Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Archive for the 'Linux' Category

October 11th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , ,

After exchanging a few e-mails with the author, I have managed to build Slackware packages for LeoCAD, both 32 and 64-bits versions.LeoCAD is a wonderful piece of software to create your own Lego constructions virtually on your computer - with an unlimited amount of pieces It can import and export LDR (LDraw) files, and [...]

October 6th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , , |

Today I finished the Slackware packages for POV-Ray, the Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a fantastic free tool for creating stunning 3D images.It can be used also for creating beautiful images of your Lego creations. In a future post I might write a small "how-to" with step-by-step instructions, but here is a small example:
As always, the [...]

October 5th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , |

LeoCAD is not so simple as I thought… The 64-bit version compiles after some patching, but it crashes horribly with some basic things.While sorting this out, I built packages for ldglite, a little program to view and edit LDraw files. It can be called from the command line also to create images of your drawings.Here [...]

October 3rd, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , |

I finished building the Slackware packages for LDView 4.1 (Beta 1).
There are just two dependencies:- tinyxml- LDraw_data (the files with all the different Lego parts)
All packages can be downloaded from my site.
As the original meaning of Lego says: Play well!
Next challenge: building LeoCad…

September 29th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , |

I am currently in the process of building some software on Linux for viewing and building Lego projects.The first program I have been successful with is LDView, a very nice tool to visualize LDraw files.I have it working on Slackware 13.0, both 32-bits and 64-bits. It is still a bit of a "hacked" installation, as [...]

July 23rd, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , ,

As explained in my previous post, I needed a flexible way to schedule a small script to run, with variable parameters.
The basic requirements were:

simple to configure (no messing in crontabs)
flexible enough to have different schedules on different weekdays (on Sundays a job should be started at another time than on Mondays, for example)
should offer the [...]

July 23rd, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , , |

This week I needed a solution to block and unblock certain IPs from accessing the internet at certain times.I didn't want to change my firewall script too much and didn't want to change it every time the rules changed (which change a lot due to variable circumstances).
So I created a two-part solution. In this post [...]

May 27th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , ,

As I've been using Linux for over a decade, I am asked a lot of questions about my favorite operating system. I don't consider myself an expert, just an experienced enthusiast
One question that pops up every now and then is about the "ideal" partitioning scheme for Linux.The short answer is that there is [...]

April 18th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , |

In a previous post I wrote something about our little friend Tux, the symbol of Linux.
On most computers running Linux he'll show up while the kernel is starting up the main services, once for every processor in your system. This little picture in compiled into the kernel and, if you have the sources on your [...]

December 7th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , , ,

This weekend I tried to help someone on LinuxQuestions.org who asked about the knetworkconf tool from KDEs Control Center.In Slackware this tool hasn't been working for quite some time, it simply says that our operating system is not supported:
(My KDE is in Portuguese, but you'll get the idea…)
I never bothered about it, as I prefer [...]