The Open Pitt What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania Issue 31 January 2007 www.wplug.org

Scintilla and SciTE by David Ostroske is a widget re- view, and quickly locate errors you Linux distributions, and it comes in- leased under an MIT-style license. If might have in your code. cluded with some versions of Ruby. this leaves you wondering “what's a As for me, I just use it to edit plain There are also plenty of other Scin- widget?,” it's basically a component text files. I could get along with using tilla-based applications available. that does something potentially useful , which is the GNOME desktop Two examples are DevStudio which programs operating under a environment's default text editor. But , graphical user interface can incorpor- SciTE loads faster, runs faster, and is an integrated development environ- ate and present to the user. As a wid- more powerful. When combined with ment for the C and C++ programming get, it's not a standalone application the Lua scripting extension languages, and Notepad++ , jects where flexible source code edit- UsingLuaWithScite>, SciTE is far a text editor for ing is required. more customizable than gedit will released under the GNU General Pub- SciTE, the Scintilla Text Editor, is ever be. Plus, it can be configured to lic License. Another, simpler editor an application that was created to save your complete session automatic- for Windows is called Notepad2 showcase Scintilla, but it has become ally, which is mighty useful when (it seems almost The home page for Scintilla and time. mandatory for any Windows editor to SciTE is located on the web at There are a few downsides, of have “notepad” in its name). Al- though standard Scintilla uses the . course. Perhaps the most important to GTK+ toolkit associated with It includes tabs for switching me is that the regular expressions it GNOME, there's also a port to Qt between multiple buffers, syntax high- understands are somewhat limited called QScintilla which may interest lighting, , auto-comple- (but I have very high standards for KDE fans. A list of more variants and tion, regular-expression search and re- regex parsers). However, although I applications can be found at . require SciTE to understand the syn- me. Another irritation is that SciTE David Ostroske is a database administrat- tax of the language you're writing, can be somewhat tedious to configure. or and developer, a Fedora user, and which is done by means of lexers. There's no graphical interface for con- WPLUG's Treasurer. He can be reached The current version includes lexers for figuration, which is performed by at . 70 programming, scripting, and editing config files. But all of these markup languages. can be found in SciTE's options menu, Coming Events SciTE is particularly useful when and the website provides thorough Feb. 10: Installfest. (Time and writing scripts. You can run the script documentation. location TBA, see web site for you're working on directly from the Getting SciTE is easy—packages details) editor, see the results in the output are readily available for all the major Feb. 15: Open Source Summit hosted by The IndUS December Roundup Entrepreneurs. 6PM to 9PM, Dec. 16 General User Meeting: Next came a quick comparison of oth- The Lexus Club at PNC Park Everyone needs backups, but far too er tools used for backups such as tar, (pre-registration required at many of us fail to perform them on a rsync, and Amanda. This was fol- ) presentation on Bacula, a software ap- modular architecture which provides Mar. 10: General User Meeting, plication which automates your great flexibility, particularly in a net- Topic: Linux Counterparts of backups. He began by reviewing worked environment. Bill demon- Popular Windows Applications. some of the major reasons why strated the interaction between the (Time and location TBA, see backups are important: hardware fail- various components and how backup web site for details) ures, human error, and archiving. jobs are scheduled and carried out. The public is welcome at all events Page 2 The Open Pitt January 2007

From the Editor: What You Can Do The Open Pitt is published by Looking out over the landscape of by-step guides to accomplishing a par- the Western Pennsylvania Linux Free and Open Source software, what ticular task—many of these are main- Users Group is available is mind-boggling. You tained by the Linux Documentation have a choice of several operating Project which is locally mirrored at systems (and hundreds of variants) . One Editor: Vance Kochenderfer and programs to handle just about any easy way to get started is to find a What is Linux? Linux is a kernel, the core of a computer oper- desktop or server function you could project which uses a wiki for its docu- ating system, created by Linus Torvalds. It is name. As an indicator of just what is mentation and just start making edits. typically packaged as a distribution, which in- out there, the stable version of Debian cludes the extra programs necessary to make a computer functional and useful. Since 1991, it has over 15,000 supported packages. Bug Reports has grown from a one-man project which ran Of course, this software isn't always All software has bugs, and the first on one computer to one with thousands of con- perfect. Many programs are incom- step to fixing them is finding them. tributors running on everything from personal plete, poorly documented, or just plain Developers rely on users to point out organizers to million-dollar supercomputers. buggy. The good news is that you can problems that may not show up in What are Open Source and ? help fix these problems. Not only is testing. Helping in this way may be a Open Source and Free Software provide you, this a way to repay some of the bene- bit of extra work, but the payoff can the user, with the opportunity to see the source fit you've received, it will lead to the be great, especially if it results in a fix code of the programs you use. You are free to use it, share it with others, and even make improvement of the software, which that personally affects you. changes to it if you wish. While the Free Soft- helps you along with everyone else. If you report a problem directly to a ware and Open Source communities differ in program's maintainer, often you'll be their philosophical approach, in practical terms Questions and Answers asked to try the latest version of the they share nearly identical goals. Learn more at One of the easiest places to start is by software and see if the bug has been and . answering other users' questions. fixed already. This can involve down- There are hundreds, if not thousands, loading and compiling the code your- This newsletter was produced using Open of on-line forums and mailing lists self, so might not be for the inexperi- Source and Free Software. where people seek help. Chances are enced or faint of heart. Suppliers of Copyright 2007 Western Pennsylvania Linux good you've used them yourself. It Linux distributions, on the other hand, Users Group. Any article in this newsletter doesn't take great expertise to contrib- generally take bug reports on any may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, ute; you just need to be one step ahead product they currently support. provided it is not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG. of the person asking the question. In Whether you report a bug to your fact, moderately experienced people supplier or to the original author, you desktop environments also have well- are often best at helping new users should investigate how they handle developed translation projects. since they still remember what it's like these and follow their system. Many to try something for the first time. projects use a bug database like Bug- Act Locally While there are generic forums like zilla to manage the process. Make WPLUG can always use help with its sure nobody else has already submit- projects and events. We need people to participate in, you may want to pick ted the same bug and include details for many roles at meetings, from one that's distribution- or application- about your system, how to reproduce serving as host to more prosaic tasks specific depending on your areas of the problem, and contact information like buying donuts. Each meeting has interest and experience. Just find in case there are additional questions. a page on our wiki where you can vo- someplace comfortable and jump in! lunteer (follow the “Wiki” link at the Think Globally top of the main WPLUG site, then Documentation Many Open Source applications offer look under “Upcoming Meetings”). Code of course is a requirement for translations for various languages, a One great need at the moment is for any software project, but documenta- process known as internationalization people to serve on the Program Com- tion is just as important. And in gen- or localization. If you're fluent in an- mittee. This is the group that plans eral all you need is the ability to write. other language, you can help by trans- our meetings and seeks out interesting Different types of documents have lating words and phrases they use. topics and speakers. Just send e-mail different purposes. User guides tend Perhaps the easiest way to start is to if you're in- to be large and comprehensive, and through the Rosetta project main- terested in volunteering. If you can't may or may not have a standard tained by Canonical at gest ideas for WPLUG events, drop a are typically brief references which which handles translation for Ubuntu note to . follow a specific pattern and require (but can be used by all). The GNOME And as always, comments or art- some knowledge of troff markup to icles for The Open Pitt can be directed edit. HOWTO documents are step- and KDE to us at .