Recently in Geany Category

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done.

In my original non-review, I couldn't really get Slitaz running on any of three PCs, so I ended it this way:

Hopefully they'll get it right with SliTaz 1.1 (or 2.0), but for now, it's a distro with a lot of promise but not a whole lot of delivery -- at least for me.

But there was also this:

I'll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card) ...

Coincidentally, I've been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

It works.

And so far, it's quicker than anything I've tried on it before. The closest thing I can compare it to is Damn Small Linux.

As of DSL version 4.4, both have the "Bon Echo" version of Firefox, with Slitaz using a more-recent build of what basically is Firefox.

Having Firefox named Bon Echo presents one problem: It's harder to install Google Gears, which would enable Google Docs to function in offline mode. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but so far that's been the big stopper for me with DSL (and now Slitaz).

Another stopper: Slitaz seems to want the user to store data on a USB-connected drive. But this laptop, made somewhere around 1999, doesn't have USB. Hell, it doesn't have Ethernet. My connectivity comes via a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, and even if I did have a WiFi signal, which I don't, I'm not sure Slitaz 1.0 supports wireless connectivity. Otherwise, I'd be trying some packages from the Slitaz repository.

But in its "raw" configuration, Slitaz is a 25 MB ISO — smaller than Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, and with fewer apps as well.

The beauty of it is that Slitaz 1.0 is running entirely in RAM — and I've only got 144MB on this laptop.

Again: 144MB and running entirely in RAM. I don't think there's a system out there with X that'll do this without tapping into Linux swap (although Damn Small Linux might be coming close).

Like Puppy and DSL, Slitaz is based on the JWM window manager, which has plenty of features and lots of speed to go with it. Right-clicking gets you a small menu, but for the full menu, you need to left-click on the Slitaz spider icon at the top of the screen.

Slitaz is lean but does have enough apps to get by.

Besides Firefox/Bon Echo (version 2.0.0.12 on the live CD), there's:

• My favorite development editor Geany
• The mhWaveEdit audio editor (at least that's what I think it is)
• emelFM2 file manager
• Clex File manager
• mtPaint image editor (one of my favorites)
• Grab screenshot
• GPicView Image Viewer
• Gparted partition manager
• Htop processes viewer
• Lighttpd Web server
• gFTP client
• Grsync
• LostIRC
• Retawq Web browser
• Scpbox secure copy app
• Transmission Bittorrent app
• ePDFView PDF viewer
• Listpatron (I can't figure out what this does, but it appears to "make lists")
• OSMO personal organizer
• SQlite database
• Wikiss PHP Wiki
• Bc calculator
• Burn ISO
• ISO Master
• Leafpad editor
• Nano editor
• Xpad sticky note editor
• Xterm

I'm not sure yet how extensive the Web-server capabilities of Slitaz are as yet, but it does have the Lighttpd server, SQLite database, along with PHP, so you can seemingly roll out a dynamic Web page on the system as configured.

Once I get to a live Internet connection on the Compaq, I plan to check out the Slitaz repository, which has some applications that aren't on the live CD, including Abiword and the GIMP.

I'll have to deal with how to save my settings in Slitaz without USB, but in that quest, I found a great utility called Mountbox that enabled me to easily mount partitions from my hard drive and then look at them with emelFM2. Not that it's hard to mount partitions from live CDs, but this app is as good as the mount tools in Puppy or DSL, and I'm glad to have it.

However, upon mounting a hard-drive partition, I could see all the files there, but I was unable to write a new file to it. That's something I'll have to work on.

(Hint: When you boot Slitaz, the standard user is hacker, with no password. Root's password is root.)

After a read through the online documentation, I settled on the following boot codes for my laptop:

boot: slitaz vga=788 lang=en kmap=us home=hda3 sound=noconf

I was still asked by the system (in French, no less) what resolution to use for X. But the boot process was a bit quicker, since I wasn't asked this time to choose a language or keyboard, nor was I asked to configure sound, something that didn't work automatically (and never does for this laptop in Linux).

I created a file, saved it in the Slitaz filesystem and rebooted without the cheat codes. The file wasn't there. I tried again with the boot codes, and my file was there. The same thing worked for a Firefox bookmark. As long as I used the home=hda3 boot code (since hda3 was the hard drive partition I chose on which to put my Slitaz save file) when booting, everything works.

So it turns out you don't need a USB drive to save files in Slitaz.

There's a "Cooking" release of Slitaz that looks much changed from the 1.0 release, and I will try it soon and hope that perhaps some and hopefully many of my problems will be addressed. It uses Openbox instead of JWM, features desktop icons, uses HAL to automatically mount media and even has Firefox 3.

Another addition, among many, to the latest build of Slitaz is wireless support. Again, I'll have to burn a disc tonight and give it a try when I'm near a WiFi signal.

