...making Linux just a little more fun!

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# The Front Page

By Heather Stern

Shadowman is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc.. We don't know what stormy thoughts he truly has of the other - "red sky at morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight", perhaps.

centOS plugs itself as the Community Enterprise OS, and intends to be and remain binary compatible with... ummm, a Certain North American Software Company.

No relation at all to the Taiwanese company CENTOS which makes internal and Cardbus peripherals. I didn't know you could get SATA support in pc-card form... yummy!

The "penny" I've offered for these thoughts is drawn by Heather Stern using the Gimp, based on a photo of a real penny, a monitor from the NeXTstep family of icons, the text circle script-fu, beveling tricks, some gradient and alphamasking tweaks, and the word portion of the centOS logo stretched and mangled by Curve Bend (found under Filter/Distorts) with some correction of its outer edges by the perspective tool.

My friend silentk online (Pete Savage) provided the photographs of UK cloudscapes. If you have need for photos for open source projects, he has been taking photos for a couple of years now and has a considerable collection. He can be mailed at pete at progbox dot co.uk to make requests.

Tux is drawn by Larry Ewing using the GIMP.

Heather is Linux Gazette's Technical Editor and The Answer Gang's Editor Gal.

Heather got started in computing before she quite got started learning English. By 8 she was a happy programmer, by 15 the system administrator for the home... Dad had finally broken down and gotten one of those personal computers, only to find it needed regular care and feeding like any other pet. Except it wasn't a Pet: it was one of those brands we find most everywhere today...

Heather is a hardware agnostic, but has spent more hours as a tech in Windows related tech support than most people have spent with their computers. (Got the pin, got the Jacket, got about a zillion T-shirts.) When she discovered Linux in 1993, it wasn't long before the home systems ran Linux regardless of what was in use at work.

By 1995 she was training others in using Linux - and in charge of all the "strange systems" at a (then) 90 million dollar company. Moving onwards, it's safe to say, Linux has been an excellent companion and breadwinner... She took over the HTML editing for "The Answer Guy" in issue 28, and has been slowly improving the preprocessing scripts she uses ever since.

Here's an autobiographical filksong she wrote called The Programmer's Daughter.

Copyright © 2005, Heather Stern. Released under the Open Publication license unless otherwise noted in the body of the article. Linux Gazette is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by its prior host, SSC, Inc.

Published in Issue 116 of Linux Gazette, July 2005

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