. They made their first appearance with the release of Mac OS System 7, and was followed up by their inclusion in Windows 3.1 later that year by Microsoft. The original three TrueType fonts included with Windows 3.1 are still an integral part of Windows to this day: Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New.

OpenType fonts are an extension of TrueType fonts, collaboratively released by Microsoft and Adobe (who joined in on the collaboration by the time OpenType was publicly announced in 1996). OpenType, which is a registered trademark of Microsoft, allows for greatly expanded character sets, as well as including data structures that dictate typographical behavior.

ClearType, a Microsoft-only feature, refers only to a method of subpixel rendering on the user's screen to try to improve the screen appearance of displayed fonts. It is not related to different types of fonts, and is applied to both TrueType and OpenType fonts. There is disagreement among type aficionados whether or not ClearType achieves its goals. ClearType is not used for printed documents.

Getting new fonts

PCLinuxOS comes with quite a few fonts already installed. But, since everyone's taste is different, you will most likely want to install some extra fonts on your system. Different fonts will allow you to personalize your own PCLinuxOS installation, just as you do with wallpaper.

Probably the easiest way to get new fonts is to install them from Synaptic. This is, by far, the easiest way to install fonts. Just search with the term "font" and you will find all sorts of extra fonts you can install. While in Synaptic, do a quick look to see if the "webcore-fonts" package is installed. If it isn't, go ahead and install it. This package contains all of the fonts that are typically found on a Windows installation. Here are the fonts that package contains:

Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Lucida Sans, Lucida Console, Microsoft Sans Serif, Symbol, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, Webdings, Wingdings

The benefit of having these fonts installed is so that if a web designer has specified one of these fonts as the default font for a web page, you will be able to view the web page the way it was intended to be viewed. Also, if you receive or send document files to Windows users, you can insure that any document are viewable as intended by having the proper fonts installed on your computer.

If you dual boot your computer with a copy of Windows, there is another very easy way to get all of your fonts transferred to your PCLinuxOS installation. Start PCLinuxOS Control Center (PCC, a.k.a. Configure Your Computer). Click on the "System" category, then select "Manage, add and remove fonts. Import Windows(™) fonts" near the top of the window. You should now see a window similar to the one above. At the bottom of the window, in the center, is a button labeled "Get Windows Fonts." Click it, and PCLinuxOS will search your mounted drives (your Windows partition is mounted, right?) for the C:\Windows\Fonts folder. When it is found, all of your Windows fonts will be imported into your PCLinuxOS installation.

Of course, if you're like a lot of us, you've abandoned Windows completely -- and long ago. So the above method won't do anything for us, except pop up an error message box that it can't find any Windows fonts. By the way, you'll also get the same error message if your Windows partition isn't mounted. If PCLinuxOS can't see it, then it also can't find any fonts to import.

There are over 100,000 different fonts available. A good portion of those are freely available. The rest are ones you have to pay for. We won't even talk about the latter ones. Many of them are quite expensive. There are more than enough free fonts available to keep your mouth watering for years -- and to meet virtually any layout designs you could ever come up with.

Thanks to the internet, most of those free fonts can be found online. Above is a graphic with the logos from 20 different sites that offer free fonts. Yes, they are yours for the taking. All you have to do is download them. Well, that's not ALL you have to do -- you do have to install them on your PCLinuxOS installation -- but we'll talk more about that in a minute. But you will have to download them, still.

Below are the links to the 20 sites in the image above. Those sites with an asterisk next to them are actually font foundries (they make and sell fonts), but they also offer up some high quality free fonts.

Open Font Library
Fonts2U
Free Fonts Download
Font Garden
HypeForType*
betterfonts
FontZone
Google Fonts
Abduzeedo Design Inspirations Friday Fresh Free Fonts*
ActionFonts
FreeFonts
Chank Fonts!
FontSpace
Creative Bloq
Font Squirrel
Simply The Best Fonts
Urbanfonts
1001 Free Fonts
FontPalace
dafont.com

This list is far from complete. There are literally thousands of sites out there offering up free fonts for your use. These 20 sites should give you plenty of places to start looking to fulfill your font needs. Some fonts have restrictions on them, offering them up only for your own personal, non-commercial use. Use of these fonts commercially requires them to be purchased. Other fonts are completely free for your use, however you choose to use them.

While the chances of you being hunted down for use of the fonts for other than the use they are "licensed" range from slim to remote to none (after all, no one can possibly review or scrutinize every item that is published), it might be best to play it safe and find an alternative font that can be used in the manner in which you want. Otherwise, you may find yourself in some legal entanglements that you might wish to avoid, as well as some expenses you didn't anticipate.

Also, the Google Fonts site operates in a rather unique way. You add whatever fonts you like to your "collection," and then you download your entire collection as a compressed ZIP file. Uncompress the file to a folder in your /home directory, and then you can go about installing them to your PCLinuxOS installation.

Installing your fonts

PCLinuxOS users have it pretty easy when it comes to installing and managing the fonts on their system. PCC has a feature built into it that makes the installation of fonts painless and easy.

