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/

Tiago Sousa and Om Maciel recently blogged about many of Geany’s great features. Geany is a cool, lightweight text editor especially configured to edit program files. I have been using Gedit as my IDE for learning python but now I’ve switched. Geany handles quite a number of file types.

Geany has a three pane layout with document tree and symbols on the left the main editor on the right and across the bottom is a panel that contains a terminal, messages, a notes area called “Scribble” and a compiler window. This sounds cluttered but its UI is elegant and is clean and intuitive. I’ll soon be trying Geany out editing some Docbook file for the Ubuntu Documentation Team.

Our LoCo Team – Ubuntu-PNW – participated in the annual LinuxFest NorthWest in Bellingham Washington this last weekend. We gave out over 400 iso CDs, tons of brochures, stickers and business cards. Ours was a busy table. Overwhelming at times.

Our  Loco Team covers a large geographical area (Washington, Oregon and Northern Idaho) so we don’t get to meet up much. I have pictures but as the photographer, I don’t have any with me in them. Thanks Dan for organizing this and Walter, Paul (on the left) and Ahmed for the great time.

A team of programmers was at LinuxFest from Oregon State University and they had with them 3 of the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ units for demo. We got to try out the Sugar interface and see working models. Very cool. Warning – do not look directly into the camera lens or you may fall into the proverbial rabbits hole!??!

The Coolest Looking Laptop Ever!
SUSE on Dell
WOW

I’ve been working with a gallery generation application for Linux. This one is a duet between Google’s Picasa and SimpleViewer.

Click on image for gallery
Use browser’s back button to return.

BumpTop is a new and creative desktop prototype.

Watch it in action on YouTube.

It is going to be very tough to overcome the inertia associated with the current flat desktop paradigm. I’m most impressed by the “Lasso and cross” methods of managing documents. The little pigtail action for the pie menu is cool but I’ve seen this implemented in application via a right mouse click and I have to say that it takes some getting used to.

This tip passed to me via Richard Querin’s blog Renaissance Man.

Powered by ScribeFire.

These all work in the Gnome Terminal. Handy if you can remember them.

Ctrl + a – Jump to the start of the line
Ctrl + d – Delete from under the cursor
Ctrl + e – Jump to the end of the line
Ctrl + k – Delete to EOL
Ctrl + l – Clear the screen
Ctrl + r – Search the history backwards
Ctrl + t – Swap last two characters
Ctrl + w – Delete last word
Ctrl + u – Delete backward from cursor
Ctrl + y – yank or paste

Alt + c – Capitalize the word
Alt + d – Delete word
Alt + l – Make word lowercase

Here “2T” means Press TAB twice
(string)2T – All available commands starting with (string)
2T – Only Sub Dirs inside including Hidden one
$2T – All Sys variables
! – Repeat command from history where # is line number
!$ = last argument of last command

Let me know if you have any to add to this list.

Add your => comment.

Nautilus is Gnome’s file manager. One of its features that I enjoy is the little function called nautilus scripts. When navigation the file tree with nautilus, there are a group of scripts available anytime on the right mouse button. Here is a link for beginners to help you get started with these scripts.

As part of my work with Ubuntu’s documentation team, I’ve been learning an application called Subversion. Subversion is an open source application for revision control. It is the tool used to develop and maintain all the documentation and keep everything sync’d up between contributors.

I saw a post by Christer Edwards over at ubuntu-tutorials.com that got me going in this direction. Here’s how I added svn functionality to nautilus. Enjoy!

In a terminal -