Some tips and tricks for the Gdium!

Following up on previous post from OLPH Planet we thought it'd be interesting to go deeper into the concept and give one or two tips on the way. The lucky Gdium owners might have noticed that two of the function keys have been reserved to launch custom applications of your choice (they are they 2 fn keys marked User1 & User2). In order to set up those keys one simply need to invoke them a first time (Fn+User1 or Fn+User2) and the configuration menu will popup. One thing about the G-Linux user interface is that there is no menu to launch a terminal window (a terminal window is the rough equivalent of a DOS command prompt in the Windows world). We believe at Emtec that terminal windows are for power users or system administrators, and normal users shouldn't be distracted by something they do not need to use.

So power users might get tired of clicking on the menu button (top upper left corner) to type 'gnome-terminal' from the "Run" menu, and decide to assign one of those 2 function keys to the terminal application.

One customization later we're going to show you a little trick using the Gdium webcam to impress your family and friends! The screenshot at the beginning of this post is what you're supposed to get on your own machine (called ASCII art) and you'll get a 1:1 ratio view of the camera window if you click on the thumbnail.

So how do you do that? Simply launch a terminal window (which should be very easy by now) and type the following command:

mplayer tv:// -vo aa -monitorpixelaspect 0.5

To quit the mplayer application just press the 'q' key (quit...).

Now this is all very black & white (well shades of grey actually) and you're probably wondering how we can get the color version like you can see on the other thumbnail. Very simply, just add 'c' for color in the command line to make it become:

mplayer tv:// -vo caca -monitorpixelaspect 0.5

We hope you enjoyed the article. Should you be one of the lucky Gdium owner or familiar with Mandriva/G-linux and have a trick to share, please contact us in the comment section and we'll post your best submitted tips on the Official Gdium Product BLOG giving you credit for it!