me, myself and I

In my last post I was talking about how like a kid at Christmas (or whatever respective holiday you partake in) I was planning on downloading some Distros to try out on the old Laptop. I managed to download both Fluxbuntu and TinyFlux (PCFluxboxOS) ISO images.

Fluxbuntu
I am a little more familiar with Ubuntu (a Debian based system) and the laptop already had TinyMe (a light PCLinuxOS) installed, so I decided to give Fluxbuntu a try first.

The installation went alright though it took a loooooong time to install everything. When it was done, I had a working system that takes a long time to boot and had a maxiumum resolution of 800x600 Not quite what I had in mind, but OK.. it's starting.

Today is day 6 since Fluxbuntu was installed and somewhere before that I did a full re-install because Fluxbox kept really messing things up. I usually install a couple times any OS because I notice something not working, or an option I overlooked so this is not unusual for me.

I noticed, after the fact, that the Fluxbuntu CD includes an option to only install the base system and none of the GUI applications (or Desktop environment). Cool option.

Anyway, with the fresh install I had a couple issues to fix:

1. Get Internet connection via external dial-up modem
2. Change resolution to 1024x768
3. Install Conky
4. Get USB pendrive working

Internet Connection
These days you're dead in the water if you don't have some form of internet connection so I poked around for a while for that.

I tried the pppoeconfig from the menu, but the stupid thing asked for the root password and Ubuntu uses "sudo" for running administration applications. Luckily the error message also shows the name (and path) of what it was tryign to run so I could go in a terminal and run the same application but use "sudo" in front to give me administrative rights.

Too bad pppoeconfig only does NIC connections and I use dial-up.

So I started in the easy place... Man (as in manual) pages. I know wvdial is a smart application that dials up and connects the system to the internet, so "man wvdial" is a good place to start.

To make a long story short,

# wvdialconf 
(searches system for a modem and enters settings in the /etc/wvdial.conf file)

# sudo nano /etc/wvdial.conf 
(enter the phone number, username and password to log into the ISP)

# wvdial 
(actually connect)

Screen Resolution
The next order of business is the screen resolution, 800x600 just doesn't cut it when I know it can do better. Some reading around the forums (Fluxbuntu's and Ubuntu's) I found I am not alone.

Some of the steps I did;

1. Modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to include "1024x768" resolution and put it first so it is the default
2. Reduce the Screen's section's DefaultDepth value from 24 to 16
3. Do Ctrl + Alt + Backspace to restart the xsession

While this may sound easy, I've been researching this for the past 5 days and finally was successful using the DefaultDept change above and that is what did the trick. .

Conky
Conky is a simple application that allows you to display system information on your desktop, such as CPU, Ram, Network, Hard Disk and activity information either textually (like Ram: 35%) or graphically (simple bar graphs scrolling by).

Once I had the Internet connection running, installing Conky is simple.

#sudo apt-get update 
(to update the repositories for the system)

#sudo apt-get install conky 
(to install the application)

Now that I have copied the sample Conky configuration file (.conkyrc) I am beginning to fool around and set it up to give me the information I want without using up a lot of system resources.

USB Pen Drive
This is my next project. That and trying to install Opera, which isn't in the default repositories. So I've downloaded the Opera file but just this morning had time to find out how to install it.

sudo dpkg -i [I]opera package file[/I]

TinyFlux
Unfortunately when I scanned the CD for errors it found some. So I'll have to wait until my next broadband opportunity to download it. Until then, though, I should have a good feel for Fluxbuntu and whether or not it will work for me.