Gimparoo!

PolishLinux.org is an informational site aimed at helping Linux/BSD newcomers choose a distro that’s right for them. I found them while searching for comparisons of Debian to Ubuntu, and they helped me decide that I’m going to stick with Ubuntu. While I was there, I noticed they have a Gimp tricks section, where you can find a few nifty tips.

Go check them out, I’m sure they’ve got something to interest you.

I do a lot of coding in C, Perl, HTML, CSS, and coming this semester, Java. I’ve used vim pretty much exclusively, but have recently started wanting to use my mouse when it’s feasible. So, I started looking around and being disappointed for one reason or the other with each of the offerings. First, I tried TextWrangler which almost did it except I didn’t like the way it handled Perl syntax highlighting, and I didn’t like the automatic indenting implementation. I tried a couple of the commercial selections such as TextMate and SubEthaEdit, but seriously, if I have to pay for them, I’ll just stick to vim. Then I found Smultron. It does a nice job of syntax highlighting and the automatic indent is implemented just the way I like. There is page after page of customization options. It’s also open source, which you all know I love. When I’m accessing my server remotely, vim will still work of course, but for homework and projects, I’m giving Smultron a try.

The tutorial adaptations on this blog would not be possible without the Creative Commons (CC). All the work on this blog is CC licensed from the start. I’m a huge fan, and believe they are the way of the future for licensing creative works. Please help spread the word by “friending” them on your favorite social network.

From the CC blog:

Looking for another way to support CC? Be our friend! By connecting with Creative Commons on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission.

So, starting today, we’re issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We’re asking you to help us expand CC’s overall friend network to 50,000 people across the Web’s various social networking and content sharing sites by December 15 – the date of our fifth birthday party.

Here are some ways you can help our friend network grow. If you aren’t a member of any of these sites, please help us by starting (or expanding) a CC group on any site you do use.

• Join our Facebook Cause, become a top recruiter, or become a CC Fan
• Participate in the 2007 CC Swag photo contest on Flickr
• Become a Creative Commons friend on MySpace or Friendster

Of course, you can also help Creative Commons by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign. As always, we thank you sincerely for your support!

Hat tip to Jon Phillips.

If you’ve made “the switch” and you love The GIMP, check out Wilber Loves Apple, a newish website dedicated to all things GIMP on the Mac platform. From their website:

Hi there! We are bunch of Gimp Fans, who try to provide a proper version for the mac. We are not related to gimp.org. We just admire their work.

I’m downloading their 2.4.1 port now!

This post does not have anything to do with the GIMP. If you don’t care about Linux server administration, you should just skip this post.

I run a very small Ubuntu LAMP server that I use for small tasks such as Perl and C programming and a personal wiki. This morning, I was checking out /var/log/auth.log, and noticed multiple login failures for user ‘root’ from a strange IP; specifically 60.28.201.57. A whois lookup revealed that the IP was from China. The activity is typical of brute force cracking, so I started to get a little worried. Thinking I’d have to bite the bullet and install a firewall, something I didn’t want to do due to the very small amount of resources this server has, I did an apt-cache search for ‘firewall’ and began the tedious process of reviewing the results.

Well, I didn’t have to look long. Not far down the list was an entry called ‘denyhosts’ with the description: an utility to help sys admins thwart ssh hackers. Well this is exactly what I’m trying to prevent, so I went to their website and read up. It sounded perfect, so I went ahead and installed it. Immediately after install, I got a system message saying I had email. The email informed me that IP  60.28.201.57 had been added to the deny list. Wow! That was fast, and easy. I literally didn’t have to do anything. That’s the kind of tool I like! It’s also FOSS, and in the Ubuntu repositories.

In short, if you host a LAMP server, even if it’s not Ubuntu, I highly recommend DenyHosts as a simple solution for preventing this type of attack.

I just discovered psdtuts.com and will be taking a look through their archives for inspiration.

Vitor has a great little article on how to use Photoshop filters in the GIMP. I didn’t even know this was possible. Thanks Vitor!

Link.

www.gimp.org From the release:

Version 2.2.14 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a bug-fix release in the stable 2.2 series. Please see the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes. The source code is available from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon.

I’ll be waiting for it to hit the Ubuntu repo’s, but if you don’t mind building from source, have at it!

Flickr user Flatfeild has posted a great tutorial on how to make the popular Amazing Circles with gimp over at the GIMP Users flickr group. Head over and check it out, and if you’re a flickr user, please consider joining the group. Here’s an example of an Amazing Circle.

AMD has posted an update to their proprietary Linux driver for ATI graphics cards. Here is the announcement. From the notes:

Resolved Issues

The following section provide a brief description of resolved issues with the latest version of the AMD Catalyst™ Linux Graphics Driver software suite. These include:

• The screen no longer turns black if the X-Server is terminated from the text console. This condition was known to occur only on certain laptop confgiurations. Further details can be found in topic number 737-26829.

This is very good news for those of us with these particular laptop configurations. Note: I have not yet installed this driver, as I just now saw the announcement, so I’d love to hear from anyone who’s already installed it.