Hi, I'm Mo, and I'm here to tell you about 5 fun things in Fedora 12. 1 CHEESE Cheese is a fun tool that lets you play around with your webcam. You can take photos, you can take multiple photos in a burst, or you can take movies with it. You can also apply special effects. So, for example - you can turn yourself into the Hulk. Or, you can trip out! There's a lot of different effects, and you can combine them all at the same time. ...which sometimes results in kind of an interesting picture. But, you get the idea. And every time you take a photo - let me reset this to normal - every time you take a photo it ends up in a little bar along the bottom. There it is. And all your photos are also stored in your home directory, in the Pictures > Webcam directory. So, there's always there, and you don't even have to open up Cheese to access them. You can right-click and open them right away, or you can edit them up in the Gimp. 2 MANA WORLD So, we're talking about fun things in Fedora. This is one thing that really surprised me. This is a completely free & open source multiplayer online role playing game called ManaWorld. All the artwork, all the whole game, is open source which I think is really awesome. It comes right in Fedora. Here's my little character - I haven't really done very well for myself because I haven't been playing very long, but thisis such a cool game. You can walk around... I'm only a little person in this game so far. I don't have a lot of money so I haven't been able to really dress up my character and customize her yet. But as you play through the game, you'll meet different people and there's different monsters you'll kill to make money. Then, based on how much money you make you can buy different things. Right now I can only kill these little maggot guys. When you kill them you get maggot slime and you can sell that for gold coins that you can then use to buy cool stuff. I still have a long way to go in this game, but I'm just fascinated that it's an online role-playing game that's completely open source. 3 MIRO So, in Fedora we have this program called Miro. It's a program that will help you organize both video and audio podcasts - or video vodcasts. It's a really nice way to organize your shows - it has a little sidebar here where you can see here's all my videos - my library that I've downloaded. You can see I'm trying to learn Blender, so I have a lot of video training for Blender. But these videos are all free, which is great. Here, if you wanted to use the Gimp and you wanted to learn more about the Gimp - there's this show called Meet the Gimp. I've been watching that a lot lately. There's some really cool stuff in it. I believe Miro uses bittorrent to download these when available. You can also, if you know the URL of a video file, you can download it directly using Miro as well and it'll add it to your Miro library so it's really easy to watch. It also lets you see sites - I can watch the Daily Show right in Miro. It adds the page so I can just click on it right away. 4 TABLET SUPPORT Tablet support is better than ever in Fedora 12. Whether you have a built-in tablet in your monitor the way I have with my Thinkpad x61 here, or if you have an external USB tablet such as a Wacom tablet - you'll have a seamless experience from install to usage. I installed Fedora 12 fresh on this machine and I didn't have to check off any extra things, I didn't have to do any additional configuration, and I have pressure-sensitive tablet support right out-of-the-box. So, I wanted to show you a few cool tools we have in Fedora 12 that work great with your tablet and will make it more enjoyable to use. CELL WRITER Here, I'm just opening up a run-of-the-mill text editor called Gedit. I'm also going up to the system tray up here and I'm opening Cell Writer. Now Cell Writer is a handwriting recognition application. So, you can see, I've just written Fedora. As I write in my handwriting, it recognizes the characters I'm writing and converts them to text. And then if I hit enter here, then they end up in my document. Now obviously this is not the manner in which you're going to want to write your opus or the next War and Peace. At the same time, it's very handy if you have your tablet flipped out so you don't have the keyboard and you need to write something quick. For example, when I'm using the tablet for digital painting, and I want to save my work, I don't want to have to flip open my keyboard to write the file name I want to save it as. This is great for writing little chunks like that. XOURNAL Here's another great tool for you tablet users in Fedora 12. It's called Xournal - I think I'm pronouncing it right - either case it's a great little tool to take handwritten notes. I've got the pencil tool, and it has a little highlighter tool. And you can change colors if you like - pink is definitely my favorite. It even has a little shape recognizer - it can be a little picky though - oh I had it turned off. You see how it recognizes the shape I'm drawing and it turns it into a perfect shape - for the most part. And it's really nice to be able to take notes and not have to whip out your keyboard. I find it very useful when I'm taking usability test notes. And what happens is after you take a page of notes, you can go up here and start a new page of fresh notes - as many pages as you need - and then you can save them out as a PDF file - they're really easy to share with people. You're going to go to File > Export PDF. It makes your notes very portable, you can print them out, it's wonderful. Another thing you can do - and I love this. This is a copy of Pride & Prejudice from Project Gutenberg. Say you're