I am going to love antiX

I tested two Live CDs today. The first one was Debian LXDE Live downloaded from cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current-live/i386/iso-cd/ It booted into nice LXDE Desktop with GIMP and OO apart from usual LXDE software. But there was no Network Manager and since my present router is not connected to NIC I had to manually configure the USB router by editing /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf But it is a good Live CD for machines having as low as 64 MB RAM. The Live CD does not have an installer and you can only have frugal type of install on hard disk.

The next Live CD was antiX-M8 'Intifada!' with IceWM as default Window Manager but believe me no distribution has such lovely IceWM fully configured:


I had Debian Lenny installed on one partition since Sep 08 which was not updated and the updates were huge. I decided to replace Debian Lenny with antiX since it is based on Debian Lenny with 2.6.27 Kernel.

Flash MPEG everything just works out of the box.

I am going to love antiX.

Enjoying the latest software on Arch Linux

I had installed Arch Linux on one of the partition in Sep 2008 but did not use it much since I was forced to use vesa driver because ati driver had a bug and it did not work on secondary monitor. Although Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron had the same bug I could update the driver through Debian Sid in June 2008 after the bug was removed.

Arch Linux is a rolling distribution and latest packages are periodically transferred from testing to main repositories and you need to just upgrade the packages through pacman.

Xorg 7.4 was moved to extra repository on 30th Nov 2008 and I was eager to use it to test the driver. I upgraded Xorg and on reboot found that although the ati driver worked for the secondary monitor the touchpad did not work. After exploring I found that this version of Xorg had input hotplugging enabled by defaut. After reading on this page I added the following packages:
xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-vmmouse xf86-input-synaptics

and it worked.

Then I did the system wide upgrade and now I have:
Linux Kernel 2.6.28
Xorg 7.4 (xserver 1.5.3) working without xorg.conf
Gnome 2.24
Open Office 3.0.1
GIMP 2.6.4
All latest packages on LXDE

Upgrading to Open Office 3.0 on Ubuntu

Open Office 3.0 has been released but it is not available on Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10. Fortunately it is available on Launchpad repository. Add the following repository to your software sources:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

Replace hardy with intrepid if you are running Ubuntu 8.10.

Get the PGP Key from the following URL:
http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x60D11217247D1CFF

Save the PGP Key to a text file and add it through Authentication tab and click Import Key File… on Software sources.

If you already have Open Office 2.4 you can do:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

otherwise you can install the entire office suite through:
$ sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Making custom Ubuntu Live CD using Remastersys

I use LXDE desktop on Ubuntu and wanted to make a Live CD from the hard disk installation. It was so easy using Remastersys.

I added Remastersys repositories to the sources:
deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/

Then installed Remastersys:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install remastersys

There was a menu entry "Remastersys backup" which I clicked, selected "Dist" and clicked on ok.

After some time "customdist.iso" was created in /home/remastersys/remastersys

I burned the iso to a CD and it works.

My custom distribution is Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on LXDE with all updates, gnome-games, Brasero, Mplayer, GPIC Viewer, xpdf, Synaptic, Firefox 3.0.5 (with Adobe Flash Player), Pidgin, Transmission, OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, PCManFM, Leafpad, Xarchiver. The size of the iso is 686.5 MB

My review of KDE 4.2

I am not a fan of KDE or Gnome since both have become too heavy for the kind of machines I use but I try when something new comes up. I had tried KDE 4.0 last year and wrote about the Desktop Widgets.

Since KDE 4.2 is having many new features i decided to install it. I have Ubuntu 8.04 on this machine but KDE 4.2 is not available for this version. I decided to install Kubuntu 8.10 for a change. After installation I applied all the updates. Then added the following repository:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ubuntu intrepid main

and the package signing key through the command:
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 493B3065 && gpg --export -a 493B3065 | sudo apt-key add -

Then updated through Adept Updater tool in the system tray.

After reboot it was KDE 4.2.

Some people don't like the application launcher of KDE 4 for them the old launcher has been added as a widget called traditional menu based launcher. There are many widgets and I have added Analog clock, CPU Temperature, weather, Twitter and Calculator and you can see them on the screenshot below:


In addition the KDE Window Manager has Desktop effects like COMPIZ and you can see the cube below: