GNOME Writing Appliance turns your current multifunctional, bells-and-whistles, aint-it-purdy computer into a single-function writing machine: an appliance in the ancient 20th century sense .

It aims to deliver a modern version of what your Dad used to write on in 1975. He got by without a browser, now you can too. GNOME Writing Appliance (a.k.a. Gnome Wrap) tries to give back a little of what technology has taken away.

The desktop is a stock SUSE Studio build of GNOME, with all the basic desktop functionality. It’s not highly tweaked. It doesn’t shuttle you right into an editor with a darkened screen and glowing green words. But the only applications it contains are text editors. Not even a baby word processor here. LibreOffice Writer is included as a publishing app, since despite their flaws, sometimes a WSYWIG word processor is plainly the quickest way to get that one-off document onto paper where it needs to be. Remove it if you can do without.)

Featured writing apps:
-* Focuswriter, a great low-complexity editor with nice features for writers

• Emacs + org-mode
• other comfort-food editors nano, gedit, (g)vim

There are a few tools for general purpose file munging, including backing up and version control:

• rsync, git, mc, and of course the standard GNU command line tools.

And so that you can use a plain text editor and still get basic document structure and emphasis, we include two tools which can export to HTML, LaTeX, and other formats:

• txt2tags
• emacs org-mode (stock version 6.33c included in Emacs 23.2, but you can ‘git’ the latest from the org-mode repo)

Printing support is included. Networking supported included for backup and system updates. If that’s too much power for you to possess, you can disable it (Remove package ‘iw’ for wireless firmware).

A few extra repositories are enabled to allow you to quickly add any of the following tools you need:
Dropbox, Adobe Reader (add ‘acroread’), LibreOffice, TexLive

This does not aim to be a general purpose Linux distro, so you won’t find a number of common user-oriented accessory apps. For example there are no IM apps, no microblogging clients, no Firefox, no photo-tweaking aps, and no games. There also are no music management applications. On the one hand, the idea is to do One Thing Well. On the other hand, once you get networking running you can add what is essential to you.

I plan to release another version soon, and am open to suggestions. But keep in mind the niche I’m going for: a lean One Thing Well machine, which helps keep distractable writers away from things that seriously distract them.

Credits:
Current background is Babourum, found here

Limitations:
At the moment, most of the apps don’t have internationalization options installed, meaning the application interfaces are (mostly) English only. Sorry. Desole’. Tut mir Leid. This is for keeping things slim, but I’d be glad to make a more cosmopolitan version if there is some demand…..

NOTE TO POTENTIAL USERS:
Although his appliance is already usable for your daily work—-the OpenSuSE building blocks are solid, you can expect the collection of applications to change over the coming weeks as I work (with your help) to settle on a set of tools which are most useful to writers. Call it BETA software until then. One implication of this is that you may want to keep your work in a separate /home/username/work partition, which you protect from the automatic repartitioning of the OpenSuSE installer, and which you backup well.