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I found this tutorial on how to create fractal backgrounds with GIMPs Flame filter on the front page of the gentoo wiki site.

You can actually get some very good results quite easily.

Here are the first few I managed to create.

Large versions are available here

Once you generate a good flame pattern you can keep creating new images and reusing the last flame settings but with different colours.

There is one issue. It appears that it has trouble generating large flames. 1600×1280 worked for me, but I could not get 3200×1080 working (dual monitor wide flame).

I use Gentoo linux for my home desktop and I have had a problem with the alsa sound settings since I moved from my old PC to my new 64bit PC.

The problem was that I only had stereo speakers connected to the front channel and I had to keep opening alsamixer to set the volumes for this channnel.

If I changed the volume in any applications it only updated the PCM channel, which didn’t affect the front channel and didn’t affect the speakers connected to it.

I finally decided to fix this today.

After a little searching I found this HOWTO Surround Sound document, via the gentoo forums, on the gentoo wiki.

After reading it and giving a few failed tries, I used the following for my .asoundrc settings.

# cat ~/.asoundrc
pcm.!dmix {
        type plug
        slave {
                pcm surround51
                channels 6
        }
}
pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "dmix"
        slave.channels 6
        route_policy duplicate
}

I then rebooted. In Alsamixer I set the front channel at 100, and pcm at 50. I then fired up mplayer, when I changed the volume the pcm channel was affected and it did affect my stereo speakers plugged into the front channel.

Additional info

# lspci | grep Audio
00:0f.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP55 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

# cat /proc/asound/card0/id 
NVidia

# cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 | grep Codec
Codec: Realtek ALC885