Nigel's IT rants & raves

Back to Crunchbang!

nogg321 — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:43:09 +0000

haven’t posted for a while, must do more!

Put Crunchbang (Jaunty) on my trusty old HP NC6000 and it just hums along. I seem to throw anything at it and it keeps saying ‘gimme more!’

Everything just seems to work, wireless, superkeys, mousepad (even with 2 finger sliding!) all right out of the ‘box’!

I thought I would try virtualbox, and it runs one vm quite happily, and I have an XP and a Statler now (NOT at the same time – don’t want to make it scream in pain!). I also wanted to play with redhat(ish) so I installed ClearOS, but even though its just a console, it does run at 100% so may have to find a smaller webserver – any ideas?

Anyway, lovin’ it at the moment. It runs everything I need skype, pidgin, gwibber (would like to go Pino, but need Statler for that – deps etc.), canto (also need Statler for latest version), calcurse, firefox, alpine,but I must admit I am scared (it might not be so perfect with Statler)

Anyway, bye for now, keep you posted, Nigel

Puppy linux review

nogg321 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:21:48 +0000

hello all

this is a quick review of Puppy linux (4.3.1). It’s a distro I just keep coming back to having tried many others.

Pros: it is small and economical on resources so will run on virtually any PC. It is by far the easiest to put on a usb stick – just tell it to and confirm a few other buttons and it’s done, others need to download this and copy that, but not Puppy! There is a thriving community and many MANY people contribute s/w for all to use with just a click-n-go type install. It will also save your settings for use after shutdown so it can apply them when you restart Puppy.

Cons: It doesn’t look like a typical linux installed system – this is not a problem, just to bare in mind – newbies can just use it for browsing, playing music all the normal things – gurus can explore deeper to make it do even more. If you do trash it, you can re-install in about 5 mins.

Note: you have to keep an eye on your home directory as this gets saved every half hour and relies on a pup-save file to contain it. A problem I have found is that most apps tend to default downloading stuff into your home directory and this can fill the save file file. So either move stuff out after downloading or download to another disk (probably internal) to save space.

I have tried other linuxes (latest was Crunchbang) but they all become bloated which is the reason I left MS behind a long time ago! I also like carrying a usb stick instead of a laptop!

So feel free to reply here with comments – good or bad!

bye bye HP DV2500

nogg321 — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:31:29 +0000

Well, it has finally bought the farm!

This HP piece of *%$£ now only lasts half an hour without the screen imploding.

Shame as it is a nice spec 160Gb disk, intel duo 2Ghz, wifi and looks the part. But that is it with HP – everything ‘looks’ the part. so beware (I stick to their printers from now on)

However if HP want to improve their image by replacing it (one month out of warranty when it went ka-blooey) feel free to get in touch!

I might try running freenas on it as a backup server, as I won’t need to touch the keys or screen, but it seems such a waste!!

more crunchbang (fixed!)

nogg321 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:16:21 +0000

it’s working well on my hp dv2000 but I have icons in the tray area which just disappear after a while/sometimes. The wireless one stays but sometimes the battery/charge and loudspeaker ones appear and stay for a while nd then disappear again.

Anyone got a clue?
regards Nigel

it seems that gnome-power-manager was set to display icon only when charging or discharging…!

lug radio live

nogg321 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:30:49 +0000

looking forward to lugradio live and oggcamp this weekend.

finally meet the linux outlaws and maybe have a drink or 2…

see you there…

8 screens of death!

nogg321 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:24:56 +0000

so far so good. I only get the ’8 screens of death’ when it shuts down and is about to power off! I have set conky up to monitor temps and everything seems to hover at the 50 ish mark.

HP laptop with CB

nogg321 — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:39:32 +0000

now trying CB on a HP DV2500 laptop which Iwas given to sort a problem where it overheats running Vista and the screen goes to 8 ‘mini’ screens totally at random. Word from the net appears to say this model has this problem shortly after warranty expires. Splatted Vista with CB to see if a less hungry OS will cope with it.

regards Nigel

Crunchbang update

nogg321 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:13:45 +0000

going really well so far.
I plugged in my HP all-in-one and it loaded the drivers and asked if I would like a test print!
(I thought only windows did this sort of thing – I’m used to a bit of a struggle with linux)
As the Linux Outlaws say “I like the pain of making stuff work in linux!

Crunchbang

nogg321 — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:40:57 +0000

Haven’t written for a while…

just came across Crunchbang (or #!) and am impressed. Was getting fed up with Kubuntu and Kde, as they are becoming a bit too unwieldy and bloaty! So I looked around for another ‘debian’ distro (I like apt-get too much to try anything else!) and this fitted the bill.

Had my usual DWL520 wireless problem but decided to sort it properly as Canonical (or Debian) won’t. I have to install without the card, reboot and blacklist the driver, shutdown, install the card and the set up ndiswrapper – works a treat now!

Anyway it’s all good now and I will report back with an update soon.
regards Nigel

ULTILEX

nogg321 — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:21:29 +0000

Hello all.

Just came across a new (to me) distro called Ultilex.

It is a bootable cd with a difference. When it boots, it goes to a menu of 5 different distros: Slax, Puppy, Tiny Core, PartedMagic and SystemRescueCD. Even more than this each distro has a number of boot options to install on I think any type of intel system, even quite small/old systems. There are even some 64bit options as well.

I have tried several in Virtualbox and they all seem to work well.
It just gets better! – there are also instructions to put it all on a usb stick. I haven’t found any downside to this yet, so it will become my main ‘rescue’ cd from now on and will repace several others.

Keep an eye on this ‘cos its going to do well!

http://ultilex.linux-bg.org/smf