The Front Page

By Heather Stern

XTeddy's Summer Vacation

I've used xzoom, but if xzoom worked like they tell it in the movies, you might see something like this in our little plushy's photo collection.

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Xteddy - a Gund "Tender Teddy" - was born in 1983, fell in love with Stegu's monitor in the 90's sometime, and since 1998 or so has been faithfully using Unix, though he has been seen on a Windows system now and then and even with a Macintosh once in a while. Lately he has been hanging out a lot in #fvwm on freenode, baking cookies, memorizing people's screenshots so as to be helpful, and indulging in a mocha now and then. The regulars there call him a little hug daemon - a ready source of hugs for all processes. Our Weekend Mechanic is one of his biggest fans.

Our regular readers may recall that Xteddy featured in our second cover art picture over a year ago (back in issue 111), but his good pal bear stood in for him.

This image was inspired by some chance comments from some real off-the-wall people on freenode - while it's pouring rain and snowing in my hills here in "sunny" California, they're enjoying a summer heat wave. Xteddy had this great idea for a summer vacation, and Tux brought his surfboard...

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Tux has been Linux's mascot since shortly after the release of the 2.0 kernel. He's been known to be quite the fellow for the lady penguins, and A Brief History Of Tux - So Far will surely tell you more than you needed to know about this dashing fellow. All too often, it's a working vacation for him, but he's considering a hiking trip - hmmm, looks like some of the LBW folk are getting together for Easter, better join their mailing list - or a cruise sometime this Summer.

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The beautiful beach shown in this image is Australia's Bells Beach. This image is from Owen Cliffe's summer vacation photos (I hope he doesn't mind) and a delightful little surfing image I found over at YoLinux.

YoLinux.com appears to be a tasty resource of material, in addition to having great cartoon art of Tux. Tux surfing came from their (come on, you can almost guess this without me telling you) Mozilla / Firefox Configuration for Web Surfing with Linux.

Whether Summer's just a short way ahead for you, or you're catching a few more waves before heading into autumn, here's to making Linux just a little more fun. Surf's up!

Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

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

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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.