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Welcome to the LinuxFocus January/February 2002 issue

This editorial was written on a cold winter evening. A lot of snow outside. It is the time to look back and think about Linux. Linux Weekly News has again published a very nice timeline (lwn.net/2001/features/Timeline). Generally speaking 2001 was the year when the stock market collapsed and of course this has some impact on Linux. However the classic Linux companies are all still there and a lot of projects are not directly commercially funded. Linux will therefore definitely continue to expand.

At a restaurant in Bordeaux, July 2001. From left to right: Guido and Katja Socher (linuxfocus), John Reuning (ibiblio), John Perr (linuxfocus), Guylhem Aznar (linuxdoc), Egon Willighagen (linuxfocus)

Looking back on LinuxFocus we can see that the number of readers are growing faster. The meeting in Bordeaux this year was an important event and a good opportunity to to get to know each other. It was as well a possibility to meet other people involved in Linux documentation and related projects. Those personal contacts helped e.g to improve the LinuxFocus server network. At the same time many languages are still maintained by just one or two persons (Russian, Portuguese,...). Especially translating articles is very hard work and takes time. We all have a lot of respect for the work that individual Linux enthusiasts are doing here. If you are still looking for a project where you can contribute from time to time to Linux then do not hesitate to contact the editor of your language. Proof reading articles is as well still a problematic area and any extra help is very welcome.

Overall we can be very satisfied about the outcome of the ongoing LinuxFocus and Linux activities. We have our daily problems but the public awareness of Linux is really growing and its future will certainly be exciting.
Happy New Year!

UNIX Basics

• Running applications remotely with X11 , by Guido Socher
  
  The Linux X Window System (X11) is much more than just a Window System.

System Administration

• Chrooting All Services in Linux , by Mark Nielsen
  
  Chrooted system services improve security by limiting damage that someone who broke into the system can do.

• Book Review: Linux System Administration - A User's Guide , by Egon Willighagen
  
  The author reviews this book by Marcel Gagné, published by Addison-Wesley Publishing.

Applications

• MySQL and Perl, the marriage of convenience , by Georges Tarbouriech
  
  This article demonstrates how easy it is to access a mysql database from perl.

• Writing CDs with Linux , by Katja and Guido Socher
  
  This article explains several ways to burn CDs under Linux.

• QCAD: Technical drawing with Linux , by André Pascual
  
  QCAD is a simple 2D CAD system. With QCAD you can easily construct and modify technical drawings.

Software Development

• Developing Gnome Application with Python (Part 2) , by Hilaire Fernandes
  
  This article is written for beginners in the area of Gnome and GNU/Linux. The author presents an educational tool to write Gnome GUIs using Python.

The LinuxFocus Tip

How to make images smaller? Our normal experience is that you can always make a picture smaller without loosing quality. This is however an experience from the "analog world". Scaling down a digital image is done by taking away pixels. If you reduce a 600 pixel wide image to 300 then you take away every second pixel.

Fig. 1: original image

Fig. 2: scaled down image

Fig. 3: blured + scaled down

This reduction of pixels makes the things not only smaller but as well very distorted. This can be seen in Fig. 2 which is just half the size (actually 1/4th but discuss this with your math teacher) of Fig. 1. The picture looks that much distorted because some lines that used to be continuous in the original image are occasionally interrupted because pixels are missing. There is a simple but surprising trick. You need to blur the image before scaling it down. In Gimp this is Filters->Blur->Gaussian_blur. Choose blur radius 1. The blur effect makes the pixels a bit wider by putting gray pixels besides the black ones. This reduces of course contrast and quality of the original image but when reducing the size of an image it avoids that some lines are totally interrupted and this improves the quality of the scaled down image.

© 2002 LinuxFocus
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