Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

This week, an extra DPOTD article will be published on Friday, remember to check it out!

Shameless self-promotion submitted by Erich Schubert. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Enigma is an addictive puzzle game

A re-invention of the discontinued game “Oxyd” available for Atari, Mac and (some versions) DOS, with hundreds of levels and improved graphics.

The game principle of Enigma is simple: uncover pairs of stones as in the “Concentration” (also known as “Memory” or “Pairs”) board game.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Not by far!

You’ll first have to reach these stones. Your actor is a black marble controlled via the mouse - and influenced heavily by physics. Different floors show different friction properties, blocks might need a good bump to move in the intended direction, bouncers, slopes and rubber bands might be pushing or pulling your marble in a different direction than you’d like it to go. Sometimes you have to hit exactly the right angle to make the marble bounce of a block in space right towards your goal.

And then the blocks are hidden in labyrinths, protected by lasers and traps, and all kinds of puzzles you’ll have to solve first before being able to reach them. There are dozens of items you’ll discover and need to find out how to use right to reach the goal.

Enigma levels are very different in nature. Some levels are well-known Sokoban levels (except you’ll have to be careful to not move boxes you didn’t intend to) and similar well known puzzles ported to be controlled with a marble, some are vast labyrinths where you have to carefully balance your marble on a small ledge. Some levels require speed and mouse dexterity, others can only be solved by bright minds. Having to control 10 marbles connected with rubber bands and charged with different magnetic charges at the same time is just one of the challenges you’ll be facing in enigma. Such levels, that blend all these features into a unique mix can best be described as “Enigma”.

Here are some screenshots, you can find more in the homepage.

Enigma is available in Debian since Sarge and in Ubuntu since Warty. Unfortunately, Enigma 1.00 was not released on time to be included with Debian Etch. Enigma 0.92 was in Etch when the freeze was called.

Entry submitted by John Beisley. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Moreutils contains a suite of utilities for command-line users. Written by multiple authors, they are individually quite modest, and perhaps too limited in scope to exist in a package in their own right, but together they form a useful accompaniment to existing command-line tools.

Following are a few examples of the utilities in moreutils, and how they can be used.

Sponge - Soaking file redirects

Many users of the command line have made a mistake such as the following:

$ grep -v someuser /etc/passwd > /etc/passwd

As the shell runs this command it will immediately truncate the destination file, and then run the grep command on it. The end result is an empty file - certainly not what was intended! After learning from their mistake, the user might instead redirect the output to a temporary file, then move the file on top of the original:

$ grep -v someuser /etc/passwd > /etc/passwd.tmp
$ mv /etc/passwd.tmp /etc/passwd

Sponge is a simple, but convenient, command that exists to roll this process up into a single step:

$ grep -v someuser /etc/passwd | sponge /etc/passwd

Sponge ’soaks up’ its standard input, waiting for it to complete before writing to the specified output file. In this way the result is what was intended, and without the need to fiddle with temporary files.

Vipe - Interactively editing pipes

Sometimes it is desirable to put yourself in the middle of a pipe processing chain, where it will be quicker to just edit the pipe content, rather than create complex filters with sed and friends. Maybe the pipe content will be unknown, perhaps a list of files that the user would like to manually filter.

Say that you would like to touch all files in the current directory, but would like to do so selectively, you could do the following:

ls | vipe | xargs -d ‘\n’ touch

In this example a list of files is opened up in your editor (as set by either the EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables), in which you may edit the list of files to be touched at your leisure. When you are satisfied, you can save the file and quit your editor, and vipe will regurgitate the content you edited to its standard-out - touching only the files retained in the editor.

Combine - Boolean/Set operations with text files

Performing set operations with lines in two text files can also be useful. This can be useful in knowing what file names are common to two directories, for example:

Directory foo contains the files:

tom and harry

Directory bar contains the files:

tom and dick

The file lists can be written to two files ready for use with combine with the following bash command:

ls /path/to/foo > foo_list && ls /path/to/bar > bar_list

It can be complicated to find which files are present in both directories, which is where combine really comes into its own:

$ combine foo_list and bar_list
tom

How about files that are in foo, but not in bar?

$ combine foo_list not bar_list
harry

A note of caution, however: while using combine, ‘or’ can be used to find the complete list of files, it has the slightly odd effect of listing files common to both files twice:

$ combine foo_list or bar_list
harry
tom
dick
tom

Obtaining the union of the two lists of file names is therefore best performed with the standard sort command:

$ cat foo_list bar_list | sort -u
dick
harry
tom

Summary

This introduction to moreutils has only touched upon some of the commands that it provides. It is worth experimenting with the others, very briefly described here:

isutf8

Checks if a file consists of valid UTF-8

ts

Reproduces standard input on standard output, with a timestamp prefix - good for annotating non-timestamped log files.

vidir

Enables a user to “edit” a directory with their text editor. That is, to conveniently delete and rename files.

ifdata

Outputs requested information about a specific Linux network interface, without the need to parse ifconfig output.

pee

Acts like tee, but pipes to given commands, instead of standard out and files.

zrun

Automatically recognises compressed files passed to a given command, uncompresses them to a temporary file and passes the uncompressed files in place of the original compressed file arguments.

mispipe

Connects two commands with a pipe, as in command1 | command2, but returns the exit value of the first command, rather than the second.

moreutils has been available in Debian in testing and unstable distributions, and in Ubuntu from Edgy onwards.

