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Low Fat Linux -*/ Part Two /*

Recently I decided to go further with low fat linux project by trying to get as low fat as possible with as much eye candy as possible with AERO vista in mind. Thus I went searching for lots of options possible to achieve the goal. For my portage R100 I decided to use : 1. E17 as the windows manager, although it lack support for 3D effect but its still beautiful and fast. The result is almost as fast as blackbox, you cannot really notice the difference except when you turn on the composite modules bling. 2. Get Vista Aero theme for firefox 3. Use Murrine GTK engine with Vista Gray theme 4. Use pyNeighborhood for samba mount 5. Drop Rox and use filler for file manager (will be dropped when E17 file manager is stable enough) 6. Get Esetroot source ,compile and install it for fake transparency since E17 doesnt support fake transparency 7. Use Aterm with this options : aterm +sb -tr -sh 50 -fg white -g 84.5x25.5 -fn 4x10 for minimalist transparent terminal 8. Get entrance for xdm replacement, use clean theme for both entrance and e17 login 9. use night bling theme for E17 10. create custom script for background change in every minutes 11. use leafpad as note pad 12. use gamix for alsa mixer 13. use equate for calculator 14. Porthole for portage (gentoo specific) With this setup, you cannot really realize the speed difference with blackbox setup but with A LOT better looking desktop. Drop me email if you wish to know more detailed instruction for getting the result or screen shot, may be I will create a web page explaining all of it. 14 July 2007 duckz

Low Fat Linux

Do you still own old laptop that only have pentium 3 cpu and little harddisk and memory?. If you do have them in your storage, then its time revive it!, As many have experienced, We as customer is forced to upgrade our computer in average of every 3 years, sometimes its because that the newest operating system is not going to have a decent performance in our old hardware, as sad as it may seem, infact its a common practice to force our money out from our pocket to purchase those newest, baddest, expensivest hardware.

But does the newest hardware is the right answer for you?. As in my case, I dont play games nor anything that will need largest, baddest, expensivest piece of hardware eg. Latest Video Card, Latest Sound Blaster, etc. After carefully examined my need in computing, I only NEED decent hardware for typing letter, emailing, spreadsheeting, watching movie, irc, wireless, and LOTS of harddisk capacity. Thus in my case, I dont need the fancy of GNOME, KDE, XP even VISTA!, I only need SMALL but FAST! set of program that will get the job done.

In the spirit of creating such small and fast computing environment, I google the net for such instruction and in shock I only got a few site that direct me in how to create one, suprisingly the site is from year 2000 or older which makes it a little bit obsolete. Anyway, I decided to install small system in my laptop (900 mhz) and uses these programs :
1. Gentoo linux for base
2. Sylpheed for email
3. Rox for file manager
4. Blackbox for windows manager
5. Gftp for gui ftp
6. aterm for terminal
7. xchat for irc
8. amsn for MSN messenger
9. kazehakase for web browser
10. AVG free for antivirus plus dazuko for daemon
11. Custom kernel to fit only what I need
12. Rox-edit for text gui editor / also try beaver for small editor
13. joe for terminal text editor
14. prozilla + prozilla gui for download accelerator
15. gmplayer + mplayer for multimedia player
16. openoffice for all office works (slow but no other choice)
17. Canon pixma driver for printing
18. GIMP for image editing
19. Rox-thumbnail for image viewing (specially for digital camera)
20. iwconfig for wireless networking (in text terminal) + /etc/init.d/wireless for auto configure to home net
21. manual dhcpcd for auto configure ip
22. manual smbclient for samba
23. custom gentoo use flags for -0s (small size) and -gnome -kde and much more to make it small.
24. XDM as default dm
25. Gentoo splash (optional)
26. lm-sensor + acpi + fnfxd + cpufreq + hdparm + laptop-mode for speed, battery, fan, brightness control
With this optimization, I ended up in decent looking OS with SMALL and FAST! program, it even faster than pentium-m 1.6 Ghz running full blown FC6 with full set of gnome. but offcourse its not as convinient as gnome (point click to everything). you will still have to type some command.

Duckz 17 January 2007

How to Dual Boot Linux and Windows XP the smart way!

