Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Article submitted by Vincent Fourmond. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!

Torus-trooper is a pretty nice abstract shoot-’em-up taking place in what could be called a space tunnel. You drive some kind of ship or car who has to stay on the sides of the tunnel, and shoot bad enemies. This game is pretty neat and original in several ways:

• You don’t have lives or energy. Rather, you have a limited amount of time to spend in the tunnel. Every time you kill some (big) enemies, you may gain 15, 30 or 45 seconds. Every time you get shot, you loose 15 seconds.
• In addition to shooting, you can build up a kind of charge by pressing the x key. When you release that charge, it runs in front of you, destroying enemy ships and absorbing enemy shots - the latter adding significant amount to your score. One thing though: building the charge slows you down considerably.
• It is pretty fast-paced, rather faster than anything else I’ve seen, and quite neatly designed.
• I like the idea of the tunnel!

When you start the game, you can ask for full screen mode (which makes you feel more “into” the game) with the -fullscreen option. After that, you get a menu where you choose the level and start playing with the fire key. You can also see your last game re-played with the alt key.

Once in the game, you need few keys: arrows, or wasd for movement and acceleration; z for normal firing and x for charge shooting. esc will take you out of the game and p will pause it, as expected.

Some screen shots

Torus-trooper is available in Debian testing, but it still hasn’t made its way into Ubuntu.

Article submitted by Onkar Shinde. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!

Thoggen is a GTK+ based DVD ripper with very simple user interface. The name is based on the fact that it outputs the video to Theora/Ogg format.

Thoggen uses GStreamer 0.10 for video encoding. Although currently it supports only Theora/Vorbis/Ogg output, more formats can be expected in the future.

The good:

• Very simple user interface.
• Supports cropping, setting resolution of output, choosing output quality or size. You can also add title and comment meta data to the output file.
• Outputs to Theora/Vorbis/Ogg which truly Frees your video.
• Can be used with DVD as well as with a directory containing DVD files.

The bad:

• Currently it only supports single audio track.
• There is no support for subtitles. The workaround is to rip subtitles manually with help of programs like subtitleripper. According to an informal conversation on IRC, support for multiple audio tracks as well as subtitles is in development.

The ugly:

• Theora encoding is usually slower than other video formats.

Screenshots

Following are the screenshots of an example ripping workflow.

Title selection dialog

Encoding options

Encoding window

The package is available in Debian since Etch and in Ubuntu since Dapper. The upstream development is a bit slow but many features are planned for future releases.

Article submitted by Alexey Beshenov. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!

Cowsay is a useless but very fun text filter written in Perl. If you send some text into cowsay, you get an ASCII cow saying your text. For example, cowsay Hello, World! prints

 _______________
< Hello, World! >
 ---------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

To get a thinking cow, run cowthink:

$ cowthink Hello, World!
 _______________
( Hello, World! )
 ---------------
        o   ^__^
         o  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Program word-wraps long messages unless the -n switch is used. The -W specifies where the message should be wrapped (default is wrapping at or before the 40^th column). Everything left over after command-line switches is treated as the cow’s message. Another way is to send text to cowsay’s standard input. Pipe boring or annoying things to speaking / thinking cow and have fun:

$ uptime | cowthink -d
 _____________________________________
(  19:16:39 up 4 days, 22:50, 1 user, )
( load average: 2.21, 1.74, 1.42      )
 -------------------------------------
        o   ^__^
         o  (xx)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             U  ||----w |
                ||     ||

-d is a switch for a dead cow. Other fun switches for cow are

• -b Borg mode
• -g greedy mode
• -p paranoia mode
• -s stoned mode
• -t tired mode
• -w wired mode
• -y youthful mode

The -e selects the appearance of the cow’s eyes (default is -e oo). The tongue is configurable through -T (default is no tongue).

You can also use other ASCII characters. Cowsay comes with a large set of “cowfiles” (actually, a pieces of Perl code) in /usr/share/cowsay/cows. Invoke cowsay with the -l switch to list them:

apt, beavis.zen, bong, bud-frogs, bunny, cheese, cower, daemon, default, dragon, dragon-and-cow, elephant, elephant-in-snake, eyes, flaming-sheep, ghostbusters, head-in, hellokitty, kiss, kitty, koala, kosh, luke-koala, mech-and-cow, meow, milk, moofasa, moose, mutilated, ren, satanic, sheep, skeleton, small, sodomized, sodomized-sheep, stegosaurus, stimpy, supermilker, surgery, telebears, three-eyes, turkey, turtle, tux, udder, vader, vader-koala, www.

The -f option specifies a particular cowfile (note that -bdgpstwy modes may not work with some characters as well as -T and -e switches):

$ cowsay -f moose Hi!
 _____
< Hi! >
 -----
  \
   \   \_\_    _/_/
    \      \__/
           (oo)\_______
           (__)\       )\/\
               ||----w |
               ||     ||

Cowsay is written by Tony Monroe. The current stable branch is 3.xx, but Cowsay 4 is also available for testing from the official webpage. Cowsay packages can be found in Debian from Oldstable to Unstable and Experimental, and in Ubuntu Dapper, Edgy, Feisty, Gutsy. Of course, the program depends on Perl.