Thus far, Slitaz 1.0 is absolutely the fastest operating system I've ever used. While it's still fairly young, it boasts of a lot of functionality, and if it runs on your particular hardware, it's a live CD that's well worth having in your laptop bag.

I'd love to have another alternative to Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, both extremely lightweight — and extremely well-formed — distributions designed to be run as live CDs (but also capable of being installed to the hard drive). And again, running entirely in RAM with only 144MB is as lightweight as they come.

Right now, I can't use Slitaz with the same "expertise" with which I can use Puppy or DSL. But for a quick-booting, quick-working live CD, Slitaz does exceedingly well for such an early stage in its life.

I'll be watching Slitaz very closely, and I expect big things for it in the future, should development continue — and I really do hope it does.

Point of order: According to the boot screen, Slitaz stands for "Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone."

So far, Slitaz lives up to that name.

More on Slitaz:
Slitaz on Distrowatch
Distrowatch review of Slitaz
My first Slitaz post from April 2008
K.Mandla's review of Slitaz
TechieMoe review of Slitaz
TechSource review of Slitaz

I didn't really need Geany, but I wanted to try Slackbuilds.

The instructions are too brief. I only say this because I can't make it work.

I extract the Slackbuild script, download the source to the proper directory, run the script as root and then get an error message.

The output says: "tar: This does not look like a tar archive," or "bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file."

I'm sure I'm missing something, but what?

Not one to wait, I went to LinuxPackages.net and got Geany for Slackware 12.0. I used pkgtool to install it. Worked perfectly.

Still, I'd like to figure out Slackbuilds. I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.

I sent Slackware expert Willy Sudiarto Raharjo an e-mail asking for help. I've exchanged e-mail with Robby Workman before, and he's responsible for many Slackbuilds scripts, but I figured I'd ask Willy first and see what he comes up with.

I've been all excited about how well the Geany text editor has been working in Windows.

But I never even tried to print a text file with Geany in Windows.

Until now.

First it did some kind of shell command. I don't have access to my shell, per my lovely employer, so that didn't work.

When I installed Geany, I used the "nogtk" version because I already had the GTK+ runtime libraries as a result of installing the GIMP image editor on a previous occasion.

So I reinstalled Geany with new GTK+ libraries. Then I went into the Geany preferences and turned on GTK printing.

It works.

But it looks HORRIBLE.

Each and every letter is separated by two lines in various stages of thickness.

Ugly. Horrible.

I wonder if there's a fix for this.

As it is, I had to return to Notepad++ just to print a text file.

So ... it's back to Notepad++.

I'm a fickle user of applications and operating systems. If something doesn't work for me, I'll switch things up in a minute.

Daily News online leader Ryan Garfat uses EditPlus, which is NOT a free, open-source program, but which does edit HTML exceptionally well. It offers a 30-day trial, then costs $35 for a single user.

But y'all know me. I want FOSS.

So does anybody out there have a favorite free, open-source text editor for Windows?

I'm back using the Geany text editor in Windows. I also use it in OpenBSD and in Linux.

I like applications that I can use across platforms. Things like Firefox, OpenOffice, Abiword, Pidgin, and other too numerous to name make life easier for those of us who use three or more different operating systems. The apps also showcase free, open-source software for those who are using proprietary operating systems and give them a reason to explore FOSS further, perhaps even trying something like Linux.

If you learn to love a bunch of free applications, why not try the OS that is just as free?

Anyway, I have a lot of requirements for a text editor, as I'm sure do most of us who use them heavily.

One thing that Geany doesn't do that I need is an easy way to rename files. It's easy enough in a Unix-like shell, or in the finder in Windows, OS X or anything else, to change a file name, but I like to be able to change the name of a file right in the text editor.

Sure, you could always do a "save as" and have the old file with the old name and a new file with the new name, but I like to save steps and have the application do it all for me.

EditPadLite, which isn't FOSS, has a "Rename/Move" function. I don't believe that Notepad++ has it, either.

At any rate, my life would be that much more complete if Geany had a "rename file" feature.

Now that I've got that off my chest, it's back to work.

After having problems with line spacing a couple of versions ago in the Windows build of the Geany text editor, I moved over to Notepad++.

While Notepad++ is a nice applications, I prefer Geany because I also use it in Linux and OpenBSD (especially in OpenBSD, where it's my default editor in X).

But the line-spacing problem was killing me. Using the default Windows linefeeds, I kept getting extra lines in my text files, which was a problem when it came to copy/pasting my text.

Today I downloaded the latest version of Geany for Windows, and the linefeed problem seems to have gone away. I looked in the release notes for the past two versions, and I didn't seen any reference to the problem, but the fact that I can now use Geany in Windows means that Notepad++ will fade to the background for awhile.

