"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

I've accumulated a few updates to past articles and reviews, presented here in reverse chronological order. By the way, I appreciate the e-mail I receive from LG readers; keep it coming!

Last month, in the second of two articles about typing tutor programs I included the Tcl source for a program by Satoshi Asami called Keyboard Practicer. It turns out that the version I had didn't include the licensing information, which follows:

/*-
 * Copyright (c) 1991-1998 Satoshi Asami
 * All rights reserved.
 *
 * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 * are met:
 * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
 *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
 *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
 *    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
 *

* THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS
* IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
* LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS
* FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
* AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
* INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
* (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
* OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
* INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY,
* WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING
* NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF
* THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
 */

The updated archive (which doesn't include any changes other than the inclusion of the above license) is available from this FTP site.

A couple of issues ago I wrote about a console keyboard tutor called Typist, which at that time was in Sunsite's /pub/Linux/Incoming directory. I've received e-mail inquiries as to its current location, which isn't obvious. The new location is here.

After a long hiatus, Christian Bolik has released a new version of his featureful file-and-desktop manager TkDesk. I reviewed a much earlier release back in 1996 (LG #8), and in the several releases since then the application has improved and matured. Another factor which has changed since 1996 is the typical desktop machine running TkDesk. The application felt a trifle sluggish on my old, low-memory 486, but on a reasonably recent Pentium-based system TkDesk runs well. Aside from being a versatile and configurable file-manager, TkDesk occupies a sort of middle ground between the typical miscellaneous collection of Linux apps and a full-fledged desktop manager such as KDE or Gnome. Its integration with Netscape and XEmacs is particularly useful, and the button-bar is one of the most configurable and useful I've seen for X-Windows.

TkDesk still won't run with Tcl/Tk 8.0, but now that incrTcl (the C++ object-oriented extension to Tcl) has been updated to work with the newer Tcl/Tk releases, the release of a version of TkDesk which uses these libraries can't be too far off. The new 1.1 release of TkDesk works fine with Tcl7.6/Tk4.2 for the time being. The TkDesk homepage is here.

Two of the most promising new window-managers available for X have been undergoing rapid development lately. Marco Macek's Icewm is getting better with each release, and the recent betas have been including GNOME-specific features. This won't affect those users who aren't using GNOME, as the configure script detects a GNOME installation and disables these features if CNOME isn't installed. Check out the icewm home-page for the latest news.

Brad Hughes has been working hard to squelch bugs and further refine his Blackbox window-manager. He has successfully converted Blackbox so that it uses the GNU autoconf system instead of an Imakefile type of configuration; in other words it now uses a configure script to generate a custom-tailored makefile, which in some cases will make Blackbox easier to compile.

The Blackbox home-page is here.