This is from my book. Activities are great but there isn’t a lot of documentation walking you through the process of using them in your day-to-day workflow.
Tag: learn linux in a month of lunches
Choose GitLab for your next open source project | agilob in the Net
My book has a chapter on Git and the host I chose to demonstrate it with is GitLab! GitLab is underrated.
Choose GitLab for your next open source project | agilob in the Net

Guake Makes Your Terminal Fun
One of the neat things about writing a book about Linux is that it has “forced” me to try out some software I haven’t otherwise gotten around to trying.
I recently finished up a chapter on customizing the terminal, and it includes a section on alternative terminals. This was the chance for me to spend some time with Guake, the roll-down terminal based upon the beloved first-person shooter’s windowshade menu.
There isn’t much to Guake. It’s a terminal. But it’s bound to the F12 key (which you can change) and it rolls down instantly. While I’m sure this has a cost in terms of CPU usage, I haven’t noticed anything. Instead it’s just a fun and fast way to get a terminal and then get rid of it. It has a nice tabbing display, but I rarely have multiple terminals open.
The only issue I had with it was that my top Xfce taskbar was blocking the top of Guake. It was easy to fix by going into the config and setting the window to open a little bit lower on my screen.
I did it by editing /usr/lib/guake/guake.py and changing
window_rect.y = 0
to
window_rect.y = 30
(thanks to AskUbuntu for the tip)!
I’m not sure I’d call Guake practical. It doesn’t solve any problem for me that the default terminal doesn’t. It just makes me smile every time I summon it and then roll it back up.
UPDATE A commenter points out this is already baked into Xfce Terminal!
Manning | Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches
Deal of the Day November 5: Half off Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches (and Learn Git in a Month of Lunches, which also seems cool). Use code dotd110515au

Writing, Not Formatting, with Asciidoc
So I’m writing a book about Linux.
You’ll hear a lot more about this over the next few months, but one of the most interesting things I’ve discovered is Asciidoc, which is a fantastically thorough markup language for writing books. It’s like Markdown with even more options, like sidebars, notes, and tables. Asciidoc lets you just type, with very simple syntax controlling the formatting.
When I first started writing the book, I was using Word style sheets with LibreOffice. Manning, my publisher, offered .odt versions for OpenOffice, but I had trouble getting the styles to work. Ironically, I wound up using the Word .docx template, which worked best with LibreOffice. But the big problem was images—they just wouldn’t embed correctly. I was spending a decent chunk of time formatting when I needed to be writing.
Comments were also tough to parse. Jim Whitehurst actually got LibreOffice patched to better handle them while he was writing his book.
After a couple of chapters of fighting through the template, my editor suggested we switch to Asciidoc and my life instantly became easier.
With LibreOffice, I had to insert an image, number it, caption it, style it, and then hope that everything held together, while with Asciidoc, I just write something like this:
.Mint's Software Manager has a similar look to the Ubuntu Software Center.
image::../images/08_11.png[]
and Asciidoc handles everything else for me, even numbering the images in the captions.
This is what the above code renders as:
Asciidoc transformed into a PDF
A sidebar or note is as simple as something like this:
Asciidoc syntax for a note
which turns it into this:
Asciidoc syntax for a note rendered into a PDF
Asciidoc has formatting for heads and subheads and even automatically generates a table of contents based on them:
Asciidoc generates a table of contents automatically
You can write Asciidoc in anything since it’s just text, but I like to preview the code to make sure everything looks OK. There’s a gedit plugin but it seemed to require some work to get going and I was under the gun with deadlines, so I decided to use Atom, the GitHub-created text/code editor. It had a plugin that rendered Asciidoc. I wrote a few chapters with it, but the preview was sometimes peculiar. Notes and sidebars would expand into the whole document. Also, I couldn’t directly open Asciidoc formatted documents with it. Instead, I had to open Atom and then open a document via the Atom open menu.
Atom was fine, but annoying enough that I decided to try Brackets, the Adobe open-source code/text editor. It renders Asciidoc much better and while opening Asciidoc files still isn’t seamless, it’s better than Atom. I wish it had a running spellcheck instead of the ability to run a spellcheck when you’re done, but it previews what I need to see and gives me a running word count, so I’m pretty happy.
The Brackets text editor
Asciidoc rendered by Brackets
Brackets and Atom render in HTML but the a2x command (it’s part of the Asciidoc package) makes it very easy to convert the .adoc file to a PDF (although there’s some weird bug that causes the transformation to fail when image files have a period in the name). The output looks like a professionally formatted book chapter.
Asciidoc has been a life-saver for me. I’m lucky to be working with a publisher that uses it. I think it has applications for anyone who needs nice-looking PDFs or someone self-publishing. I also think it has tremendous implications for open education resources in that it allows someone to write a textbook without necessarily having to format it. You’d have a PDF ready very easily but you could still make the underlying Asciidoc available to people who wanted to modify the original work.
Markup languages like Asciidoc are fantastic for people like me who don’t want to deal with formatting. It’s saved me hours on the book (once we moved to Asciidoc, we were also able to use a private git repository to submit drafts back and forth; Asciidoc also has the ability to comment-out text which lets us share comments in the text) and allows me to focus on writing and not on styles and formatting. I’m not sure if Asciidoc has wide appeal for everyone, but if there’s a chance you can use it to move your work forward, I encourage you to spend some time with it.
Manning | Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches
Deal of the Day August 27: Half off Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches. Use code dotd082715au
For real this time!
Manning: Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches
I’m writing a book about Linux!
It’s available as an early access title, meaning you can start reading it before it’s finished (which is kind of a terrifying thought for me…)
I’m guessing if you’re a regular here, this book isn’t for you. But if there’s someone you know who wants to learn Linux, or you think should know Linux, here’s a 50% coupon code: mlcsefal
UPDATE Sorry! The coupon code expired. There’ll be another one later this week. I’m the worst at marketing…