Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

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

When working at my PC, I often forget that I need to do something, say, in ten minutes. Therefore, I need an easy way to set up a reminder and be prodded when the time elapses. timer-applet is a small applet for the GNOME panel that does this.

The applet takes the form of a small button sitting on the panel. When you click it, the timer setup dialog box appears.

You may just enter the time after which you want to be reminded and click “Start Timer”. You can also set a name for the timer; it will be shown to you when the timer finishes, so you don’t have to painfully recall what you are to do. If your needs are more complex, you can set up multiple timer presets.

After you click “Start Timer”, the countdown begins. The panel button shows the time remaining. Clicking the button will pause the timer; clicking it again will allow you to continue the countdown or start it over.

Once the chosen time period elapses, the applet notifies you with a bubble, and the button begins to flash.

timer-applet is actively maintained and has a web site. It has been available in Debian since etch and in Ubuntu since dapper. Ubuntu gutsy features the 2.0 version of timer-applet which has a slightly better user interface.

The obvious downside of timer-applet is that it is only useful in GNOME environments. KDE users might want to check out the package kalarm (from KDE’s PIM suite). Also, the packages teatime and kteatime may be useful if you specifically need a tea timer.

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.