In my last article, Quick and Dirty with Open Office Base, I described my initial experiences with building a simple database application for my wife in Open Office Base, having had no prior experience with the program.

One of the least understood features of OpenOffice.org is graphics text. People understand vaguely that it differs from regular text, but exactly how it differs or why anyone should care is mostly unknown. However, if you know the distinction, graphics text can work for you in ways that regular text cannot.

Recently I wrote about controlling konsole with dbus. As I've begun to use that script for setting up my konsoles I, like others, have discovered that the tab title that you set with dbus doesn't stick. This short note shows you a workaround to make your tab titles stay put.

I've been taking a Java programming course this semester at the local technical college, which has been a wonderful learning experience. The programming course uses the Eclipse 3.5.1 IDE along with the Java Development Toolkit for programming in Java. In addition to using Eclipse, I use Dropbox to save the source code and preferences from my home install of Eclipse, eliminating the need to carry a USB key or email/transfer the files through any other method. This Dropbox storage method also ensures that every machine I use has the latest version of source code files with minimal interaction and fuss on my part.

When grep and sed aren't enough, gawk may provide the extra horsepower that you need. The following tip contains a sampling of some of the things one might do with gawk.

Working on a little script the other day I had the need to determine if the input to the script was coming from a pipe or from the terminal. Seems like a simple enough thing to determine but nothing jumped immediately to mind and a quick internet search didn't help much either. After a bit of pondering I came up with two solutions: the stat command and using information from the proc file system.

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

There are many dialog programs out there, Zenity, Kdialog, xdialog, etc. I love programs like these. They make it so easy to spice up a shell script with a little GUI action. Today I'm going to go look at a dialog program called gxmessage.

One of my favorite new apps is a little system tray app called caffeine (and here). It's simple, yet very practical, its purpose is to inhibit a screen saver or sleep mode, which is great while watching flash videos on sites like hulu.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be dereferenced (ie the value is not available). But this is not so, variable names can be passed as parameters to functions and they can be dereferenced to obtain the value of the variable with the given name.

By changing your Xsession file you can start a kiosk-style machine that starts a single X11 application.

As a person who uses Linux regularly, often I am asked about my opinions about other operating systems, especially those coming from large companies located in Redmond, Washington. Here's the deal. Operating systems are tools. We use them to do jobs. It is always a good idea to think critically about what tools you are using, and verify if other tools can do the same job in a more efficient or flexible manner.

I'm sure that most people hardly think about page options in OpenOffice.org Writer. The average person may change the paper orientation from portrait to landscape, or narrow the margins to squeeze more words into a page, but not much else.

Ever wanted to get the MAC or IP address of your computer in a Linux shell script? The following two commands should work on most flavours of Linux/Unix.

In this series of articles, we've gone over making custom transitioning slide-show backgrounds in different desktop environments. So far, we've gone over GNOME, KDE3, and XFCE. This time, we'll do the same task in KDE4. I think that it is easiest to do this KDE4 compared to all of the other desktop environments.

Continuing in this series of slide show backgrounds, in this article I will explain the process of creating a set of desktop backgrounds that will transition like a slide-show in XFCE. Note that I am using XFCE version 4.6.0 in this tutorial. Other versions may be able to use this tip, but the screen shots may look different. See corresponding howtos for GNOME, and KDE3 also.

My recent article about transitioning slide show backgrounds in GNOME garnered quite a bit of attention, so here's my first reminder of how to do the same thing in other desktop environments. This one will show you how to create a custom slide show backgrounds in KDE3.

This tech tip provides you with information on how to customize your motd (Message Of The Day) message to display the output of one or more scripts. This uses the update-motd package, which updates the motd message when run. I use this method on Ubuntu 9.10, but not all systems provide this package so extra effort may be required to use it on other systems.

I wanted to store geolocation information in the photos I take with my digital camera. That way I wouldn't have to specify the photo locations manually when I upload them to the Picasa webpage. Since my camera doesn't have built in GPS support, I wrote this script to add the location information to the pictures when they are on the computer already.

While test-driving the new Gnome 2.28 desktop, I was surprised to see that among the default backgrounds, there was a "Cosmos" slide-show of several cosmic pictures of space that regularly transition on your desktop. While I had used this feature in the past when using KDE, I was not aware of how to create my own slide-show backgrounds in Gnome. By examining how the Cosmos slide-show works, I figured out how to create my own custom slide-show backgrounds. Read on and find out to create your own custom desktop background.