Specifications

interesting directories are there, including
one for your Halloween adventures.
Perhaps the most interesting ones are
the wip (work in progress) directory and
the playable directory. Do an
ls in either
of those directories, and you’ll find a
couple hundred other levels—not all of
them playable, granted, but still fun to
try. To run one of those levels, simply
pass the full pathname to the pingus
executable, like this:
pingus /usr/share/games/pingus/data/levels/
¯ wip/hellmouth11-grumbel.pingus
Doing the above lets you play the
game in the work in progress directory
called hellmouth11 (Figure 8). Finally,
should you feel so inclined, Pingus has a
built-in level editor (that’s the other
menu option at the start), so you can
create your own levels and contribute to
the game’s development.
Pingus is a great game, and it’s great
fun. The hidden levels offer a treasure
trove of weird and wonderful side
quests. Take my word for it, you need
to check this one out. Besides, the
future of the Pingus depends on you!
Ah, mes amis, I can see by the clock
on the wall that we are nearly out of
time, and there are still many penguins
to save. Perhaps a few more minutes
will bring us that much closer to getting
our chilly friends to their goal. In the
meantime, I’m sure we can convince
François to refill your glasses one more
time while you huddle in your coats. I
promise that the next time you arrive,
I will make sure that the temperature
approaches something more temperate.
Raise your glasses, mes amis, and let us
all drink to one another’s health. A
votre santé! Bon appétit!
I
Marcel Gagné is an award-winning writer living in
Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of the Moving to Linux
series of books from Addison-Wesley. Marcel is also a pilot,
a past Top-40 disc jockey, writes science fiction and fanta-
sy, and folds a mean Origami T-Rex. He can be reached via
e-mail at [e-mail]. You can discover lots
of other things (including great Wine links) from his Web
site at www.marcelgagne.com.
Resources
Penguin Logos of Every Kind:
www.linux.org/info/logos.html
IceBreaker: mattdm.org/icebreaker
Pingus: pingus.seul.org
Snowball:
www.snowball.retrovertigo.de
Marcel’s Web Site:
www.marcelgagne.com
The WFTL-LUG, Marcel’s Online Linux
User Group:
www.wftl-lug.org
Figure 8.
Hundreds of
additional
levels,
including the
Hellmouth,
await you, if
you dare to
explore.