I see many people getting trouble installing linux and windows xp in one computer, usually the problem occurs with loading either one of them with boot loader, so If you have a) one computer b) large enough single harddisk or 2 harddisks c) enough knowledge how to install linux (flavour / distro at your choice) d) enough knowledge how to install windows xp (what a joke!) then you might follow my suggestions

First of all, you need to partition your harddisk (single harddisk) with the following scheme (you can do this with windows setup or linux setup program) : 1st primary partition for windows xp system (you can use either ntfs or vfat for this), 2nd partition is for exchanging data (as this writting, ntfs support in linux is not yet perfect so please choose vfat (fat32) for this partition), 3rd partition is for linux swap file (if you dont need swap dont use it), 4th partition is for /boot (usually using fat16, but if you dont want this you can put /boot in / ), 5th partition is for linux / , optional 6th partition for /home at your choice

Second step, the booting problem, this is a common problem for dual booting, usually if you install linux first (which will install grub/lilo as its boot loader and then modify the boot record) then installing windows, windows will modify the boot loader and erasing the linux boot loader entry by writting new boot loader that only uses windows xp boot loader, to avoid this you can either install windows first and then linux or you can use windows xp boot loader to chain load to grub by using grub for windows. To install grub for windows, download this files then extract them : grldr and boot.ini must be in c:/ , /boot must be in c: and the most important is the files MUST NOT BE compressed. After that you need to change the menu.lst in c:/boot to suit your need (dont know how?? read the grub manual). If you edit them successfully, when you reboots xp you will be able to boot to your linux. you only know how helpful this is when you need to fix xp from recovery console which will rewrite the boot sector and loses your linux boot entry

Third step, maintaining good computer admin, as you may know windows xp is prone to many problems that eventually you will need to reinstall it, so keep a good habit by : a) only install system and program in the 1st partition b) relink your my_documents to 2nd partition (dont ask how, find out in microsoft.com and good luck!) c) put all your data (documents, outlook .pst, your valuable download etc) in the 2nd partition d) set your linux to mount the 2nd partition (believe me this is VERY helpful in case your XP got trashed by virus or worm and you cant boot them.

Well this is just my suggestion and how I install my dual boot system, If you have better suggestion I would love to hear it so please email me for suggestion.

Duckz December 26, 2006

Migrating to Gentoo

Driven from curiosity of Gentoo distro, I have decided to try the distro out in my Toshiba Portege R100, seems that gentoo is somewhat more complicated for average user to use and its time consuming in installing the distro. The aim of this project is to produce stable linux environment for my R100 but with high performance in memory usage and cpu usage in mind.

I decided to throw away gnome and kde desktop since its too resource hungry for my pentium m 900 mhz processor, To replace them, right now I am testing IceWM and Xfce4 as its candidates for replacing gnome. While I want to have Gnomeless environment as much as possible, seems that in today linux environment in general its really not possible to not install the library of gnome or kde, many GUI application depends on it, I have tried to leave them out all together but cannot get a decent environment for laptop uses, almost everything must be done via terminal text based, while its fine with me but seems its not really convinience to use.

In the future I will write out about the detailed information regarding installing a light weight resource use linux distribution bases on gentoo linux. I hope this project will help older toshiba laptop user in keeping their old hardware in use with convinience and SPEED!.

Duckz August 30, 2006

GUEST BOOK REMOVED

I got tired in deleting all the spam in the guest book, Congratullations SPAMMER 1 USER 0, until freewebs is updating the guest book script to prevent such lame spammer, The guest book is removed, Old entry still is in the page for other Linux user to see.

Duckz August 30, 2006

Microsoft & Opensources

If you were filthy rich from your time at Microsoft and you want to do something new, would you: A) Found a museum about Jimi Hendrix; B) Plan a trip to the International Space Station; or C) launch an open-source start-up company.

The answer is: D) All of the above.

Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, established the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle with its focus on the guitar god. Charles Simonyi, a billionaire software developer who can take much of the credit for Word and Excel, is working towards a 2007 trip to the space station. And, perhaps the most unlikely activity of them all for an ex-Micosoftie, Scott Collison, former director of platform strategy at Microsoft, is the CEO of Ohloh, an open-source startup out of Bellevue Wash.

Ohloh, which is both bankrolled and staffed by former Microsoft executives, will be using open-source software to provide companies with a service to help them choose the right open-source software for their needs.

Ohloh was scheduled to go into a beta launch on July 19th, but it already appears to be in operation. The service is meant to help developers identify open-source projects that are advancing rapidly and show the most promise for a programming group's particular interest.

It's an interesting niche. The former Microsoft staffers think they may just be on to something that will be both profitable for them and helpful for companies that want to get the most from open-source programs without needing to dig through the whole wide range of free software for themselves.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

source: www.linux-watch.com
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