reading a book and you want to highlight passages - write notes in the margin. And then you can save a copy of the book with your notes on it, but you can also maintain the clean copy as well in case you need it. So you can print out your notes right in context - it's great. Another way that Xournal is a great application to use - if you have to fill out forms and sign them. Like, when I was doing a mortgage pre-approval - that was one thing that came in handy. My real estate agent sent me a form, and all I had to do was sign it and save it out and it worked very conveniently. Normally you have to print it out on paper, sign it with pen, scan it back in, convert it to PDF, and then email it. By the time you're done with that, you've wasted 20 minutes to half an hour. So, Xournal is a great little tool to work with your tablet. GIMP Now I'd like to show you how Fedora 12 will help you express your artistic urges using your tablet. So here I have an application called Gimp opened up. This is pretty much the open source premiere bitmap graphics editor and it's also great for doing paint jobs - digital painting, icon art, things like that. Here I have selected the brush tool and I have a bunch of brushes here. Some of these I installed from various places online. Actually a great feature in Gimp is that you can install Photoshop brushes in Gimp, so you don't need to find Gimp-specific brushes. ---- But there's Gimp specific brushes out there too. These are different charcoal brushes, plain brushes, more artsy brushes. And then, here you have controls, you can change the opacity of the brush, the scale of the brush makes it bigger or smaller. There's a cool set of things here called brush dynamics. These are based on properties of your tablet. For example - the pressure sensitivity of your tablet. So, since I have opacity checked off, that means the more forcefully I put the pen on the screen, the darker it's going to come out. And the lighter that I draw, the lighter it will come out. So you can see here - I'm going very light, then I'm pressing harder and you can see it get much darker. Very, very cool. You can also do some cool things here - you can change it so the size of the brush changes - and this is a very thin brush but you can kind of see it. Where it's very slim and I press down and it gets thicker. So this is just a cool little bag of tricks that you can play around with in the Gimp and it's all sensitive to the tablet so - cool stuff, right? MY PAINT This is a very natural-feeling kind of painting program. I'm using the ink one - you can see how fluid that pen mark comes out. Some of these - this is like blades of grass. you can change the colors here. Some of these are kind of trippy - look at this one. But there's many, many brushes in my paint to experiement with. There's a lot of cool effects you can do with them. I can show you a picture I did earlier today actually with My Paint. Here it is. So you can do some pretty cool things with My Paint. You know it's not a fully-featured drawing program. It doesn't have layers, the undo is very linear, and it really just saves to PNG so you can't do special effects and expect to be able to tweak them later. But it's a pretty cool application. So that's my paint. Next I am going to show you inkscape, which is my favorite application of all time. INKSCAPE So, here's inkscape. I'm going to change this to landscape. Here we go. So in Inkscape when I'm using my tablet, I use the calligraphy tool. This is how you get the pressure sensitivty working - this one is for tilt, this is pressure sensitivty, and this changes the width of your line. So, you can see here with the velocity alone it changes the width. If I go a little bit slower, you see I'm just pushing down very hard - so hard my screen is getting pushed back. I'm pushing very hard and I'm getting a very thick line. Then I'm easing up and it's getting very thin. So. Inksacpe is great because it has layers. Everything you draw is vector so then if you decide you want to scale up one of your drawings, you can do that and it's completely lossless. You don't lose any fidelity of the line or anything. It also has things like simplifying the line - it's cutting down the number of points in the vectors. Then you get to a specific point - this guy looks like a penguin, actually. So that's the tablet in Inkscape. Also, actually, Inkscape has these really cool preset pen effects. Here's the wiggle pen. Here's the thin pen - that's one I made myself. It has very slow drawing, so when I'm doing very careful tracing, you can see it moves so slowly it's a lot harder for me to make mistakes that way. This is splotchy. It's very - splotchy. And that's Inkscape. 5 - AGAVE Here's one more fun tool in Fedora 12 I think you might get some enjoyment out of. It's called agave. It helps you pick out color schemes. Say you're trying to design a website, and you like the color red. But you're not sure what other colors to pick to go with it. It will pick out color schemes for you based on different mathematical representations of color relationships. This one is based on triads - this one tetrads, analogous color scheme, monochromatic, split-complements, complements... They give you all the color codes in hex, RGB, and HSV. You can also pick out random colors. Agave is great. Also, you can save color schemes to your favorites. You can hit random, say oh I like that one, and add it there. So there you go. --- I hope you've enjoyed all these things I've shown you in Fedora 12. If you'd like to get your own copy of Fedora 12, go to get.fedoraproject.org and you'll be able to try out all the things I showed you. Have fun!