Friday, May 30, 2008

My SaxenOS 2008











OK as I promised, I installed the recently released SaxenOS 2008 beta today.

The installation was typical PCLinuxOS. Choosing English in place of German was not difficult ; at boot pressing F2 brings English.

Also at boot splash you can change and set English as your default language.

SaxenOS 2008 desktop gives the feelings of a KDE desktop from its layout .

It has nicely set menu and once you have set the language to English and installed the system you get a clear picture.

I set my time zone, display and changed the PCLinuxOS repository from the default to another one as it was unreachable.

Getting the available upgrades was smooth. Then I removed some packages I did not want. Nvidia driver and compiz setting works out of the box once installed.

Once I was all set I rebooted the system and upon re login my desktop settings were gone but I easily recovered them back with Desktop Settings for XFCE .

I noticed one weird problem though, when I tried to shut down the system it went through all the processes smoothly but at the end wont shutdown automatically and I had to press the power off button to shut it down manually.

Over all SaxenOS 2008 looks promising and quite stable at this early beta stage and I am sure it will be robust and stable enough once it reaches to the final version.

I will keep on probing into it more and report back any issues if I find any.

I would urge all my readers to try SaxenOS 2008 and I am sure they will like it.

SaxenOS goes PCLinuxOS

SaxenOS from Germany once based on Slackware and Zenwalk-based distribution with the Xfce desktop and designed for older, low-specification computers adopts PCLinuxOS as its base and Xfce desktop

SaxenOS 2008 beta 2 has been released and can downloaded from their home page.

This is a major change and looks promising .

This version 2008 was release in cooperation with the BdH Dresden .

I will grab a copy myself and test install this newly re designed distribution soon.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

My custom made Granular 1.0 Preview Desktop

This is a screenshot of my customized Granular Linux 1.0 Preview Desktop.

I am a traditionalist, conventionalist and obsessional....hence I like old , same KDE desktop pattern.

My Granular Linux system is highly customized, one package per task approach so I had to remove many default packages.

Hope Anurag , Chrisz and other Granular team members are not annoyed the way I trimmed and customized Granular.


I am gonna post a remaster story of my Granular system once I am done with that as at present I am facing some difficulties with it and I have reported it to Granular team members.

Monday, May 26, 2008

TinyMe 2008 | Small but Robust



I am PCLinuxOS KDE fan, I like slim and customized installation and desktop.

Openbox is a small and configurable windows manager. TinyMe has adopted this small and fast windows manager.

I have been closely following this nicely crafted distribution since its version 6b. Versiob 2008 was released yesterday and I immediately downloaded and isnatlled it.

TinyMe 2008 offers the solid base of PCLinuxOS with the eye candy and user friendliness of OpenBox specially made for TinyMe, Im Loving it!

Here are some of the tips and tricks to customize your Tinyme 2008 installation . These tips are from my posts/requests at Tinyme Forum.

Compiz-fusion Installation on Tinyme

I tried installing compiz on previous version , it was properly installed but never worked.

Nvidia driver for my geforce Fx 5600 card is running smooth now too.

Can I get a working compiz on Tinyme 2008?

KDulcimer:

Edit ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh and remove these two lines:

nitrogen --restore &
idesk &
(The lines may differ slightly.)


Rearrange Icons on desktop

Desktop Icons: I like to place various icons on desktop at different spots, in KDE it`s easy but after playing around for quite some time with TinyMe desktop icons I could not figure out how to rearrage them, they are fixed, what`s the clue?

Lord UnR34l & KDulcimer:

To move the icons, you should be able to right-click and drag.

To stop Conky (the system monitor) from appearing on desktop

I dont want the system log being showed on my desktop in right upper corner, is there any way to remove it??

Lord UnR34l:

Go to home->.config (there is a dot in front of " config " - this is a hidden folder (to see them go in pcmanfm to view -> show hidden files)) -> openbox->autostart.sh and from it delete the "conky&" line, save the file and re-log in.

In anycase if you delete something more you can restore theautostart.sh file by copying it from live cd as root and pasting it to openbox directory in home.

I am posting my Tinyme Desktop screenshot taken with ksnapshot here at the top.

Tinyme is simply amazing and radically simple.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Wallpapers for Clive Midwinter


Few Vista Wallpapers. I am uploading these because a friend wanted to have one of these. Have fun with the kool looking M$ wallpapers.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

A PCLinuxOS Blog


I was looking for some information regarding PCLinuxOS and a blog page ran by Manmath Sahu popped out in front of me.


This guy is a true Fan of PCLinuxOS and I guess all home users can benefit from his writings.He is collecting important information and write about howtos and much more about PCLinuxOS and GNU/Linux in general .


I will mark it as a "must read" in my favourites.


Remasterme PCLinuxOS I A Gem Tool for Home Users

PCLinuxOS offers a small but nice package called "mklivecd" that will make an identical , and exact clone of your system if ran properly.

This tool will let you make a clean ISO of your custom made PCLinuxOS which you can write to a CD/DVD depending upon the size of the ISO that was generated from your running system.


A simple command "mklivecd new.iso" as root in shell will do the job for you promptly and without much haste. I have tried it many times and my copies of remastered PCLinuxOS are perfectly out of the box on my system in case I ever need to do a fresh install .

PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime comes with a GUI for mklivecd or remaster. It works fine too but the choice of adding extra options in adding advanced configuration of your remaster copy is little confusing and I did not find any documentations for it either. Besides it also failed on me many times while I was trying to make a remaster copy so I quit using it . But I guess it might work for others as Texstar and his team has spent lots of efforts in making this tools with GUI so it has to work or else they won`t include it in PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime.

I urge all home users to try using this nice tool to have a back up of their systems. There are few important points to be borne in mind before you plan to make a remaster of your system.

1: It is better to make a remaster of custom built functional system which worked for you flawlessly.
2. Remove all cache by ~apt-get clean command before you make your remaster as this will clean all unwanted data and lessen the size of your ISO .
3. Remove all data from your home directory because it will be copied into your ISO automatically increasing the size of your ISO.
4. Once you have successfully generated the ISO, do its md5sums and write it down so that you can later compare the md5sums of your burned CD/DVD and your remastered ISO.
5. Use CDRW/DVDRW for burning your remastered ISO as you would be making more and more ISOs later and you can always write them to same media.

I hope these small notes will help a lot of people to benefit from this amazing package that PCLinuxOS offers. I am sure it works for everybody as it does for me.