Geany: August 2008 Archives

My exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-part series on what OS to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) spent a good deal of time on how Puppy Linux represented the best combination of quickness and out-of-the-box features of any operating system for this old, underpowered hardware.

I based all of that on running Puppy 2.13. I managed to boot Puppy 4, but the relative slowness of Abiword to start had me pausing about an upgrade from 2.13.

I must've forgotten that I couldn't get X to work in Puppy 3.01 on the Compaq. I might be able to figure out the configuration later. Or I might not.

Sticking with Puppy 2.13 is a distinct possibility, as is going to a later build in the Puppy 2 series (probably 2.17) just to get some newer packages and, more importantly, the ability to encrypt my pup_save file.

Considering the possibility of upgrading to Puppy 4.00, a slow Abiword I can handle, especially because I learned something very helpful about the Geany text editor, at least the version in OpenBSD 4.2 (version 0.11) and not that in Puppy 2.13 (version 0.10). That "valuable" something (meaning valuable to me and my work and likely not to you or yours is this:

When you tab before beginning writing a paragraph, the build of Geany in OpenBSD (and likely in most Linux systems with updated packages) will automatically tab when you hit the return key to begin your next paragraph. That means not needing to continually hit the tab key to make my paragraphs look separate when NOT writing for the Web.

For the Web, there are usually two returns (or the <p> HTML code) between paragraphs. For print, the paragraphs don't have space between them and can only be told apart by their indents, something which I've been relying on word processing programs to do for me and which I now will be able to do in Geany.

The ability to create copy for the Web and for the Daily News print system with the same text editor, and to do it with a minimum of formatting, is a very good thing indeed.