I don't use Geany to write hard-core code. I mostly just run it for general writing and a bit of text cleanup and HTML coding. There are probably better editors for heavy HTML coding, and that's something I'll have to look into.

To run Geany in Windows, you need the GTK+ runtime libraries. If you don't already have them, and chances are if you are unsure, you probably don't, download the version of Geany that includes them.

If you do have GTK+ — and I do because I installed it along with the GIMP image editor — use the "nogtk" version.

For Linux and BSDs, Geany is usually available as a package.

Go here for all info on Geany for Windows and Unix-like OSes.

I'll be using Geany in Windows rather heavily over the next week or so, and I'll write about it again in the near future.

What version of Linux has been at the top of the Distrowatch rankings for months now that I've never tried until today? PCLinuxOS.

Everybody I know who has runs PCLinuxOS has good things to say about it. Scott Ruecker of LXer and the Los Angeles Daily News' own City Hall reporter Rick Orlov are among those who have used and liked it.

I couldn't boot the CD on my test machine (VIA C3-based converted thin client), but on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) it's booting just fine.

To start with the live CD, I selected the "copy2ram" option because I have 1 GB to play with on this machine. It takes quite a while to copy the system files to RAM, but once that's done, the system should run very fast.

The 2007 version of PCLinuxOS has received continual updates and is a sort of rolling release -- the coders behind it don't create new ISO images on a continual basis like we get from Ubuntu, for instance. Once you install PCLinuxOS, it's easy to bring it up to day. Actually, I prefer it this way. I'd rather do a bunch of updates than continually burn new CDs.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD.

It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc:

During initialization, fvwm will search for a configuration file which describes key and button bindings, and a few other things. The format of these files will be described later. First, fvwm will search for a file named .fvwmrc in the user's home directory, then in ${sysconfdir} (typically /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm). Failing that, it will look for system.fvwmrc in ${sysconfdir} for system-wide defaults. If that file is not found, fvwm will be basically useless.

There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

Since fvwm looks for the .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, I decided to create one with the help of the system.fvwm2rc file mentioned in the man page.

I used the Geany editor, but substitute any text editor you wish (I'm just more comfortable in a GUI editor when it comes to things like copying and pasting. I don't use vi enough to be all that proficient).

Here's how to do it:

Log on with your user account, open an xterm window and do the following (again, substitute your favorite editor for geany, or install the geany package on your OpenBSD system with $ sudo pkg_add -i geany):

$ geany /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/system.fvwm2rc

Under the File menu in Geany, choose Save As, then navigate to your home directory and save the file as .fvwmrc (in other words, create /home/~/.fvwmrc, substituting the name of your user's home file for ~)

Now you should have a .fvwmrc file in your home directory that is editable by the user account. Modifying the menus is pretty easy. I've already added a category for applications and added all the apps I've installed thus far to it.

I'd still love to find out where the systemwide fvwm configuration file really lives. I don't have enough Unix or OpenBSD knowledge to do so at this point.

I've stuck with fvwm because it's the default window manager in OpenBSD, and it's pretty nice once you learn about it. I've got a long way to go, that's for sure.

Fvwm note: Changes in your .fvwmrc aren't implemented until you quit X and restart it.

Applications I've added to my OpenBSD box thus far:

Geany (text editor)
Dillo (lightweight GUI browser)
Firefox (heavyweight GUI browser)
Nano (console text editor; I just "get it" more than vi)
MC (console file manager)
Rox (the ROX-filer GUI file manager)
Abiword (relatively lightweight word processor)
Ted (even lighter RTF-format word processor)

I haven't added a mail client, and I might add Sylpheed or Thunderbird. I might also add mutt, fetchmail and msmtp and try POP mail from the command line for one account. Generally, though, the whole console e-mail thing baffles me -- and yes, I have done it before. I generally find a GUI mail client or Web mail interface so much easier that I don't need to spend days and days fiddling with mutt.

Essential OpenBSD reading: The OpenBSD Journal. I just found out about this, although I'm sure I've been here before.

Also: OpenBSD 101.

Ted on OpenBSD: I installed the Ted word processor -- an exceedingly light application that reads and produces files in rich text format -- which can be read and edited by most word-processing applications, including Microsoft Word.

Ted on OpenBSD ... how to actually run it:

This doesn't work:

$ ted

But this does:

$ Ted

Remember, Unix-like OSes are case sensitive, and in the case of Ted, it's really capital T, small e, small d.

I've been grumbling about Ted not working in Debian for an age, but Ted works fine in OpenBSD. I'll probably use Geany for most of my work, though. I got used to Geany by using it in Puppy Linux, and while I'm not crazy about its Windows implementation, in Linux/Unix, I still really like it.

