09
My little network using Dia
by admin ·
I was watching a screencast at Linux Crazy ( Podcast 51) the other day where comprookie2000 gave a tour of his home network using a graphic. I have wanted a graphic depicting the topology of my home network for my site but never got around to figuring out how to make one. Watching the screencast got me interested again.
Looking at David’s (comprookie2000) graphic made me feel for the guy. It is rare I find someone will less artist talent than myself. No no disrespect but wow is it bad. 44.9k file size for a 400×225 pixel image? Ouchie for the people that visit his site with limited bandwidth. In all fairness, I was not able to reduce it much with my limited skills using the “.png” file type. While no fan of “.gif”, it will reduce this image by 50%.
In the screencast, David advises he used GIMP to create the graphic, and that is where I started out making mine. I quickly discovered however that GIMP is less than ideal for this application. I remembered there is a program to do diagrams, but could not remember the name. A quick search on scroogle got me “Dia“, an open source diagramming program.
Right away it was clear Dia was what I was looking for, and I had a simple diagram of my home network in about 30 minutes. I found the program very easy to use and I spent most of that 30 minutes looking at the default icon sets included with the program.
Here is what I came up with (click to see the full size image).