Moving to Linux(c) Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!
Authors: Gagne M.
 Published year: 2005
 Pages: 130-133/181
Buy this book on amazon.com >>

So What's with the Penguin?

Having made you run off to Larry Ewing's site for a copy of Tux, I suppose I should take a moment to answer one of the most frequently asked questions in the Linux world. After all, every time you look at a Linux book, boxed set, or Web site, you stand a good chance of coming face to face with a fat, smiling penguin. You may well be wondering what Linux has to do with this penguin (Figure 15-13). Well, for starters, his name is Tux , and he is the Linux mascot. The most famous version of Tux (and there are many) is Larry Ewing's design.

Figure 15-13. Tux, the Linux mascot.

graphics/15fig013.jpg

The story behind Tux is the stuff of legend now and, like most legends, a little hard to pin down. Linus Torvalds was asked what he envisioned for a mascot. The answer from Linus was, "You should be imagining a slightly overweight penguin, sitting down after having gorged itself, and having just burped. It's sitting there with a beatific smile—the world is a good place to be when you have just eaten a few gallons of raw fish and you can feel another 'burp' coming."

There is also another story where Linus claims he was attacked by a killer penguin at the Canberra zoo, where he contracted "penguinitis," a disease whose main symptom is that you "stay awake at night just thinking about penguins and feeling great love towards them."

That's the thing about legends. They tend to get strange over time.

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

—Linus Torvalds

Extra! Extra!

Before we move away from the classic office applications, I would like to take another moment to address the issue of templates. Although StarOffice, the non-free commercial sibling of OpenOffice.org, comes with a number of templates for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics, OpenOffice.org is still quite light in this area. As I mentioned earlier, the Impress package has no included templates at all.

To resolve this issue, the OO Extras Web site was born.

Travis Bauer has put together a great site with a number of community created and distributed templates for the OpenOffice.org suite. The site is laid out so that you can look for things specific to your application of choice, and screenshots are provided so that you can get a preview of what the document will look like. Because OO Extras has become an international affair, these extras come in different languages, as well.

A visit to OO Extras is well worth your time. Perhaps in time, you too will contribute to this growing body of work.

Resources

Larry Ewing's "Tux" (the Official Linux Penguin)

http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/

Linux Logo Links at Linux.org

http://www.linux.org/ info /logos.html

OO Extras

http://ooextras. sourceforge .net

Chapter 16. Graphics and Art (Just Call Me Leonardo)

Oddly enough, applications allowing users to work with graphics are among some of the most highly developed in the world. To see the truth in this rather bold statement, turn your eyes to Hollywood. Blockbusters such as Titanic, Star Trek: Nemesis, Shrek, and others use Linux and Linux clusters to create the complex special effects.

In terms of graphical design and photo editing, your Linux system comes with one of the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use packages there is, regardless of what OS you are running. It's called the GIMP , and I'll be introducing you to its features a little later in this chapter.

Then we have digital cameras . In the world of your old OS, you needed special software to work with your particular camera. In the Linux world, you can do it all with a single interface. In fact, if you've come this far in this book, you probably already know almost everything you need to work with your camera.

Finally, I'll cover another of piece of graphical magic making when I show you how to use a scanner with your Linux system, from capturing your old photos to capturing and interpreting text.

Ready? Then smile!

Moving to Linux(c) Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!
Authors: Gagne M.
 Published year: 2005
 Pages: 130-133/181
Buy this book on amazon.com >>

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