Unix
I had my first experience with Unix when I first installed Linux Mandrake on my personal computer in the spring of 2000. Like many first time Unix users I was a bit confused and intimidated at first, especially by things like command-line interfaces and terse man pages. But I persevered, and as I write this about a year later, I am far from a Unix guru, but I have become something of a true believer in the power of Unix. If you are serious about computing and networking, why not use an operating system that is serious about these things, too?Linux, in particular
As I mentioned, I run Linux (or, more properly, GNU/Linux). All of the remote systems I use are Linux, as well, and I've been very impressed with the fact that a stable operating system can be built from the ground up by a loose-knit group of volunteers. More on Linux later.Some things I really like about Unix
- LaTeX -- I taught myself LaTeX when I should have been working on a couple of papers last fall, and it was well worth it. Again, I'm no guru, but I know enough to produce technical documents with lots of embedded equations and figures and things, and this serves my purpose for the time being.
- Blackbox -- read some of my thoughts on my current favorite window manager.
- Extreme flexibility -- you can customize just about anything if you want to (see below for an example), especially if you're talking open source software.
XScrabble Project
If you've looked at my web page a bit or at my Blackbox screenshot, you may have noticed that I like the color blue. Especially in muted shades. I also happen to like Scrabble, and was delighted several months ago when I discovered XScrabble, by Matt Chapman. One thing I was never happy with, however, was the set of colors used in XScrabble. I recently discovered the extent to which the look of X can be influenced by the .Xdefaults file and by app-defaults files, so I set about trying to give XScrabble a look that's more consistent with the rest of my X environment. I met with some success, but discovered to my chagrin that some color elements are compiled into the binary (the background xpm, the colors of the board itself, and some colors in the setup dialog).
Alas, what was I to do? I'm not yet much of a programmer, so I proceeded with caution, but after grep'ing the source files to find color references, I concluded that this wasn't quite insurmountable after all. I still have some kinks to work out, but here's a screenshot that represents about two hours worth of pretty simple hacking. I tried not only to make the look of the program consistent with my environment, but also to tweak the colors of the board and tiles to look a little bit more like a real Scrabble set. When I feel confident that all the cosmetic issues are worked out, I'll make the modified source available, along with a description of how to go about making your own modifications.
ATI Xpert 2000
Are you stuck with this poorly supported card? I wrote up a little page describing how to get the damn thing working.Bear with me as I slowly add useful content to this page. I intend to put up links to sites that I have found useful in learning to administer a Linux system and take advantage of it's many powerful features.
Copyright © 2001 Matt Holland.
This page last modified 4/15/01.
Made with Emacs.