How do you pronounce mingw?

There are some things in life that are important. This is not one of them. But this is something you could argue with your co-workers about for days on end.

By the way, is anyone hiring?

A cat using a Linux notebook

I put way too much work into this not to share it:

An adorable cat on a great operating system.

This is how it started:

An adorable cat with bad taste. (via)

After some color correction (which I am not very good at), I began to replace the Apple logo with Tux the Penguin:

Vectorized Tux. (via)

He doesn’t glow very well, but Inverted Tux should!

Inverted Vectorized Tux!

I added Inveted Tux as a layer to my cat image and placed a solid black layer below. Then I skewed the two layers together to approximate the correct perspective:

Photoshop trickery.

Finally, I removed the solid black layer and blurred Tux a little bit.

LXDE/Openbox keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that lately I’ve taken an interest in Unixy things. That’s right. Unixy is a word.

I’ve tried Ubuntu a few times but was never very happy with the performance. When I learned that Lubuntu can run the same packages as Ubuntu but is faster, I had to try it out. The difference in performance is noticeable. I’ve been running Lubuntu alongside my Windows 7 install for a week or so now and come to prefer it.

As it turns out, the difference in performance is mostly due to the LXDE desktop environment that comes bundled with the Lubuntu desktop installation. The slowness I experienced with Ubuntu was mostly due to the Unity desktop environment. (I had the same problem with GNOME on Ubuntu, although I liked its UI better than Unity’s.) I think this means that any ‘buntu distribution will be more responsive using LXDE instead of Unity.

I can’t function very well without keyboard shortcuts, and I can’t find a cheat sheet anywhere, so here’s one for you (but mostly for me). Some of these shortcuts are specific to LXDE while others are specific to Openbox – the window manager that comes with LXDE. You can modify any of them by going to ~/.config/openbox/ and opening the file ending with rc.xml. (See this page of the Openbox wiki for details.)

Note: The “super” key is usually bound to the Windows key on keyboards which have one.

Default LXDE/Openbox bindings

Action	Binding
Go to desktop (direction)	ctrl + alt + arrow
Go to desktop (number)	super + f1/f2/f3/f4
Send to desktop	shift + alt + arrow
Toggle show desktop	super + d
Close window	alt + f4
Hide window	alt + esc
Window menu	alt + space
Next window	alt + tab
Previous window	alt + shift + tab
Go to window (direction)	super + shift + arrow
Toggle fullscreen	f11

LXDE specific bindings

Action	Binding	Alt. binding
Window list (sticky)	ctrl + alt + tab
PCMan File Manager	super + e	ctrl + alt + d
LXPanel Run	super + r	alt + f2
LXPanel Menu	alt + f1	ctrl + esc
LXTask (task manager)	ctrl + alt + del
Open terminal	ctrl + alt + t
Lock screen	ctrl + alt + l

Lubuntu specific bindings

Action	Binding
Take a screenshot	alt + print screen

I’m not sure about all of these, so let me know if I missed any or put them in the wrong places.