Article submitted by Ken Muir. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!

So often we hear that Linux is lacking in key applications, but if there is one area in which there is a strong replacement for a key Windows application, it is flowcharting.

Kivio is part of the KDE Office Suite that offers basic flowcharting abilities, but with a twist. Objects are scriptable, and a back end plug-in system offers the ability to make objects do just about anything. The scriptable stencils use Python and there is also support for Dia stencils.

Despite the fact Kivio is a KDE-based application, it runs perfectly in the Gnome environment, although if you haven’t any other KDE applications installed, there are quite a few libraries and other essential KDE elements which have to be added to your system. Installation is completely straight forward and on first startup (Diag. 1), you are presented with the option of starting with an empty document or with the basic flowcharting stencil loaded.

Besides the basic flowchart stencils, there are collections of Dia shapes, geographic collections including maps and flags, hardware collections as well as entity relationship and UML collections. The desktop itself is a powerful working environment (Diag. 2), with palettes providing for an easy overview of your diagram as well as the management of layers, objects, geometry and protection. Alignment is easily managed with both manual and automatic guides. There is an extensive range of arrowheads available for connectors. Another powerful feature of the program is the ability to export pages in a large variety of formats, including PNG Image (.png), JPEG Image (.jpg), BMP Image (.bmp), Encapsulated Postscript Image (.eps), Portable Bitmap (.pbm), PCX Image (.pcx), Portable Pixmap Image (.ppm), SGI Image (RGB) (.rgb), X PixMap Image (.xpm), JPEG 2000 Image (.jp2), Krita Document (.kra), Adobe Illustrator Document (.ai), TIFF Image (.tiff), ILM EXR Image (.exr), Karbon14 Document (.karbon), GIMP Native Image Format (.xcf), Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg) and Windows® MetaFile (.wmf).

A freestanding text tool allows for easy documentation of diagrams. Kivio is very straight forward to use and you can quickly produce serviceable diagrams with very little effort. All the basic tools are intuitive to use and for power users there is an awful lot of sophistication below the hood.

Kivio is available for Debian Sarge, Etch, Lenny and Sid and for Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy.
There is further information on Kivio at http://www.koffice.org/kivio/.
You can find an excellent handbook by Ben Lamb at http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/koffice/kivio/index.html and a PDF version at http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/koffice/kivio/kivio.pdf.
Current maintainer is Peter Simonsonn and the program is distributed under GPL version 2.

Article submitted by James Cameron. Please help DPOTD by submitting good articles about software you like!

If you’ve been reading debaday for a while, chances are you now have a heap of packages installed that you’ve tried out, some of which you want to keep installed, and some of which you have forgotten.

Those forgotten packages can cost you. They might contain setuid binaries or running daemons that could compromise your security. Future upgrades take longer, and there will be more to download. Your backups have grown. You are doing backups, right? That’s what duplicity was for.

If you’ve been using aptitude to install packages, then the autoclean command will remove a few things you don’t want.

An example using deborphan on a Debian Etch system:

# deborphan
libssl0.9.7
libstdc++5

In this example, deborphan discovered two fairly small packages that were superfluous, and so they can be removed. Since deborphan gives you only package names in this mode, they can be used in a command:

# aptitude purge `deborphan`

Or if you are in the habit of working at a level below aptitude:

# dpkg --purge `deborphan`

Recursive Deborphan

What you remove may reveal something else as newly orphaned. You
might even want to do this recursively:

#!/bin/sh
while [ -n "`deborphan`" ]; do
    deborphan
    echo
    aptitude purge `deborphan`
done

You might call that a deborphan-recursive script.

Not Just Libraries

Deborphan gives you a list of packages installed on your system that no other package depends on. By default this will only show library packages. But it can also be told to give you a list of all such packages using the -a flag … consider this compound command:

# dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package}\n' \
`deborphan -a | awk '{print $2}'` | sort -rn

You might name this deborphan-by-size. What it does is give you a sorted list of packages that nothing depends on, in descending order by package size. Work down from the top, choosing what you do not want installed. But remember that every time you remove a package, the list might change because the removed package might have dependencies that are now orphaned.

What’s the worst that could happen? You might remove some package that you will have to reinstall and reconfigure. You have backups. [If you have installed any applications without using the Debian packaging system, it's a different story. You will have to manually make sure that the packages deborphan removes are not required for them to operate. Ed.]

Or how about a small system where you have removed as much as possible so that you have the most space available for your own stuff? Deborphan can be used step by step to challenge you to remove packages you don’t really need. Eventually dpkg, apt-get, or aptitude will warn you about removing a package it considers essential. That’s where you stop, unless you really want some trouble.

Sometimes library packages are installed just to satisfy some dependency of a package in development. Developers will find deborphan’s decisions cause them to reinstall packages they need for software development … an answer to that is to either create a metapackage that refers to the packages you need, or to do your package building in a pbuilder.

Deborphan is available in Debian and Ubuntu since before time began.