I've always liked XMMS as a music player program on Linux. It had enough features, but the basic interface was always simple enough to just work. Unfortunately, it is not maintained any longer, and in my latest Ubuntu upgrade to version 8.10, I found it was no longer included or supported.

The XMMS project continued with a successor, XMMS2, but it is much more than just a simple audio player. I looked at it and got lost fairly quickly. I just wanted something simple like the original XMMS.

JPEG images are a good data format for photographs because they contain data that is compressed in a manner optimized for the human eye. However, it is a "lossy" compression, meaning that if they are unencoded and re-encoded several times, the image will lose quality.

Sometimes all I want to do is crop a picture, to chop off uninteresting areas of the photo. Several tools can do this by working on the native JPEG data, meaning there is no loss of information from re-encoding the image.

I have been using LTSP for a while to turn old PCs into X terminals. LTSP works well for a desktop PC that can use PXE or Etherboot. LTSP does not work as cleanly on old laptops with PCMCIA network cards. In these cases, the kernel has to be installed on the laptop hard disk, but the rest of the LTSP installation runs from the server. When upgrading LTSP, the kernel on the hard disk gets out of sync with the modules on the server, and the laptops stop working as terminals.

I've been looking for a simpler setup for a laptop X terminal, and I've found ThinStation.

I have Linux running on an IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop. I recently upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 4. Several things broke from upgrading, including sound.

This Omnibook 2000 is old enough that the BIOS does not support booting off of a CD directly. Many Linux installers have an option to boot from a floppy disk. However, many other software these days comes on a bootable CD but without a floppy option. And those that have a floppy option are often still easier to use with a single CD.

Therefore I decided I needed to be able to boot from CD. After searching around with Google, I found Smart BootManager.

With digital cameras so popular, the USB multi-format card readers are readily available, inexpensive, and supported on Linux.

The memory cards in the reader show up as SCSI disk devices. The digital camera manufacturers have standardized on the MSDOS FAT filesystem, so you can just read and write to the memory card through the reader as if it were a disk drive.

A good audio source is of course your local radio stations. Sometimes, however, I want to listen to shows at a time other than when they are broadcast.

Using an FM radio tuner on the computer, you can capture the audio from the radio signal and save it to a sound file, such as MP3.

I'm using the DLink DSB-R100 tuner. It is a small FM radio which connects to the PC using USB for the tuning commands and the sound card's line-in connector for the audio.

With LTSP, all applications run on the server. This is great for the low maintenance involved: install an application program once, and it is available immediately on all terminals.

However, some times you may want to discriminate between different terminals. For example, you may want to restrict web browsing at one terminal or another.

Many people are familiar with the "print your own greeting card" idea. You print four small page images on a single sheet of paper and fold it in half twice. You get a little greeting card with a custom cover and interior, all from one single-sided piece of paper.

I wanted to do this from a Linux application, without needing Windows or MacOS. Preferably, I could use any application to produce 4 pages, and have some magic transform it into the single page with all parts reduced and oriented properly for folding.

To print from Open Office through KPrinter, set up a printer in Open Office for it.

Run spadmin as root. On RedHat 8.0 it is at

 /usr/lib/openoffice/spadmin 

Add a new printer of type "Generic Printer". This means simple Postscript output. For the command line specify

 kprinter --stdin 

Name your printer entry "KPrinter" or something recognizable to you.

Mac on Linux is a software package for Linux running on a PowerPC processor. It will allow you to run MacOS in a virtual machine.

It is similar in concept to VMWare GSX, where the disk images are stored in the host's file system but the guest VM screen is not tied to the host's screen.

Hardware

I'm running it on an old Power Computing PowerCurve Mac clone. It has been upgraded to a 225MHz PPC 604 CPU and 128MB ram.

I have an old laptop being used as an LTSP X Terminal. I have found that the X server software for this laptop is buggy. Somehow Mozilla exposes a bug that locks up the terminal.

LTSP is the Linux Terminal Server Project.

It is a software package which turns old cheap low-power PCs into X Terminals whose desktop software runs on a central Linux server.