First of all, you can view all of the fonts installed on your computer. Select an installed font from the list and you can view a sample or preview of that font in the "Preview" window. You can also change the size of the text displayed in the preview window, simply by selecting the size you want your preview text to be along the right side of the window.

To install your downloaded fonts, select "Import" button. You will see a dialog box similar to the one above, but empty. Click on the "Add" button, travel to the folder where you extracted or stored your downloaded fonts. Select the fonts you want to install, then click on OK. Once you have all the fonts added that you want to install, select the "Install" button. PCC will install the selected fonts into the usr/share/fonts folder, where they will be available to every user on that computer.

If you want the selected fonts to only be available to the current user, you will have to first create a .fonts directory in your /home directory (if one doesn't already exist). Then, you will have to manually copy fonts into that folder.

While you're installing your new fonts, it might be a good idea to check the options you want to use with your new fonts. By default, all of the choices are selected. If you find some reason to not want your new fonts to be available to any of the choices listed, you can clear the checkmark and select the "OK" button.

Similarly, if there are any fonts installed on your system that you want to uninstall, select the font from the list. Then, select the "Uninstall" button. That selected font will be removed from your system.

Although font tools are few and far between under Linux, you do have a couple of other options in PCLinuxOS. First, there is GNOME Font Manager (pictured above). It has the same functions as the PCC utility, allowing you to install and remove fonts from your system, and to view the fonts installed on your system. Font Manager will list all the fonts it finds, including system fonts (installed in /usr/share/fonts) and any user fonts (installed in the .fonts folder in that particular user's /home directory).

Fontmatrix is another option for managing the fonts on your computer. The "About" dialog box pretty well sums up the function of Fontmatrix. Just in case you can't read it clearly, here is what it says:

Fontmatrix

A font manager for Linux.

Fontmatrix is aimed at adventurous graphic designers and typesetters who need to manage hundreds and even thousands of fonts for their work - avoiding the need to browse overly long lists in dialogs.

Basically, Fontmatrix helps you do three things:

Activating and deactivating your fonts

Tagging fonts with sets

Finding suitable fonts by constructing simple or complex queries

Refining the fonts selection by comparing glyphs in detail

Generating font "books" as PDF

Find more at fontmatrix.net or from built-in help system.

OK. So Fontmatrix may be overkill for the average user. But Fontmatrix is also the ONLY program that allows the user to view fonts that aren't installed on their computer, short of opening them into a full blown font editor, such as Fontforge. You can set custom text to be used for displaying the selected font (as I've done in the screen image above). Fontmatrix is a program built on the Qt libraries.

There are some users who have large collections of fonts. I'm not talking about a couple or few hundred. I'm talking about thousands (one PCLinuxOS user I know has over 2,700 font files in his collection). Obviously, they won't want to have all of those fonts installed all of the time. Fontmatrix is perfectly suited for these users, since they can activate and deactivate entire groups of their font collection as needed.

Summary

I am utterly amazed at the lack of something so seemingly simple as a font viewer under Linux. As much as I hate to admit it, Windows users have many, many choices when it comes to font viewers. Even just double clicking on a font file in Windows brought up a rudimentary built-in font viewer that allowed you to see what any font file would look like on your system, even without it being installed on your system.

Dolphin, the default file manager on KDE has the ability to view font files in a similar rudimentary font viewer, simply by clicking on it. Plus, the font doesn't even have to be installed, which is a true plus. But not everyone runs KDE, so they don't have the "luxury" of Dolphin's special built-in capability. Some users simply don't care for KDE's bloat and eye candy. Others may not have computers capable of running KDE well, so they opt for using one of the lighter desktop environments. I'm an Xfce user, and I don't have the ability to easily view font files. MATE and LXDE users are in a similar boat, as are users of the GNOME and Unity desktops (from what I've read). As far as I know, KDE is the only desktop environment where users can view fonts easily.

So, obviously it's possible to create such a program. All of the programs we talked about in this article have the ability to display a sample of text using the selected font, albeit most of them being restricted to only viewing installed fonts. What's unclear is why someone hasn't made a font viewer that can view any font file, without it being installed on the user's computer. It sure would be nice to be able to double click on a font file and have a sample of that font displayed. We can only hope for such a program, at this point.

Inkscape Tutorial: Creating A Water Drop Illustration

By: Khadis

Creating a water (or blood) drop or splash in Inkscape is radically easy and simple. If you are going to create it, you just need one tool to do it. Let's go!

Open up your Inkscape and create an oval of any size and any color using Circle tool (F5).

Grab your Tweak tool (Shift + F2) and activate Push parts of paths in any direction option. Here are some of other parameters that you can set:

Click and hold any side/part of your oval, then drag it out. On my example, I dragged out the upper part. Your first result on the edge might be like this:

Still using Tweak tool, click and drag several times on the edge (including "undoing" if you get bad result) so the result will be like this (yours may be better):

Do tweaking again for other parts. You might need to do a circular movement or drag calmly and gently.

