vivithemage's blog programming, reza faq, gmediaserver, love, linux

Teenage girls and Linux/BSD

I have found a certain consistency regarding the reasons for dissatisfaction among teenage girls with Linux or BSD operating systems. I'm sure there are many teenage girls who know there way round Linux/BSD. I've listed three of the main requirements that I think most girls would want if they are to use a Linux/BSD machine.

1. Use KDE

KDE is nice and bubbly, plenty of icons and you can get quite far without using the command line. Don't use something like blackbox, it will piss them off severely.

2. make sure flash is installed, sound is working, it plays dvd's and recognizes whatever music player they have.

3. When you install open office, make sure to provide instructions on how to save the files as docs. If you fail to do this, be sure to tell them about the online conversion sites which can convert odt's to docs.

If all these requirements are met (summed up as GUI, Media and Work), there should be an increased likelihood they'll be satisfied with their new OS. I may add some additional points later, but these seem to be the main three. (*Hides and braces himself for flames by female FOSS developers*) ;p

libmagic/magic.h library tutorial with example. (It’s magic!)

Libmagic is generally used to determine a file type, for example if it's a jpg, avi, or whatever, you can point it to a file and it will determine what sort of file it is using magic numbers.

I found only a few links on the library and the majority were all clones of the man file with this one being the best I found.

http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/3/libmagic

My googling skills/patience failed me it seems as I couldn't find anything more detailed. However, I looked at some other projects that used it and experimented and got it working. Here is some example code, which takes "/file/you/want.yay" and returns a mime to it (e.g. text/x-c; charset=us-ascii). You can get it to return different stuff, check the previous link for more details.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <magic.h>

int main(void)
{
	char *actual_file = "/file/you/want.yay";
	const char *magic_full;
	magic_t magic_cookie;
	/*MAGIC_MIME tells magic to return a mime of the file, but you can specify different things*/
	magic_cookie = magic_open(MAGIC_MIME);
		if (magic_cookie == NULL) {
	        printf("unable to initialize magic library\n");
	        return 1;
		    }
	    printf("Loading default magic database\n");
	    if (magic_load(magic_cookie, NULL) != 0) {
	        printf("cannot load magic database - %s\n", magic_error(magic_cookie));
	        magic_close(magic_cookie);
	        return 1;
	    }
	magic_full = magic_file(magic_cookie, actual_file);
	printf("%s\n", magic_full);
	magic_close(magic_cookie);
        return 0;
}

To compile it do: "gcc magic_test.c -o magics -lmagic". Furthermore make sure the libmagic library is installed. "apt-get install libmagic-dev" should do it if you're using a machine with debian/ubuntu.

Apologies for the bad formatting, it seems eclipse and wordpress don't agree with each other.