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Welcome to the LinuxFocus May/June 2004 issue

Free roads!? I am not sure what you mean. Of course everybody has to pay when he or she wants to get from A to B. The land owners have certainly the right to charge a fee they consider appropriate when you cross their land.
The entire economy is based on the idea that custom fees and road tolls exist. Many people work in this area. Owners of large roads are really rich and of course this money will be invested in other areas creating jobs and income. This is one of the fundamentals of our business models.

On top of that we can track the movement of people and goods. It is a very good system of control. Sometimes "bad" guys and products come in but police forces can usually locate road owners who let "bad" in and stop this. I feel very comfortable with our system.

Recently I read a strange article from a world which had a public road infrastructure. The system could not only be used without paying a fee but offered also many alternative path to get from A to B. How would you choose which way to take? Today I have contracts with two road owners and I use those roads. I don't worry about alternatives. I never get lost when I drive.

Strangely this article concluded that this economy was functioning very well.

Free software provides an alternative road infrastructure at a lower cost and gives freedom of choice because it does not lock in the users with unfair contracts. It gives us more freedom to use the roads as we like. ... but not everybody may be ready for such a change ...

-- Guido Socher

ps: Here is a nice example for freedom of choice: nukeanything (Remove any object from any web page with a right mouse click. It is excellent).

LinuxFocus.org Articles

Software Development

Talking to a Running Process , by Bob Smith

Run Time Access is a library that lets you view the data structures in your program as tables in a PosgreSQL database or as files in a virtual file system (similar to /proc).

Graphics

Going 3D with Blender: Modeling a clock , by Katja Socher

In this article we model a clock with Blender.

System Administration

Colorful Shells -- Using ANSI Color Codes , by Nico Golde

In an ANSI compatible terminal (like xterm, rxvt, konsole ...) text may be shown in colors. This article explains how to do that.

Gentoo linux , by Guido Socher

Gentoo Linux is a source package based Linux system. It is very different from the established commercial Linux distributions.

shivalik -- simple configuration backup (defying Murphy's laws) , by Dr. S. Parthasarathy

There are a whole lot of HOWTOs out there which tell you what to do if you have a serious problem with your Linux installation. But there is no one there who told you what you should do before disaster strikes you! This article gives some suggestions as to what you can do even without a full tape backup.

The LinuxFocus Tip

Has your laptop only two mouse buttons?

If your laptop has only 2 mouse buttons and you hate pasting by pressing both buttons at the same time then try this: Map a spare key on the keyboard to the middle mouse button.

Here is how to convert the PrintScreen key into a middle mouse button:

xmodmap -e 'keysym Print = Pointer_Button2'
xkbset m
xkbset exp =m

You need the xkbset program to change a keypress event into a buttonpress event. xkbset can be downloaded from:
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen/software/xkbset/ ( or xkbset-0.5.tar.gz, local copy)

Latin1 characters on an English keyboard

Here is a trick on how to make a few non English characters available on a computer with an English keyboard.

KDE and Gnome come with programs to completly change the keyboard layout on the fly. The problem is that the labels on the keys do then no longer correspond to the actual characters behind the keys. Most Latin languages have however an almost English character set except for a few letters. Why not use xmodmap to change some useless keys such as Caps-lock to generate those additonal characters? Here is an example for German:

Caps-lock + a -> gives ä
Shift Caps-lock + a -> gives Ä
....

... and here is how to do that. Save the following in a file and then run "xmodmap theFile"

clear lock
!the next line is normally not needed
!add Mod3 = Mode_switch
!keysym Caps_Lock = Mode_switch
!!or
keycode 66 = Mode_switch
! now the key definitions, use xev to look up the keycode
! number if needed. The first 2 columns after the equal sign
! are the normal functions of the keys. The last two columns are
! used when Mode_switch is pressed or Mode_switch + Shift is
! pressed.
keycode 30 = u U udiaeresis Udiaeresis
keycode 32 = o O odiaeresis Odiaeresis
keycode 38 = a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis
keycode 39 = s S ssharp