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Techno Page

by Harendra Alwis

Flash Lesson 1

Now select the Pencil tool. (Note: All the tools are identified by icons. If you're ever puzzled by a particular icon, place your cursor over the tool in question for a second and a tool tip will pop up and identify it for you.) 

In the bottom half of the Toolbar palette, you'll find four graphic buttons. These are the tool modifiers. 

They are contextual, so they change according to what tool you've selected from above. The first button affects the shapes you draw with the pencil, and the others are for colour, line size, and line quality. 

With the pencil tool still selected, select the Straighten option. If you are capable of drawing a perfectly straight line, you can skip this tool — and you might consider alerting Guinness. The rest of us will need this modifier to help in the drawing of three connecting lines to form a triangle. Pretty good, eh? 

If you're accustomed to using a program like Illustrator or Freehand, you may be familiar to the pen tool, new to Flash 5. This is an alternative way of drawing shapes in Flash. 

There are two arrow tools. They are used to select objects and modify them. The hollow arrow (Sub selection tool) is for selecting or modifying points on an object. Once you have selected a shape with an arrow tool, you can straighten or smooth it by clicking on one of the icons under Options on the tool panel. Or you can choose Optimize... under the Modify menu. You can access these arrow tools even if another tool is selected by clicking with the command key (on Macintosh) or control key (on Windows). 

Next, select this Paint Bucket icon. Pick your favorite Web-safe colour from the tool modifier below and click anywhere inside the triangle. See the pretty, colourful triangle? If your triangle won't fill, it's possible that there's a gap at one corner. No problem — just select "Close Large Gaps" under the Options section on the tool panel. 

Double-click on one of the segments. You've now selected the entire outline of the triangle. Hit the Delete key, and the outline will disappear, leaving you with a pure, triangular shape. 

Try clicking your mouse on any edge of the triangle and then dragging it. This allows you to reshape the object. Select the Paintbrush tool and, using the same colour as the triangle, paint along the triangle. Select the triangle with the arrow tool. You'll notice that now everything has merged into one image. Choose the eraser and try the same thing. If you don't want to merge the paintbrush stroke with the triangle, you should create a new layer first. But again, we'll cover this later. 

Select Edit and Undo a few times to revert to the original triangle shape. Remember, the number of undo's available is defined under Preferences. 

Wait! Are you sure that's really your favorite colour? Changing colours is no problem. With the triangle selected, go to the Mixer or Swatches panel and select a different fill colour or gradient. You can also use the fill colour tool under the "Colours" area on the tool panel; or just "pour" another colour into it with the Paint bucket tool. 

Now save your movie. Next week, we'll make that triangle move around. So while you wait, let me tell you that Flash 5 (the program) has a pretty good tutorial in it, that you may want to skim through. This will help a lot if you want to learn the basics.

Preparing your HD for Linux

If you are a seasoned Linux or UNIX user do not read this. Others read the whole thing before you try anything.

You can't install Linux on your existing partitions because all of the Space is devoted to Windows (I hope). You have to make free space before installing Linux. Power Quest Partition Magic lets you to resize an existing partition without a data loss.

Let's assume you have 1GB of free space. Don't create any Linux partitions with Partition Magic. Disk partitioning programs that come under Linux are very good at it.

Now we are going to boot from the Linux installation CD. Most PCs these days let you to boot directly boot from a bootable CD. After you see the welcome message press the relevant key that takes you to the installation program. You will see some messages scrolling. This is the Linux Kernel probing for hardware on your system. Then press Ctrl+Alt+F2. This brings one of the virtual consoles. Activate it. This is done already in some distributions and some say "Press Enter to activate this Console". If you can see a '#' sign that means it's already active and waiting for input.

Now we are going to create Linux partitions from the free space you created above.

Type cfdisk and press enter. This is a user friendly partitioning Program in Linux. You will see your existing MS Windows partitions (If you are installing Linux with a pre installed Windows) and the free space you created. There is another program called fdisk but do yourself a favour and use cfdisk.

Now we are going to create a 100Mb swap partition, a 15Mb boot partition (where Linux kernel lies) and the existing space to a root partition. According to my example this would be 885Mb.

100Mb swap partition's file system must be 'Linux swap', 15Mb boot partition's file system must be 'Linux ext2' and the root partition's file system must also be 'Linux ext2'. Do not allocate beyond these given values to the boot and swap partitions. Doing so will waste your disk space. Do use as much space for the root partition. This setup will be ok for most newbies that are trying Linux for the first time.

Reboot the system before going any further. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del will do the job.

Congratulations! You have successfully prepared your hard drive to install Linux. Now you are at the start of a noble quest to the wonderful world of Linux. Be prepared to uncover wonders and creative ways of doing things that seemed to be impossible to do with your home PC.

Chintana