Slowly Closing Old Windows (Living On The Etch)

I’ve been delving deeper into Debian Etch just lately, in fact, I’m writing this text on my Debian machine (in Gedit).   Back when I was on a dial up connection there were a few occasions when I got booted before sending an email I’d spent an hour or more writing online and the email would be lost forever.   I don’t know how many times it happened but there came a day when I said "no more" since then I do my writing in a plain text editor on my computer, proofread it, then log in and send/upload it.   Up until now all my posts here at Lockergnome have been written on my Win2K machine in NoteTab Light (I bought both the Pro and Standard versions but still prefer the freeware version).   When I decided to start using Debian more often the first thing I wanted was an editor with at least some of the features I was accustomed to.   I wrote an email to my LUG giving them a list of the features I particularly wanted and asked if anyone could suggest a suitable editor in Linux.   I was stunned by the number of different suggestions I got but I dutifully wrote them all down and the checked the software repository to see which were available in Debian.   Virtually all of them were, and then some.   I decided that the only way to choose one would be to try them all so I installed those that looked interesting and while I doubt that I got anywhere near all of them, when I finished downloading, opened a terminal and ran "update-menus", my Debian/Apps/Editors menu listed BlueFish, EasyEditor, Emacs, geany, GVIM, jed, Joe, Kate, KEdit, mined, MousePad, NE, Nedit, Quanta Plus, Sam, scite, Screem, tea, and Ted along with Gedit and Nano which were included in the initial installation.   I spent the next few days trying them out and found that Gedit comes as close as any of them to having the features I want but one or two others have features I’d like to know more about so I’ll have to spend more time checking them out.   One of them in particular, SciTE is a very powerful editor with a host of interesting features, and is also available for Windows (free, of course).

My wife Lisa has been teaching a friend of ours who’s never owned a computer, to use Etch and found there was no sound when they clicked the pronunciation button at Merriam-Webster Online.  Solving the problem was a simple matter of installing mplayer (from the repository) and resetting the browser preferences to use mplayer to play wav files but, of course, being a newbie I’m not "permitted" to find simple solutions on the first try so, instead, I spent two days learning how to enable multimedia features.   I shouldn’t complain though because my Etch machine will now play wmv files whereas my Windows 2000 Pro machine won’t always (which I assume has something to do with DRM).   The best tutorial I found for adding multimedia capabilities to Debian Etch was from a fellow who calls himself Machiner.   When I got confused and couldn’t make sense of his tutorial I emailed him and he carried on a conversation with me, via email, until I finally understood what he was saying at which point I had no trouble completing the process.  That may be my favorite thing about Linux users as a group; I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a more helpful, friendly group of people.   I’ve seen comments from people who’ve had negative encounters but my own experiences have been 100% positive.