Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Entry submitted by Amanda Angell. We are in a big need for new editors, able to dedicate time on a regular basis to debaday. See the contribute page for details, and contact us !

digiKam’s website states that it is an “advanced digital photo management application for Linux” which understates the programs abilities. It does everything from auto-detecting your camera, importing the photos, sorting your collection in useful ways, and does some basic - or even creative - photo editing. It is only available for KDE, so Gnome users miss out. It is Integrated into KDE applications using KIPI (KDE Image Plugin Interface), and can drag-and-drop into other KDE programs.

DigikamImagePlugins is an add-on that enhances the basic digiKam Image Editor into a much more powerful tool for playing with pictures. My favorites are the distortion effects, oil paint, and the adjust levels plug-ins. There is a Create Calendar section in digiKam’s Tools menu, which is a lot of fun and the end result can be printed or saved as a PDF.

digiKam uses dcraw 8.41 to decode “more than 200 proprietary camera file formats”, and the Gphoto2 project supports “over 700 digital camera devices”. Cameras using USB, serial connection, and USB/IEEE Mass storage connections are supported.

The camera interface is fast and smooth, with thumbnails to preview the pictures before downloading and, at least with Canon cameras, you have the option to only select new pictures for download.

Photos can be organized by albums, date, saved searches, and a completely customizable tagging system. This makes a big difference when trying to find and organise your photos as opposed to the simple date order of some programs.

Once in the main window, a left click opens the photo in the digiKam Image Editor. Right click for more options, including opening the photo in other editing programs (such as the Gimp). Movie files are opened in your favorite multimedia software.

In comparison, I have been using Gnome’s camera import using gthumb image viewer for 6 months and there are noticeably less camera interface options. It feels a little disjointed and doesn’t have the options of sorting your photos into albums, tags or ratings. In-fact, I feel that digiKam handles my camera better than the original Windows XP software.

Version 0.9.0 is available in Debian (experimental) and Ubuntu.

digiKam won the 2005 TUX Readers’ Choice Award for “Favorite Digital Photo Management Tool”, and for good reason. It is powerful, easy to use, and intuitive.

Entry submitted by Henryk Gerlach. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

A picture says more than a thousand words. Sometimes you have just plain data files and want to produce some nice plot out of them. If this does not happen on a regular basis you might use oocalc, but it is not so easy to automatize this using OpenOffice.org.
That’s were gnuplot comes into play.

Here is a real world example: sar is a utility to monitor the performance of your server (it should be covered here some other day!). A typically sar output for a not so busy server looks like this (in fact the data was sexed up as the average reveals):

Linux 2.6.9-023stab039.1-smp (host.domain.tld)     02/17/07

00:05:01          CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait     %idle
01:35:01          all      0.19      0.00      0.03      0.00     99.78
01:45:01          all      0.35      0.00      0.26      0.04     99.35
01:55:01          all      0.41      0.00      0.66      0.00     98.93
02:05:01          all      0.48      0.00      1.19      0.03     98.31
02:15:01          all      0.13      0.00      5.03      0.01     94.83
02:25:01          all     10.34      0.00     20.46      0.00     69.20
02:35:01          all     40.35      0.00     20.79      0.00     38.86
02:45:01          all     15.32      0.00     10.61      0.01     74.06
02:55:01          all      0.08      0.00      0.17      0.00     99.74
03:05:01          all      0.05      0.00      0.01      0.00     99.94
03:15:01          all      0.01      9.39      0.25      9.90     80.45
03:25:01          all      0.00     14.11      0.30      2.79     82.80
03:35:01          all      1.07      0.00      0.04      0.02     98.87
03:45:01          all      0.00      0.00      0.00      0.00    100.00
03:55:01          all      0.05      0.00      0.01      0.00     99.95
04:05:01          all      0.04      0.00      0.00      0.00     99.96
04:15:01          all      0.05      0.00      0.01      0.00     99.95
04:25:01          all      0.01      0.00      0.01      0.02     99.96
04:35:01          all      0.57      0.00      0.25      0.00     99.18
04:45:01          all      0.00      0.00      0.01      0.00     99.99
04:55:01          all      0.01      0.00      0.00      0.00     99.99
Average:          all      0.14      0.18      0.06      0.20     99.43

by piping the above in through tail +4 | head -n -1 > data.txt into a file we clip of the first three and the last line which would confuse gnuplot.

Let’s start an interactive session of gnuplot by typing gnuplot on the command line. Type the following:

gnuplot> set xdata time
gnuplot> set timefmt "%H:%M:%S"
gnuplot> plot [*:*][0:100] “data.txt” using 1:3 with linespoints title “user”, \\
 > “data.txt” using 1:5 with linespoints title “system”, \\
 > “data.txt” using 1:6 with linespoints title “iowait”

In line 1 we tell gnuplot to interpret the x axis as a time axis.

Line 2 defines the time format of the x-axis (the first column of “data.txt”).

Finally line 3 produces the plot. The [*:*] tells gnuplot to chose the scale on the x-axis, as it seems fit, while [0:100] scales the y-axis between 0 and 100. Then “data.txt” using 1:3 with linespoints title “user”, tells gnuplot to take the first and the third column of “data.txt” and plot it with points connected by lines.

The title “user” produces a legend for the line.