Entry submitted by Dave Seff. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

gLabels is a program for creating labels and business cards. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you’ll find at most office supply stores.

This application is a gem of a program for anyone who want to create their own business cards, address labels, CD Labels and covers, and much more. It has an extensive database of label and sticker formats for most major brands of labels such as Avery, Neato, and Memorex. It also has a template creation feature which allows for custom labels and designs. For this example I will explain the basics on how to create a set of business cards.

When you choose new from the file menu, you are presented with a list of various standard label sets. I chose Avery 5871 Business cards as that was what I had purchased from the store.

From here you can start designing. You can place and format text, images, and basic shapes to your liking. Don’t worry about needing to duplicate these to cover the entire sheet of labels. gLabels knows to print the entire sheet as per the template used. Once you are satisfied with your design, just send it to the printer once you have loaded it with the store bought labels.

As you can see the interface is quite simple to use. Editing labels is simple and straight forward. News, updates and support can be found at the gLabels homepage, http://glabels.sourceforge.net/.

gLabels is written for the Gnome desktop environment but just like most Linux applications, it will run under any window manager. KDE has a similar application called kbarcode. The name is misleading however it does provide the same functionality. It does not seem to be as straightforward as gLabels, but it does support batch printing if you are mass producing labels for commercial use.

gLabels has been available in Debian since Sarge, and in Ubuntu since Warty.

This week, an extra DPOTD article will be published on Friday, remember to check it out!

Entry submitted by Bastian Venthur. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Reportbug-NG is an alternative to Debian’s classic reportbug written with the end-user in mind. It has a nice and clean Qt interface allowing you to search for existing bug reports and filter them easy and fast. You can give additional information to existing bug reports or create new ones. In both cases a dialog will ask you for all relevant information (summary, severity, tags, …) and will finally start your favourite mail client, where you only have to fill the gap with your full report and click the “send” button.

A screencast showing Reportbug-NG in action (click on the image for full size):

The major advantages over reportbug are:

• Graphical interface (true desktop application)
• Severity and Status of bugs are associated with colors, so it’s easy to distinguish the different classes.
• Easy and fast filtering of bug reports
• Ability to write you bug reports with your mail client (spellchecker, copy-paste, attachments). The following Clients are currently supported:
• Evolution
• GoogleMail
• Iceape/Mozilla
• Icedove/Thunderbird
• KMail
• Mutt
• Pine
• Sylpheed
• Sylpheed-Claws
• Sylpheed-Claws-Gtk

Note to Ubuntu users: since reportbug-ng submits reports to the Debian BTS, it isn’t useful for reporting bugs in Ubuntu packages.

Reportbug-NG is actively developed and maintained by Bastian Venthur. It is fully functional and currently no major flaws are known. As it’s fairly new, it’s only available in Debian unstable.

Some features I planned for the next versions:

• Porting R-NG from Qt3 to Qt4.
• Include some advanced BTS-features for developers like tagging, reassigning, merging, etc.

Project homepage: http://reportbug-ng.alioth.debian.org/

Entry submitted by Julien Valroff. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

TinyCA aims at helping you in the certification authority (CA) management task. Despite its easy-to-use and somewhat intuitive interface, it provides extended functions for advanced users who want to simplify their life.

Screenshot: CA & certificate list tabs

It works like a front-end for OpenSSL and offers (almost) the same features, amongst which:

• Unlimited CAs: you can work with several CAs, choice is made when opening the main window or from an easily accessible button
• Creation and revocation of x509 - S/MIME certificates
• Import already existing CAs
• Export client and server certificates in PEM, DER, TXT and PKCS#12 formats

Screenshot: create & import CA dialogs

Users already familiar with OpenSSL will be able to work immediately with TinyCA, while the more inexperienced will first have to look for documentation on certificate management elsewhere, as suggested by TinyCA documentation page:

TinyCA reveals particularly useful when you have to manage a bunch of certificates, eg. in the case of an OpenVPN tunnel. In this case, I do only regret TinyCA is not able to generate Diffie-Hellman keys, for which you still need to use OpenSSL from the command line.

TinyCA is available in Debian Sarge in the GTK version, whereas the latest version in Debian testing and unstable is based on the Perl-Gtk2 bindings (this lead upstream developer to call the new generation TinyCA2, whereas the Debian package kept the name tinyca). The package is also available for Ubuntu users in the universe component.

Once the package is installed, do not look for a TinyCA entry in your GNOME or KDE menu, none is provided. Instead, just look in the Debian menu, or simply launch the command in a terminal emulator: tinyca2.

If you end up using TinyCA, remember to keep your ~/.TinyCA directory private, as it contains the private keys for your CA and your certificates! Also do use a secure method for transferring your keys to the machine, eg. ssh.