Looking for some great new Minty art?

As many of our readers know by now I love finding new desktop wallpaper images. In addition to the Ubuntu monthly desktop screenshot threads for new images to use I also check the National Geographic photo of the day to see what images they post that I want to have on my desktop. I also use Webshots and Webilder to get new images every day, and I used to use Webilder to change my desktop wallpaper on a regular basis. Unfortunately while I can still use Webilder to help find new images it can’t change my wallpaper images on KDE like it can for GNOME, but KDE has a wallpaper slideshow option to automatically change images on a regular basis for me. KDE also has a Photo of the Day plasmoid to help me check other sites for possible new wallpaper images. (Please note that one of the sites that Photo of the Day uses is Bonjour Madame, which is definitely Not Safe For work, and I don’t see a way to not show images from that site.)

Today while perusing the Naughty November 2010 Screnshots thread (“Naughty” is just a name, the thread is always SFW) and a user shared a link to some great wallpapers that use the concept of electronic circuitry and a Linux distribution’s logo to make some incredible images. As I was looking at the images on deviantArt I noticed a button for a group called the #LinuxMint-Club. The group has not only some killer Mint wallpapers, but also some wallpaper and other images for other distros as well. One thing that can be found there is artwork for your burned Mint CDs and DVDs, including art for the case for the disk. They also have some good GNOME-, KDE-, and Debian-related artwork.

If you’re on the lookout for some pretty incredible wallpaper art, regardless of what flavor of Linux you run, as well as some other good promotional artwork, surf on over to deviantArt and check out the work of the members of the #LinuxMint-Club.I think you’ll really like what you find there.

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Help spread the word about Linux Mint KDE

You may have noticed some new images in the sidebar, although one of them is missing and had to be fixed  After looking at making the move to KDE4 back in July I was amazed at how much nicer it was than when I looked at KDE3 a few years ago, back when I first decided it was time to kick Windows to the curb. At the recommendations of Henry and Mekenzie (on that post) I ended up moving to KDE, and after using Kubuntu for a bit I moved to Linux Mint 9 KDE. It didn’t take long for me to become a very happy Linux Mint KDE user. There isn’t an upgrade to use the latest packages that come with Kubuntu 10.10 yet (Mint is based on the *Ubuntu family of distros) but that’s simply because Mint doesn’t release updates based on a calendar date, preferring instead to make sure it’s as ready and bug-free as it can be before they release it. Mint 10 “Julia” (GNOME) was released on the 12th but the KDE version has a bit more work to be done. I’m actually fine with that and I’m waiting as patiently as I can.

Nanci has also made the move to Mint KDE and over the weekend we decided it was time to add some image links to our sidebar to promote both the KDE Software Compilation and the specific GNU/Linux distribution we use. There are already a number of images people can use to promote KDE but there are few images for promoting Mint, with even fewer promoting the KDE flavor of Mint. I ended up creating a pair of images that can be used for promoting Linux Mint. Both images measure 280×175 pixels to fit in the sidebar of our blog although I may be able to create other sizes if interest warrants.

MintKDEpromo_Dew_280x175.png

MintKDEpromo_Emotion_280x175.png

Both images are free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Simply right click on either (or both) image and select Save As… and them post them on your blog, Facebook page, etc. I recommend having the link for the images go to the Linux Mint website.

You can also get the Gimp file I used to create the image if you’d like to modify the image for your own use or use it as the basis for a new image. Just leave me a comment with your email address in the proper field (which will be available to Nanci and I but won’t be visible to anyone else) and I’ll email it to you.

Credits

The images are created with images from a few different sources and I want to make sure I give credit where it’s due.

• The logo for Mint KDE came from the Mint-KDE icon theme included with my Mint 9 KDE installation
• The KDE logo came from the KDE Clipart page
• The text is in the formintElegance Medium font that I found in this post on the Mint Forums
• The two background images are resized wallpaper from the Emotion wallpaper set and from Zwopper’s most excellent Unbranded Dew package.

Long live the Mint!

[UPDATED] A pair of KDE questions for our readers

Since moving to KDE and Linux Mint I’ve got a couple of questions I’m hoping you guys can help me find answers to. The first is an update issue I’ve been fighting with mid-October. I’m seeing updates available for Grub and something called inxi but I can’t find changelog information anywhere. The updates are from the linuxmint repo but not even Mint’s update utility has any information on what got changed, even at least a  week after the update became available. I’ve actually asked about it on the Mint Forums but so far all I’m getting is crickets. Does anyone have an idea where I might be able to look for info on what’s been changed in these updates?

The second question is about a KDE plasmoid I’ve come to love. I’ve taken to checking the Photo of the Day plasmoid every day but I hate having to manually launching it with Kicker. I know I can throw the plasmoid on my desktop but I really don’t want to lose that much screen real estate to a plasmoid I only use once a day, and I know I can put it on my panel but I’m really not thrilled with how it is used on the panel.

Does anyone know of a way to add it to the KDE menu? What I’d like to do is to throw an icon on my panel that will launch the plasmoid on demand rather than show the current active image. I suspect I may be asking for the impossible, but as a still relative noobie to KDE I’m not sure if it’s remotely possible or not.

Updated 13 November: A few days ago I ended up just taking the updates but I got complaints that the updates weren’t actually updates for the grub packages I had installed. This morning I ended up uninstalling Grub and reinstalling it. The errors are gone and my system seems to still be working.

But Mint really needs to find a better way of doing updates than to tell me there are updates I can’t even install.

