linux Archives - Page 13 of 28 - Yet Another Linux Blog

Customizing PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime

So, HowtoForge has a perfect desktop for PCLinuxOS 2007…how about something similar for 2008 MiniMe? I won’t go into near as much detail as they do there but I’ll go over how I get my desktop up and rolling after a fresh install of PCLinuxOS Minime 2008.

Putting it Together — Build Your Own PCLOS

MiniMe is the lesser known offspring of PCLinuxOS 2007 that ships with a 2.6.22.15 kernel and is a minimalistic installation of the KDE desktop 3.5.9. Texstar provides this distribution for those wanting to remaster their installations…it’s a base for other remastered projects like PCLinuxOS Gnome. Remastering and the Make LiveCD wizard enable users to customize their distribution and make a bootable backup CD with all their customizations OR release their own customized distribution. You can also use the Make LiveUSB wizard to create your very own thumbdrive PCLinuxOS.

I found it strange that no one had written anything about MimiMe-to on getting PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniMe up and running as a desktop replacement so I decided to give it a go. The aim of this article isn’t to copy Howtoforge’s great series on perfect installations…but to show how I get PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime up to a perfect installation for me. This means all web video, audio, fonts, and tools I need are installed. So let’s get at it.

What Do We Need?

First and foremost, do a complete upgrade of your fresh installed system. Open Synaptic >> Reload >> Mark all Upgrades >> Apply. It’s going to take a while to get all the updates you’ll need. Do NOT enable the testing repository until after you install your graphics driver at the end of this article…just perform a straight update from main.

Now let’s start installing stuff that is needed on a daily basis. I’m more of a lightweight type of guy so I don’t need robust office applications so my tastes may not line up with yours. Please substitute applications where you see fit…the repositories most likely have them.

To give a brief, high level overview of my daily use applications:

firefox3
Opera
K3B
konversation
pidgin
skype_static
koffice
gimp
Amarok
claws-mail
kdeaddons-kate
kdeaddons-ark
kdegraphics-ksnapshot (for taking screenshots)

Those are the high level applications I use on a daily basis to get things done. Whenever you are prompted to mark other packages for install, go ahead and and choose “mark”. Click apply and let the your daily use applications install.

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YALB – Now Brought to you by Evolution Studios

Some of you may have noticed a few blips in RSS feeds during the last month or so. The blips were caused by two things..

I switched from Serendipity Blogging Engine to WordPress
YALB gained a sponsor for hosting

Now, I’ve been running the new blogging engine and software for over a month now so that I could form an opinion on both of these items. I’m happy to say that WordPress fits the bill quite nicely (more on that in later posts)…but that my host is the BEST part of the changes that have happened.

Evolution Studios offered me some server space on their servers…Linux of course…and not a moment too soon. My old account was beginning to crawl with latent page loads and the service had grown latent as well. Evolution Studios stepped in and made me a great offer and asked that I evaluate things and post my honest opinion (whether good or bad) of how the transition went and how well the service is.

Just some background on Evolution Studios: They power all of the media behind ping.fm and chris.pirillo.com (yes, THAT Chris Pirillo). Those two sites alone generate a huge amount of traffic and have elected to go with evolutionstudios.org to be their media workhorse.

I can honestly say that both the transition and service went beyond my expectations. Not only did I have one of their engineers helping me every step of the way, I was able to approach that engineer with all of my questions being answered in REAL TIME…which was fantastic.

So why all the hoopla? Why would I go out of my way to give these guys a “thumbs up”? One word…or URL rather. Ping.fm is one of their clients. I use ping.fm on a daily basis…it allows me to make one post to ALL my social networks via Instant Message or igoogle page widget. It’s fast and easy. And all of their media is powered by Evolution Studios. So, despite having HUGE customers like Chris Pirillo and ping.fm which both have millions of users on a daily basis…they still found the time to hold my hand through the migration and bent over backwards to make my hosting experience BEYOND EXCELLENT. I think these guys will continue to grow and will continue to bring on like minded individuals who are courteous and professional…and I think their clients will benefit.