Notepad++ is working out pretty well so far. The latest Windows text editor in my quest for a better, freer text-editing experience, Notepad++ is under the GPL license, so it's free and open-source. It's also not a port of a Linux/Unix editor like Geany, and the annoying Geany bug -- in which extra linefeeds (or carriage returns?) are inserted in Windows (CR/LF) formatted text files -- is thankfully not present in Notepad++.

In fact, Notepad++ allows you to set whether you want your text files to be in Windows (CR/LF), Unix (LF) or Mac (CR???) format. Since the files look the way I want (and cut/paste that way) in the default Windows format, I'm pretty happy. I like the way you can change the case of letters -- ctrl-U for lower-case, ctrl-shift-U for upper. I'll have to get used to it, because every other program I use does it a different way.

The search/replace function in Notepad++ is very good. It even keeps your previous search/replace words in a drop down so you can use them again in the session. I haven't yet figured out how to search for text and replace it with a carriage return/linefeed, but if I figure that one out, Notepad++ will become a must-have editor on my Windows box.

Notepad++ seems to remember the last directory I saved to, and all newly created files default to that directory. But I don't think it remembers the directory from the last time the program ran. EditPad Lite does remember, and it's a great help. I wouldn't be opposed to setting my "home" directory manually, but I'm not sure this can be done. If using the Notepad++ directory for files causes it to open to the same directory every time, that's a small sacrifice for me to make; I generally store all of my text files in one place, and it doesn't matter where that place is (though it's nice to be able to choose it in advance, though navigating to my text-file directory once per day isn't an insurmountable hardship).

Notepad++ remembers the last eight files I've opened, and they're available for reopening in the File menu. I think I can set it to remember more. For me, the more the better.

Why a text editor? I remember Jerry Pournelle, prolific science-fiction writer and long-winded columnist for Byte magazine way, way back in the day talking about the pre-IBM-PC machines he had set up for word processing in what he called (and still calls) Chaos Manor, and all the technical specs, trials and tribulations he went through. He's definitely an inspiration for this blog and its style, although I've never quite thought of it that way until now. (I used to love Byte back in the '80s.) Pournelle always talked about text editors, and at the time, I had no idea what a "text editor" was. I knew what a word processor was, but it took awhile for the concept of a text editor and what it can do to sink in.

And then came vi. Vi's great when it's the only game in town, as it was on the UC Santa Cruz timeshare Unix box I had an account on in the late '80s. Today I can fake it in vi, but I'm no master.

I still use word processors occasionally -- usually AbiWord, sometimes OpenOffice, occasionally MS Word on the Mac. But more and more -- with all the Web work I do -- text editors are quicker, more flexible, faster -- and most importantly, they give you clean ASCII output that isn't mucked up with extra crap.

End note: I Googled Jerry Pournelle to see if I was spelling his name right. I'm glad to see his Web site, which I'm going to explore at greater length at my earliest opportunity.

Since Geany in Windows can't manage to get the spacing between lines right without we selecting the LF mode (as opposed to the CR/LF mode) for every file I open, I decided to look elsewhere for my Windows text editor solution. (Note: this "setting" doesn't seem to make a difference in EditPad Lite -- things come out OK no matter which kind of line endings I choose.)

Next up: Notepad++, which unlike my former favorite EditPad Lite, is under the GNU license, meaning it's free and open-source -- a requirement for my new Windows text editor.

So far, Notepad++ is looking very good. I can open multiple files in tabs, I can wrap lines without the wrapping screwing up the file (the biggest detriment -- to me, specifically -- in Linux/Unix console editors -- is when word-wrapping inserts line-feeds everywhere they wrap; I just want to see the wrap, not have the wrap be permanent -- sorry, vi).

Confession: I opened up GVim for Windows, which I've had installed for a while. There's no way that would ever work. I'm just being realistic.

So I'll see how Notepad++ goes and report back.

I'm not saying I'm gonna stick with Geany in Windows, even though I've had nothing but praise for it as a Linux application. I'm not crazy about the paragraph I'm working on going from a white background to gray (and I haven't figured out how to turn this "feature" off), nor am I crazy about the cursor disappearing at times when I scroll down and it's a the far left of the screen ...

But I did figure out the solution to one of my problems:

When I copied and pasted my text from Geany into whatever Web program I'm prepping it for, I ended up with extra lines. I fixed it by going under Document -- Set Line Endings and switching from Convert and Set to CR/LF (Win) to Convert and set to LF (Unix).

(Note: Having to do this for EVERY file is a pain in the ass. Why can't I just set it and forget it?)

I also noticed that Geany -- mainly a text editor for programmers -- has a couple of features that might be useful: Under Tools -- Export, you can choose to output text as HTML or LaTex (the latter being useful for Linux/Unix typesetting but the former being useful for just about everything I do).