HOW-TOs

Secondary Window Tools in Scribus

Scribus is designed so that the main window shows only the document you are designing. Other tools are positioned to secondary windows, where they have all the room they need for detailed settings. You may discover some of these secondary windows via menus and toolbars as you work, but not all.

Safer Access without Passwords

How do you make sure that your passwords are safe? You can make them longer, complicate them by adding odd characters, making sure to use different passwords for each user account that you have. Or, you can simply skip them all together.

How Fast Can You Type? Develop a Tiny Utility in Bash to Find Out

If you spend most of your time typing on your keyboard (and I hope you don’t use that mouse very frequently, if you care for your wrists, that is), getting up to speed and practicing to become a better and faster typist is well worth the time and effort. And measuring something is the first step to improve it.

Tweaking text in Scribus

In word processors, users generally settle for an appearance that is good enough. By contrast, in a design application like Scribus, you have the tools to adjust the layout until it is exactly the way you want.

Grabbing Your Music from YouTube: Do It Your Way

A few months ago my father-in-law said that his company was renewing their computers. When I heard that some second-hand PCs were about to be available, I decided to take some of them, thinking that a few old PCs would not hurt when it comes to enlarging my home network and doing experiments with GNU/Linux.

Internet Relay Chat

Wow, talk about a dinosaur! IRC seems like it has been around since the dawn of time. Without dating myself, I still remember logging into BBSs back in the eighties and nineties and getting help in chat rooms that would eventually become what IRC is today.

Linux on a Fingernail

This issue of Linux Journal is all about how to get Linux in your pocket. In this article, I go one better and tell you how to get Linux on your fingernail. Now, before you get too excited, I won't be discussing some new nano-computer being used by James Bond, unfortunately. Instead, I discuss how to put Linux on a micro-SD card (or any other USB drive, for that matter).

Using Styles in Scribus

If you don't include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph. As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually.

Working with Frames and Objects in Scribus

A Scribus document consists of a series of objects that are added to a page, and contained within a frame. In addition to the usual cut, copy, and paste functions available in most applications, frames in Scribus share a general set of editing attributes and, so far as possible, the same set of properties.

Working with Images in Scribus

Apart from text, images are probably the most commonly used objects in Scribus or any other layout application. The basics of working with images in Scribus are mostly straightforward, but there are some methods and resources that you might miss, especially at first.

Wi-Fi on the Command Line

More people than ever are using wireless networks as their primary networking medium. Great programs are available under X11 that give users a graphical interface to their wireless cards. Both GNOME and KDE include network management utilities, and a desktop-environment-agnostic utility called wicd also offers great functionality.

Text Frames in Scribus

As a layout program, Scribus puts objects in frames so that they can be manipulated more easily. Images, drawing primitives, tables -- if it is content, Scribus puts it in a color-coded frame, with eight handles so that you can position it by dragging it around. But of all its frames, the most important -- and probably the most customizable -- is the text frame.

What Hardware Do I Have?

Often you may not necessarily know what kind of hardware you have—you may have a no-name box from a smaller company or a used machine. This month, I present the tools you can use to find out what you have installed.

Navigating and Working in Scribus

Scribus has mixed reputation among free software users. On the one hand, users are vaguely aware of Scribus as a first-rate application that can hold its own against proprietary counterparts like InDesign.

OpenOffice.org: Interactions Between Programs

Some people insist that OpenOffice.org should be called an office application instead of an office suite. The distinction that they are trying to make is that the programs in OpenOffice.org share a common code base, instead of being separate programs that are simply bundled together, the way that Microsoft Office's are.

Setting the Resolution in an X-less VM

Ever been working in a VM that is command line only and wished it wasn’t so small? Well, that was how I felt constantly until now. Step on past the break to see how to change the resolution in an X-less install by utilizing uvesafb. Let’s look at this from two points of view: Ubuntu and Gentoo. Ubuntu with Grub2:

Creating Custom Man Pages

Man pages have been the primary source for UN*x documentation for a long time. Whenever I create a script that's going to be around for a while, I create documentation in the form of a section 1 man page. This stops my cell phone from ringing on the weekends when the junior sysadmins are looking for my notes.
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