Wreath 2009

I recently joined a new community of Linux enthusiasts who are devoted to the simple, the fast, the elegant and the #!. What is the #! you ask? Well #! (pronounced crunchbang), is a Linux distribution that is in second, third or forth public interation. Developed by a young guy named Philip in order to scratch an itch, then quitely shared around, it is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux with an Openbox window manager.

What I really want to say is that this is a cool community. As an example of the coolness, I shared on the Crunchbang forums that I was a ebook fan and had discovered that evince (a document viewer available in #!) will remember what page I’m reading from session to session. So reading a 350 page PDF is no problem. I can pick up where I left off.

I had and idea to add the ‘ebook reader’ to the menu of crunchbang. I had seen a sample somewhere else on the forum where a grad student had his thesis paper in the menu so that they could quickly get to editing each of the components. This would be a sort of manual process of editing the menu every time I started a new ebook. Not really a problem.

This is cool in and of itself but an interesting thing happened when I post this information to the forum. Philip took the idea and developed it into an elegant piped menu. A piped menu is something unique in Openbox that allows the menu to be dynamically created. Currently the piped menu reads a specified directory and creates a menu of all the PDF’s in it and ties them to envince. This process of me having the idea and Philip contributing the code was just a few hours. I’m in Idaho and he in the UK. Here is a link to the discussion, code and the obligatory screen shot.  

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/525/ebook-reading/