You can use the help plot command to learn more about the many options to format your graph.
If we are happy with the output, we can save it to a “png”-file by changing the terminal

gnuplot> set terminal png

and defining an output-filename:

gnuplot> set output “stats.png”

Okay, this all seems still pretty manual, but here is how we can automatically generate the png-file in some bash script, too:

#!/bin/bash
#... generate data.txt with sar, head and tail.
OUTFILE="stat.png"
gnuplot <<END
set terminal png
set output "$OUTFILE"
set xdata time
set timefmt "%H:%M:%S"
plot [*:*][0:100] “data.txt” using 1:3 with linespoints title “user”, \\
 “data.txt” using 1:5 with linespoints title “system”, \\
 “data.txt” using 1:6 with linespoints title “iowait”
END

But gnuplot can do much more! It can print functions and 3d-data. Check out the tutorials.

Target Users:

Everyone who needs to generate graphs of data or functions, especially in an automated manner.

Tutorials:

• IBM Developerworks: Visualize your data with gnuplot
• gnuplot tips (not so Frequently Asked Questions)

Other packages doing similar things:

• Grace (xmgr) is possibly as old as gnuplot. It has a bigger emphasize on the GUI and a less convenient console. If you prefer to point and click grace might be better for you.
• RLPlot(covered earlier in debaday) comes with a fresh KDE-GUI, is easy to use and might be the right thing for you if you just want to produce a few graphs. But scripting seems hard; maybe it is possible to use the DCOP-interface.
• If gnuplot does not scratch your itch, you might even try to program something yourself using scipy (covered earlier in debaday) or the gnu plotutils (a nice example is piechart)

License:

Although it’s called gnuplot, it is not licensed under the GPL, but some homebrewn License.

You can find gnuplots’s homepage at http://www.gnuplot.info/.

gnuplot is available in both Debian and Ubuntu.

Entry submitted by Jan Hülsbergen. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Gtetrinet is a small multiplayer clone of the classic puzzle-game Tetris implementing the tetrinet protocol. It features some original ideas about how multiplayer-Tetris can be handled and it has an active user community.

Multiplayer enhancements

The most unique thing about gtetrinet is the usage of ‘extras’ or ’special blocks’. Every time a player eliminates a line of his own field, one of the remaining blocks turns into an extra. When a line containing one or more extras is eliminated, those extras go to the inventory of the player, from where he/she can use them to harm other players or to aid himself. There are numerous extras which do everything from just eliminating or adding a single line to switching playing fields with an opponent of choice.

Also, the servers offer different ‘channels’, which have slightly different game-modes. For example, the tetrinet.de server has a #maps channel, in which the players do not start with an empty field but with some blocks/extras already there. Also, there is a #pure channel, in which the player can play a more classical multiplayer Tetris, without any extras at all.

User community

You don’t have to search for others to play against you, you can just connect to one of the public servers, for example tetrinet.org or tetrinet.de, which - as far as I can tell - has active players at any given time of day. And I have checked this for years now. ;-)

Servers

I already mentioned the public available tetrinet servers but there are more. You can also run your own server, using for example the package tetrinetx, which provides a nice tetrinet server implementation. There is also a package tetrinet-server, but it’s more primitive.

Also, there is a tetrinet-client package, which features a textmode client for the game.

Screenschots (click to get a larger image)

The Partyline

Ingame

Entry submitted by Thijs Kinkhorst. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

signing-party is a package combining a set of tools used in managing OpenPGP / GnuPG cryptographic keys. The most important tools in this package are used in preparing for or processing the results of gatherings to exchange key signatures, hence the name “signing-party”. If you are coming to FOSDEM next week-end, you should definitely have a look at it!

The two tools most interesting for the average user are gpg-key2ps and caff.

gpg-key2ps is used before attending a signing party. The script takes your public key and creates PostScript (PS) output that has your key fingerprint and userid’s nicely formatted on paper slips. The only thing left for you to do is to cut the paper.

When you arrive home after the signing event, you need a way to process all these paper slips. That’s where caff comes in. Give it a list of key-ID’s, and it will cycle through them, present you with the key’s fingerprint and asks you to confirm that it matches the paper you got.

The most important part about the signing process is that you verified the key owner’s real identity. However, caff adds additional security to that: it encrypts your signature on their key with their own key, and then mails it to them. It mails the signature for a specific user ID to the emailaddress on that user ID. This brings additional security: before the recipient can add your signature to their key, they must decrypt it with their private key, proving that they indeed have access to the key they claimed to be theirs. By mailing to the email addresses on the key user ID’s, it is also verified that the key owner can indeed read that address. All this you get for free - caff stands for “CA fire and forget”: you confirm that fingerprints match, and caff handles the rest.

Target Users:

• Anyone signing OpenPGP keys.

Further reading:

• Keysigning explained targetted specifically at Debian
• How not to look lost at a key-signing by Steve Kowalik
• Wikipedia on PGP
• The GNU privacy handbook, a complete manual to GnuPG.

The signing-party package is available in both Debian and Ubuntu. The caff tool is only available in Debian Etch and up, or in the package from backports.org.

Debian Package of the Day has now been alive again for more than two months. While it has been running quite well until know, we are concerned about the future, since we don’t have any article ready currently, and haven’t received a lot of contributions recently.

We really need *you* to submit articles about the packages you use. If you read Debaday, and haven’t submitted an article yet, you should really feel guilty now. :-) There are still tons of packages one could write about ! You can write about everything: games, sysadmin tools, cool end-user stuff, etc. Please read the Contribute page for more info. We are considering a switch from “two packages per week” to “one package per week” if we don’t receive more submissions soon.

Also, it would be great if we could recruit one or two other “editors”. The job is interesting (the goal is to answer submissions, providing ideas for improvements, and to adjust the last details), and you get to read all the articles in advance. You don’t need to be a native english speaker. Contact us if you are interested.