APC_Australia_Issue_442_June_2017

Linux » OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
MTPaint
Painting software with even more enhancements.
FREE | GITHUB.COM/WJAGUAR
We have another addition
to your collection of
extremely lightweight
productivity applications.
Meet MTPaint, a personal graphic
editor written by Mark Tyler back
in the days of GTK 1 and initially
optimised for decent performance
on machines that are a hundred
times feebler than your smartphone
of today.
We’re not talking about ancient
abandonware, though. MTPaint has
been continuously developed up to
version 3.40 (released in 2011), but
since then, only few development
versions were released. The current
MTPaint 3.50 release of nowadays
brings an impressive number of
enhancements and new features,
and, by the way, it can be safely
compiled against GTK2. So you can now
enjoy scripting console (Image > Script),
support for multiple threads when
rendering images (good for multicore
CPUs), optional gamma correction for
painting, much better text tools,
multiple clone tool improvements, a
new file format (PMM) and a whole lot
more. In the meantime, MTPaint is still
a classic graphic application optimised
for manual drawing and working with
indexed palettes. It requires as little
resources as, say, Microsoft Paint from
early Windows versions, but in return
gives you more advanced tools.
MTPaint supports layers,
transparency, selections, up to 1,000
undo steps and up to 8,000% for
zooming in. And even that is not the
end of MTPaint’s feature-list: how
about exporting your artwork to
ASCII or turning a multi-layered file
into a GIF animation with a few mouse
clicks? Alternatively, you can set your
own custom keyboard shortcuts for
any menu item of the editor, and
become a keyboard ninja of bitmaps.
For many common tasks, MTPaint
is able to replace GIMP as the main
creative tool, so why not give this
mighty little editor a try?
Alexander Tolstoy
LanguageTool
A spelling and grammar checker.
FREE | LANGUAGETOOL.ORG
When switching from Windows to Linux, there is an
abundance of choice of office suites, both open-source and
proprietary. But the story doesn’t end with proper parsing of
DOCX and XLSX files in Linux, because Windows users also
expect the same quality of spell-checking as they are used
to with Microsoft Word, which contains some proprietary
language tools from third parties. LanguageTool is an
extension that implements all the usual capabilities for more
than 20 languages, mostly European.
It comes as an .OXT file for LibreOffice and Apache
OpenOffice and needs to be installed using the standard
extension manager (Tools > Extension Manager) from any
of the suite’s applications. LanguageTool is based on Java 8
and will not work with other office apps in Linux right away.
LanguageTool offers Chrome and Firefox browser plug-ins,
a Google Docs plug-in, a cross-platform standalone desktop
client and finally an online text input field on the project’s
website. When used in an office suite, LanguageTool
supersedes the default spell-checking engine and offers its
own dictionaries together with the grammar check feature.
You can tell it’s working by the blue underlines that emerge
below missed commas, wrong prepositions, duplicate words
and other errors. Of course, it won’t make your text shine as a
professional reviewer could do (Boaster...! — Ed), but at least
you’ll escape the most common mistakes that occur.
Each LanguageTool release brings more grammar rules
and enriches existing dictionaries with new terms and
phrases, and the 3.7 version is no exception. Be sure to
upgrade if you use Writer heavily!
Alexander Tolstoy
NTFS-3G
A safe and reliable filesystem driver.
FREE | BIT.LY/2O3PQ0Q
Even though the market share of Windows is (very) slowly
declining, in the mid-term, we still use various tweaks to
make Linux and Windows’ interoperability easier. NTFS-3G
is a fully open-source tech. The driver enables handling of
NTFS partitions on any non-Windows platform that can work
with user-level filesystems, also known as FUSE ( $ sudo
modprobe fuse ). Along with Linux, the list includes
many other OSes, from macOS to OpenIndiana. The NTFS-
3G bundle includes the basic part for mounting and the
ntfsprogs package for manipulating partitions. You can read,
write, resize NTFS partitions without losing data, and as long
as the driver has been considered to be enterprise-ready for
some time already, using NTFS-3G is quite safe. To mount an
NTFS partition, use the following template:
$ mount –t ntfs3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows
Whereas scanning and fixing possible errors goes like this:
$ ntfsfix /dev/sdbX
Where ‘sdbX’ is the name of your NTFS partition. The new
release features a few enhancements, such as the ability to
mount NTFS volumes in read-only mode in case Windows
had put it into the so-called ‘hibernate’ state, better
extended attributes handling, better UTF16 support and
more. Generally, the driver has extra fixes and performance
fixes that improve writing and reading from an NTFS volume
from Linux or another FUSE-compatible OS.
Version 2017.3.23 is the first major update in nearly a year
so it will be worth the upgrade if you rely upon NTFS filesystem
support under Linux; for instance, having Windows
on a separate partition or need to work with external drives
formatted with NTFS. Alexander Tolstoy
40 www.apcmag.com