nixternal

If you spend a lot of time editing wiki pages from within your browser, do I have some good news for you! The good news? It is called editmoin. Editmoin is a simple application, available in the repositories, that allows you to edit any MoinMoin wiki page from within your default text editor.

Setup took me a few minutes to finally get correct, but after dabbling for a few minutes, I got it down. What you will need is the MOIN_ID cookie which you can grab by viewing the cookies from within your browser. The line you are interested in is the Content section. For example, for https://wiki.ubuntu.com, you may see content that looks similar to 1a2b3CdEFG4hIJ/5klMnoPQrsTuVWxyzabCdefgH6iJk. Once you have this, you create a file named .moin_ids in your home directory, and then add the following information:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com 1a2b3CdEFG4hIJ/5klMnoPQrsTuVWxyzabCdefgH6iJk

Once you have done that and saved it, at the command line type the following:

foo@bar:~$ editmoin https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WikiPage

That will open up the page for your editing delight! This is much faster than editing pages with a browser, at least it is for me, and I am sure many of you will feel the same.

Once you have that setup, read over the editmoin documentation for some other customizations such as vi syntax highlighting and aliases. For syntax highlighting you will need 2 extra files:

• moin1_5.vim
• moin1_6.vim

Hope I covered the necessities here, if not, add them to the comments. Thanks!

EDIT: If you do not see MOIN_ID, that means you need to log into the wiki first.

Who all is going to PyCon 2008 in Chicago in the next week or so? If so what all are you going to be there for? Conferences? Tutorials? Sprints?

Seeing as I only live about 15 minutes from where PyCon is going to be hosted, I might show up one or two days to check it out, and have been thinking about meeting up with the Bazaar folks and the sprint they have planned. If you are going, leave a comment and maybe if I get some time off we can meet up.

Lucas Nussbaum has graciously setup a mailing list with the approval of the great people over at Freedesktop.org. The purpose of this list is to allow all of the distributions to work together and for those working in distribution development. Lucas gave a brief example such as:

• How do you achieve graphical boot in your distro? Do you use some kind of dependancy-based or events-based boot?
• How do you package both ruby 1.8, ruby 1.9 and jruby, or handle KDE vs KDE4?
• Do you use a system that gives a limited set of rights to new contributors?

So for you KDE developers who are working in distribution development and are interested in the cross-distribution collaboration, go ahead and join the list. If you would like more information on Lucas’ announcement, feel free to read it in full HERE. He also has an mbox file for download consisting of the communications he had between some of the distributions interested. Thanks Lucas!