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 -

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8200), which is my primary PC, started mis-behaving. It runs fine for ten to twenty minutes or maybe more then the CPU races to 100% utilization and the twin fans roars and the GUI becomes very sluggish. Trouble shooting the problem is frustrating. On occasion the laptop will run for several hours without any problem. I then feel like I got it fixed. Reboot and come back later and the problem is back. When the problem is occurring, if I reboot without powering off the laptop, the problem persists. I’ve tried many things to rectify this but I’m getting nowhere. I can’t even tell if this is a hardware or software problem. Because my /home is on a separate partition I was able to reinstall Ubuntu but even this did not help. I’ve rebuilt the kernel to be sure SMP was not enabled and to specify support for my Pentium M processor. There must be some desktop/user configuration that is the culprit. Wish me luck.

http://quickones.org/

Matthew East of the Ubuntu Documentation Team pointed me to a great series of screen casts. Alan Pope of Ubuntu-UK has created some cool introductory videos/screencasts. There a quite a few screencasts and look for new ones coming in the future. The sound quality is great and Alan has a great way of pacing the action. I highly recommend these and I’ve learned a nugget or two watching them. I’ve just got to figure out how to do this as I really feel these screencasts are the wave of the future.

I think the grand daddy of the screencast in this format is Jon Udell. Formally of Infoworld, Jon continues to evangelize the practicality of screencasting. Screencasting on Ubuntu has been difficult but the challenges have been overcome.