The Blog
Hello, and welcome to Penguin Sightings! In case you haven’t read enough yet to tell, this site is what is called a software blog. Not just any software, of course, though - Linux software! Hence, the name. You’ve probably noticed that our subtitle is “New Stuff for the GNU World.” And that’s a pretty good description of what this place is all about. Every couple days or so we give you a review of some newly-released open-source program, and explain what it does and how to install and use it. There is, however, the odd exception. Occasionally there’ll be some elderly app that we exhume, dust off, and bring to the light again; and, even more rarely, we’ll gingerly usher a freeware/shareware program into our inner sanctum - but don’t worry, because that’ll happen pretty infrequently. The one . . . well, two hard criteria for the software we review, however, is that it run in Linux, and that it be interesting (because who’d want to read a boring blog?); but more on that later.

The Authors
Yes, there’s two of us. There’s myself, Mark Keller - a fairly average guy (albeit in a rather remarkable way) who’s been using Linux off and on, alternately hating and loving it, for the past five years. And who likes to write. Hence, my position here as writer. And then there’s Jack, the penguin. He’s a rotund little fellow who acts as a model for the illustrations, and generally just hangs around and eats my canned tuna. He helps with the punctuation sometimes, though, so I really shouldn’t complain.

The Box
And then there’s the box we test all the apps on. In olden days, it was a top-of-the-line gaming machine - but then the rest of the PC population caught up with it, and now it’s just an ordinary computer with a fancy case. It has a 1.8 Ghz processor, a Gig of RAM (upgraded from 512 MB), a 128 MB graphics card, and twin 80 Gig hard drives (fraternal twins, of course - one’s an IDE running WinXP and Linux Mint, and the other’s a SATA that we use for data storage). Not too bad, though not especially good, either - but just perfect for our needs.

The Readers
And finally, there’s you. Yes, you! Without its readership, this blog would be nothing but a schizophrenic dialog with myself (yes, Jack would be there, but he’s so busy handing me semicolons that he doesn’t have much time to listen). So, of course, we want you to stick around. But we’d like your feedback, as well. As I said above, Penguin Sightings is supposed to be interesting - but our definition of interesting quite likely is not your definition of interesting. For example, I rather like games and art software. And Jack likes anything that has fish in it. If left unchecked, we would fill up this blog with reviews of fish-drawing games. Which would be weird. But . . . the reader is always right, and that would be you. So if there’s a category of software you wished we payed more attention to: email us! If there’s a specific program you want us to talk about: email us! (as mentioned earlier, we do occasionally cover old or non-opensource applications, so if you really like something that falls into one of those categories . . .) If you want to send us fanmail: email us! If you want to send us hatemail - but I guess you get the point.

So have fun, press Ctrl-D, and, um . . . oh, yes, the email address:

theemailaddress@penguinsightings.org

Really, that’s what it’s called. See you around!