Jim Hall

5850 points

Minnesota

Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.

Open Sourcerer People's Choice Award People's Choice Award 2018 Author Linux Contributor Club

Authored Content

Old-school technical writing with groff

Take a trip back in time to experience text formatting from a bygone era.

Digital creative of a browser on the internet

3 ways to take screenshots on Linux

Save time by taking screenshots on Linux with one of my favorite tools.

How I use the Linux sed command to automate file edits

Here are some tips and tricks to automating file edits from the Linux command line.

Use this nifty Unix tool to process text on Linux

The pr tool prepares text documents for printing.

How I manage files from the Linux command line

If you prefer to interact with your system through the terminal, check out my favorite Linux commands for managing files.

How I use Bash to automate tasks on Linux

Bash has a few handy automation features that make my life easier when working with files on Linux.

Authored Comments

Jim Hall

5 Nov 2021

How to update a Linux symlink

I've been using Linux since 1993 and I didn't realize until your article that you could change a link without deleting it first. I've always used 'rm' then another 'ln -s'

Thanks for sharing!

Jim Hall

29 Oct 2021

Print a Halloween greeting with ASCII art on Linux

Hi David - glad you liked the article! I agree, TheDraw was a great DOS program for drawing ASCII art. As you mentioned, you can output the file to see it in full color. Use TYPE on FreeDOS, or 'cat' on Linux. You'll need to load an ANSI driver on FreeDOS, like the open source NANSI.SYS driver. Linux terminals are modified color ANSI terminals, so should display ANSI escapes by default.

Another way to write this program for DOS is to copy the array directly to video memory. But I thought showing it "character by character" using _setbkcolor and _settextcolor would help others to make their own programs with color text. :-)