I asked Evolution Studios if they were having any specials this week so that I could tell everyone that reads my blog about them and they wanted to offer readers here a deal. The first 100 users referred through Yet Another Linux Blog will receive a $20 coupon to go toward any hosting plans purchased. If this sounds like a good deal or you just want to check the host out, visit Evolution Studios today. The coupon code is “devnet“. Remember, that’s the first 100 openings so space is limited! Let Evolution Studios show you what EXCELLENT products and services are all about 🙂

PCLinuxOS Repositories

Something that is asked about quite a bit in the PCLinuxOS support IRC channel is “how to change repositories”. One of the main reasons this is needed is that not all repositories are reachable depending on your geographic location. Some of the repositories are also down at random intervals. To equip the standard PCLinuxOS user with how to change repos, we first need to understand how the repository is structured, how the developers use the repositories, and how the community should make use of repositories.

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Some Random Linux Observations

Ubuntu is the only Linux distro I know of that has its alpha
releases slashdotted and dugg…which is a real shame; I think there
are more that deserve this treatment from linux media sites.
Different Linux distros and desktop camps should recognize their differences as providing choice instead of being something that makes them different.
They all have the same goals…to get people using open source software
and to provide a great experience for the user. Differences are always
looked down upon. Choice is usually a positive thing. We should be
positive.
When designing a new car, automobile manufacturers don’t
build it first and then draft it out on paper. Likewise, Linux architects should not write the code first before creating a draft or set of goals
(whether it be a paper draft, documentation, or QA test cases) that visualize where you want to go. A visual goal is better than written or said one.
For
every Penguin Pete, there is a Ken Starks. There are times when one
outweighs the other. The nice part is that in the Linux community, the
Ken Starks have a longer lasting impact and touch more lives.
The Linux Desktop will never be “finished” and for that I am VERY glad.
Programmers should be more like the code they write…without bias, structured, and incapable of “talking down”.
Every distro ships with at least one thing broken.
Every distro ships with at least two things broken.
Every distro ships with things broken.
If Linux were a dog, it would NOT be purebred.
People
can get excited about Linux because they can take part in it. People
can’t get excited about Microsoft because they can’t take part in it. It’s the difference between playing in the game and being on the sideline wishing you were in the game.
Categorizing something divides; why are we categorizing Linux and developers?
Linux fits well into big business, but big business does not fit well into Linux

By no means are these meant to point fingers…they are just observations. Do you share some? Do you have more to provide? Please, let me know what you’ve seen in or out of your Linux community.

KDE: Right Click, Extract Here

I’ve been hunting for a post on how to have KDE “extract here” like Foresight Gnome edition does (it’s really handy to one click extract archives). Post after post found via Google did nothing at all to help me out. Most tried to have you read how to do this manually by creating your own service menu and they would use xterm to extract. I wanted to use ark…mainly because it’s there and it’s a gui.

Then I decided to search KDE-Apps.org and viola! I found it. A handy little tool that allows you to right click on any archive and “extract here” with Ark. Here’s how to install it.

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4 Little Known Thunderbird Extensions

I recently searched through the mozilla thunderbird extensions website and found 4 extensions that I didn’t know about that actually prove to be quite useful. I use Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 on Foresight Linux and have tested all of these extensions and verified that they work on that environment. Hopefully, they’ll help someone craft a more enjoyable email experience 🙂

Search for Sender

If you’re like me, you like to group like items together in your inbox. With this extension, you can group emails from the same sender as quickly as a right click. Really, it’s just a shortcut that places the sender email up into the search box and searches for you. The nice part is, with this extension, you don’t have to type it. Quick, easy, and simple. This has quickly become an extension that I cannot live without.

SyncMab

SyncMab is an extension similar to foxmarks for Firefox. With foxmarks, you keep all your bookmarks on a central server of your choosing so that your bookmarks are the same across all computers you use that have Firefox installed. This is perfect for me since I have a set of work bookmarks and home bookmarks and like to be able to switch back and forth between them. But what about thunderbird? It doesn’t have bookmarks right? Exactly, but it does have contacts in your addressbook! So, you’ll be able to save your contacts to a server of your choosing and then on another computer with thunderbird you can synchronize your contacts by downloading that file using SyncMab. It’s brilliant and allows you to always have the same contacts across operating systems, across computers, and even to maintain multiple addressbooks 🙂

Display Quota

This extension will display a small graphic in Thunderbird that tells you how much space you have left in your IMAP mail account and can warn you when you get close to filling up. This might not be too useful for those of you that use IMAP with huge quotas (gmail) but for others, it may be. I have heard that some users do not like the popup that displays for warning on this extension. For those users, Thunderbird has a built in function you can enable:

Open your configuration editor in Thunderbird and find the following keys:

mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show – % when quota should show up
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning – % when quota becomes yellow
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical – % when quota becomes red

Thanks to goddess-gate.com for information on how to do this.

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