Here are some of my creations. Not so good, but I am sure that you'll be inspired to create the better and realistic one:

To get different effect, you can always change the width of tweak area and the force value. You can also switch from Push parts of paths in any direction to Shrink (inset) parts of paths option.

For the next touch, you can duplicate (Ctrl + D) the object, give it a different color (I chose the darker color), add a stroke, send it to back, and move it some millimeters to create a shadow effect.

You can also put text above the objects like this:

I used the Impact font, while you can choose your favorite font. Resize it to fit your main object.

Then, I rotated the text, duplicated it and picked a darker color for the duplicated one, and also moved the duplicate to higher position. It will give a shadow effect too.

If you think that the text isn't good yet, you can modify it by giving it a "shattered" effect. Here is how:

Type your text. Then, by using the Bezier tool (Shift + F6) create some objects (example: triangle or any random shape), and put them above the text, similar to the picture below:

Then, do Difference (Ctrl + -) operation by clicking on the Bezier object, then hold your Shift button, click on your text, and press Ctrl + -.

Apply the text to your water drop object.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: tbschommer

as told to Smileeb

How old are you?
I'm 59.

Married, single or what?
Married to my wonderful wife Elke for 37 years.

Children, grandchildren?
No.

Retired or working and for how long and at what?
Semi-retirement since May 2014. I've been working in IT since 1976, first as a developer at a government agency for statistics, then as a systems analyst at Prime Computer (my best job ever). After two stints at software companies, I landed at a wholesale company as a database developer, where I've been for close to 20 years now.

What is the area you live in like. Weather, Quietness, Scenery?
We used to live in Dusseldorf, which is beautiful. It's where I met my wife in school. It's just north of Cologne, and south to the so-called "Ruhrgebiet", the former coal and steel-producing region.

The weather is usually moderate, but very unpredictable. Any forecast above 2 days in advance is more or less a guess, even for the meteorologists.

Now we live just outside of Dusseldorf, where the hilly region begins (expanding to the East), so we're able to get into the more rural areas quickly, which is really nice.

Are you handy with your hands and have any hobbies?
Sadly, besides handling computer keyboards, not so much, although I managed to build my own PC in the summer (and I'm darn proud of the result, too). My wife and I used to play bowling, and teach bowling to youngsters. We were really into it from 1979 until around 2000. The last piece of wood I handled myself was making a bookshelf during my last year in school in East Orange, N.J., where I was born and grew up (yes, I'm a U.S. citizen). Nowadays, I'm sorry I didn't have the opportunity to become more of a craftsman.

What is your education level?
The German "Abitur" is comparable to completing Junior college. After that, I took a four month long seminar in computer techniques (remember, it was 1975!). Punchcards, etc.

Do you like to travel, go camping?
We haven't gone camping for the last 40 years, but we love to travel, near and far. Vacations at the Mediterranean in Italy and Spain, the North Sea in Germany, Belgium Holland. And whenever we get the chance, we visit my Dad in Rhode Island and spend a little time in Cape Cod.

What caused you to try Linux and join this forum?
First, my employer started using Unix servers for the Oracle databases, so I decided I'd find a niche and put Linux on my personal box (clients were all M$). That was in 1998. After several years, I was one of the "experts" whenever Unix came up (yeah, right). I used Suse for years, then a few other distros, but then (around 2008) I found my home -- PCLinuxOS!

After about a year, reading along, I decided to be brave and join the forum. This was my first experience communicating on a computer using anything other than personal emails.

Let me finish by saying that I absolutely love PCLOS and its community. Nothing compares to this OS or the people associated with it!

Dusseldorf (with the river Rhine):

A few impressions of Haan (where we currently live):

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight is an exclusive, monthly column by smileeb, featuring PCLinuxOS forum members. This column will allow "the rest of us" to get to know our forum family members better, and will give those featured an opportunity to share their PCLinuxOS story with the rest of the world.

If you would like to be featured in PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight, please send a private message to smileeb in the PCLinuxOS forum expressing your interest.

PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions

Sudoku

Download Puzzle Solutions Here

Scrappler

Download Puzzle Solutions Here

PCLinuxOS Crossword Puzzle: February 2015
Programming Languages

Download Puzzle Solutions Here

Programming Languages Word Find

Download Puzzle Solutions Here

Screenshot Showcase

Posted by Aleph, January 5, 2015, running IceWM

Posted by Crow, January 16, 2015, running KDE

Posted by edu.ro, January 3, 2015, running Openbox

Posted by francesco_bat, January 1, 2015, running IceWM

Posted by harvi, January 5, 2015, running MATE

Posted by jogurtmen, January 10, 2015, running KDE

Posted by Meemaw, January 7, 2015, running Xfce

Posted by nymira, January 25, 2015, running LXDE

Posted by tbschommer, January 8, 2015, running KDE

Posted by Yankee, January 5, 2015, running LXDE