July 2009 Archives

http://lightlinux.blogspot.com/

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6800/2/

This is the second page of an article. On the second page the article provides some information on how to use the "ps" utility for more than simply finding the id of the process you want to kill.

Are you a Clanlib newbie and you can't get your Sprites to display. I'm a newbie too, and here are a few things that weren't really explained in the tutorials (for some odd reason...):

(Note: I'm using ClanLib 0.8 on a Debian Linux system - don't know how much this applies to you.)

1. After you create your resources.xml file for the sprites, you might spend two hours wondering why your application keep complaining that the xml file is invalid. For those of you who haven't worked with xml much, it would seem that this must be at the beginning and ending of your xml file for it to be valid:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<resources>
...sprite stuff here...
</resources>

2. When you draw your sprite, by default setting the drawing gets done to a background buffer. So you won't actually see anything that is drawn until you run flip() on your window object.

window_obj->flip();

3. To actually see the animation (which is the whole idea behind sprites) you need to run "update" on the sprite object before drawing it.

sprite_obj->update();
sprite_obj->draw(100, 100);

For a long time I used Showfoto for my image viewer. Lately I have been using Mirage the most.

Both Showfoto and Mirage have clean, attractive, and intuitive interfaces. The primary advantage Showfoto has over Mirage is that Showfoto can do a heck of a lot more. Showfoto has many menu options for enhancing, decorating, transforming, and filtering your photo. Mirage, on the other hand, is limited to a few minor editing options such as resizing, rotating, and cropping.

The primary advantage Mirage has over Showfoto is that it seems to start up and load images twice as fast (at least on my system).

Personally I use Mirage the most, because I am very concerned about speed. I want my computer to respond to my commands instantly. Whenever I want to see an image, I would much rather it show up in 0.5 seconds than 1 second. (Yes, I can tell the difference.)

While all those extra features in Showfoto are interesting, I never use them. When I really want to edit a photo, I use GIMP, which is (I would think) better suited for that sort of thing.

So here is my advice: Use Mirage for most of your image viewing, when you just want to get a quick look at an image or a directory of images: this will save you a lot of half-seconds over your lifetime. Use Showfoto if you need to edit a photo but do not have time to learn GIMP.

Noting this link for my own benefit:

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/multiple-x.html

It contains info on how to start x on a separate display, set color depth, and a few other details.