Add your favorite sayings to the Fortune plasmoid

[Updated 1 Oct 2011:  Another update has been uploaded to my Dropbox. The fortune count is now 272. As always you can get the updated file from the link below. -Peng]

One of the things I love using on KDE is the Fortune plasmoid. It’s a handy little gadget for putting a random quotation on your desktop on a recurring basis, which I found out about on one of the Ubuntu Forums’ monthly screenshot thread some time back when I was still a GNOME user. It’s a great applet with over 30 sets of quotations in English alone, not to mention several other languages.

Yesterday I was reading a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about comments an idiot at an electronics store’s tech support group (think Nerd Herd) told his grandparents. The very second post had a comment from theraje that I thought would be perfect for the Fortunes:

It takes an amateur to mess something up… but to REALLY screw something up requires an “expert”.

Since jramen is the developer of the Fortune plasmoid on KDE-Look.org I left him a comment on plamoid’s KDE-Look page asking how to get it added to the quotations that Fortune uses. He was kind enough to not only tell me how to do it but also keep working with me until I got it working properly, especially since OpenSUSE and Mint KDE installs it a little differently.

The first thing you need to do is to create a document at /usr/share/games/fortunes/ called something like myfortunes. You’ll need root access to create this file so I fired up Dolphin, navigated over to /usr/share/games, and right clicked on the fortunes directory, selecting Root Actions > Open in File Manager (you may need to install the package kde-service-menu-rootactions or Mint’s rootactions-servicemenu to get this context menu). Once you’re in the folder right click anywhere in it and select Create New > Text File… and use the filename you want to call it. Then open this new file in Kate (or your favorite KDE text editor) and add the quotation you want to use, with percent signs (“%”) on the lines above and below your quote. You will need to have each quotation wrapped in percent signs, although you only need one between quotations. For just this one quotation it should look like this:

%
It takes an amateur to mess something up... but to REALLY screw something up requires an "expert".
		-- theraje on the Ubuntu Forums
%

Save the file and open a root terminal, which you can do from the Root Actions context menu.  In that terminal run this command:

# strfile /usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes

substituting whatever name you gave the file for myfortunes if you used a different filename. This is to create a .dat file that Fortunes needs to use the file. You should see a response like this:

# strfile /usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes
"/usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes.dat" created
There was 1 string
Longest string: 133 bytes
Shortest string: 133 bytes
#

As jramen said, “hopefully Fortune will pick this particular quote someday, too, ‘cuz as I saw, there are gazillions of them there.” To make sure Fortune can read the file run

# fortune -f

in your terminal window. Unfortunately, if you’re running a distro that installs Fortune into different directories than OpenSUSE does, like Ubuntu or Mint, that command will return an error.

# fortune -f
Command 'fortune' is available in '/usr/games/fortune'
The command could not be located because '/usr/games' is not included in the PATH environment variable.
fortune: command not found
#

Houston, we definitely have a problem, although I’m not sure why. The easiest way to fix that is to create a system link to the fortunes file in /usr/games (which is the executable file that is run to use Fortunes) to any directory in your system’s path settings. I created it in /usr/bin. You should be able to create it from the command line by running

ln -a /usr/games/fortune /usr/bin/fortune

I say “should” because it didn’t work for me. I got around the problem by opening a Dolphin window as root and splitting it into two panes, one showing /usr/games and the other showing /usr/bin, as shown in the screenshot to the right. You can do this buy using View>Split or by simply pressing the F3 key. Once you have the two directories in your two panes simply click on fortune within the /usr/games pane and dragging it to the /usr/bin pane, and either selecting Link Here from the window that pops up when you release the mouse button or by holding down the Alt key as you drag the file.

Once you’ve created the link, which will show up with an arrow on top of the icon in the /usr/bin pane, go back to your root terminal and run # fortune -f. On my system, with a number of fortune packages installed and over 60 additional quotations in my myfortunes file, showed this when I run that command.

# fortune -f
 100.00% /usr/share/games/fortunes
      0.65% linuxcookie
      0.95% kids
      1.02% ethnic
      1.27% law
      0.34% goedel
      0.33% news
      0.87% husse-helping
      3.98% work
      2.67% wisdom
      0.79% riddles
      4.11% miscellaneous
      3.94% science
      0.33% pets
      1.79% disclaimer
      0.40% myfortunes
      0.11% husse-funny
      2.86% bofh-excuses
      0.27% debian-hints
      0.19% magic
      6.49% computers
      2.12% linux
      1.28% education
      4.55% songs-poems
      0.93% sports
      1.43% startrek
      0.13% husse-moderating
      0.08% husse-self
      1.31% drugs
      0.06% ascii-art
      7.59% definitions
      1.24% humorists
      7.86% people
      0.47% medicine
      0.95% love
      1.25% food
      0.45% paradoxum
      2.93% art
      0.08% translate-me
      2.72% fortunes
      7.16% cookie
      3.41% knghtbrd
      3.46% zippy
      4.42% politics
      3.68% men-women
      0.54% debian
      1.65% literature
      3.16% platitudes
      1.72% perl
#

Here’s how my newly added fortune looks when I have it on my desktop.

I know the line wrapping is broken on fortune plasmoid but if you have your terminal set up to show a fortune when you launch a terminal window it will show up properly there.

If you want to use my myfortunes file, which includes a number of quotations I used to run on my old blog under the heading Words To Live By, I’ve posted it to my Dropbox. Simply right-click on this link and select Save Link As… or whatever your preferred browser uses for saving a link on your computer.

Mega thanks to jramen for talking me though getting my own collection of fortunes created and usable by his damned nice plasmoid. I owe him a pint of his favorite adult (or non-adult) beverage.

Updated 7 Dec: I’m closing comments on this post because it seems to have become a magnet for comment spam. Akismet is able to catch all the spam, but it’s gotten a pain to have to verify that so many comments on this post are spam every day.