Lateef Alabi-Oki’s Scribes is a truly incredible text editor. It’s light without being useless. But it also manages to integrate a lot of functionality without being overly complex. Anyone who loves text editors needs to check it out (it’s in the Ubuntu repositories). And to track Scribes development, I heartily recommend Lateef’s blog.
Also, reviewing Lateef’s software list, I’m now intrigued by the Pomodoro Technique (Lateef uses and maintains gomodoro, a Pomodoro timer).
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- Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Lateef Alabi-Oki. I’m a software developer, IT consultant and computer technician. I’m modestly known in the Free Software community as the maintainer of Scribes, the esoteric, unconventional, unorthodox text editor for Linux and Unix-like systems. I also maintain less popular projects like Striim (the Internet Radio Player), Germinal (the terminal emulator designed to be used with a terminal multiplexer like Tmux), gomodoro (a pomodoro timer) among others.
- What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I run Fedora Rawhide on my main computer.
- What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
In general I run GNOME on a custom desktop shell session optimized for efficiency above all else. The desktop shell comprises of a compositing window manager (compiz), a dock (Avant Window Navigator) and a powerful action manager and launcher (Kupfer). The most important and powerful interface on Unix is the shell terminal. My shell of choice is fish running inside a terminal multiplexer (Tmux) running inside a terminal emulator (Germinal). My browser of choice is Google Chrome. For music I turn to Pithos, a Pandora client. Scribes is my text editor of choice for hacking, editing or any kind of text creation. If Scribes is not available, I’ll use Vim. Dropbox has been a life saver too many times. I’m excited about the “Cloud” movement. Nautilus is my file manager of choice. Other software I use include Transmission, devede, Totem, Rhythmbox, gomodoro, the GIMP, Shotwell and too many other awesome free software I’m forgetting. Kudos to free software developers.
- What kind of hardware do you run it on?
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1501. It’s old but it works.
CPU: 2GHz AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology
Memory: 1GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon Mobile 128MB (Dual monitor setup)
Hard Disk Size: 60GBIt has become evident that I need more memory. My laptop got stolen so I’m left with this old tud. 🙂
- What is your ideal Linux setup?
A laptop that supports Linux with an Intel Core i7 processor, 1GB of Video Memory (ATI, Nvidia or Intel), 8-16GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD hard disk space, with a triple monitor setup (side monitors should be 21" – 23"). Support for HD multimedia both audio and video baked into the CPU and/or GPU. Any laptop that can provide me with this spec or better and that runs Linux properly would be an ideal development box.
- Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure.
Interview conducted May 21, 2011
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
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