Brandon’s Blog

While carving pumkins with the Kids tonight for Holloween I got an idea in my head, “Hey the Ubuntu Logo would look spiffy on there”, so i took myself back to the store and got “Dad” a pumkin to carve up. Below are the results ( Click for larger image ) .

So did I do it Justice ?

Well it seems Jono and the guys over at LugRadio think I have “… the best american accent …” even though I’ve only been on the show one time. Go grab the New Episode Season 5 Show 3 and check those guys out, simply the best Linux related Podcast PEROID, no if’s, and’s, or squealing pigs about it.

[ Note: Check arround 1 hour 5 minutes and 20 seconds in to listen to why I wrote this blogpost with the Deliverance “theme” , where Adam Sweet and Jono Bacon start the hilarious bit when reading an email from Wade Olson about KDE4 , fskin Classic ]

Well this post is mostly just notes for myself , if someone else benifets from them great.

I have an old Intel P200 mhz , 128mb RAM, and a 6GB HDD I wanted to setup as a Web ( Dillo ) and IRC ( irssi ) station.

Since it was to be lightweight , for personal reasons I decided to use fluxbox ( not fluxbuntu ) so I installed a from a Ubuntu server edition disk and then just installed fluxbox , dillo, and irssi from there. Thats the normal boring stuff, here is the stuff i need to rember.

I wanted this system to boot right into Fluxbox , no login, no anything, just post then Desktop so I did the following:

Installed GCC
sudo apt-get install build-essential


Created a text file called autologin.c with the following:
int main() {
execlp( "login", "login", "-f", "brandon", 0);
}

( Note: Replace “brandon” with your login name ) and staticly compiled it, striped it, then put it in /usr/local/sbin :
gcc -static autologin.c -o autologin
strip autologin
sudo cp autologin /usr/local/sbin/


Now to make it run this when tty1 is created, edit /etc/event.d/tty1 and look for
exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

And change it to
exec /sbin/getty -n -l /usr/local/sbin/autologin 38400 tty1


( Now uninstall KDM/GDM if you are not using a server install )
At this point we will be autologed in when the system boots up , but only to a command prompt requiring the command `startx` to be run to get into fluxbox, so here is how to make fluxbox autorun on login

Create a file ( or edit the existing one ) called .bash_profile ( note the . in front ) in your home directory ( e.g. ~/.bash_profile ) and add the following :
if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]; then
startx
fi

and also a file ~/.xinitrc with
idesk &
sleep 2
exec startfluxbox

( Note: only use the idesk line if you have idesk installed for icons and such on fluxbox )

Thats it, save all open files and reboot, you should be greeted with a fluxbox desktop for a single user system with low end specs.

Update: Yes I know GDM/KDM/XDM can “autologin” but I wanted to have a few running processes as possible to conserv CPU and RAM on this low end box.

UPDATE: For this post I lost all ( 10 ) comments due to a db corruption, I’ll be trying to restore them asap.

Isnt calling someone names suppose to wear off by the end of your first year in primary school?

Then why do people in the Ubuntu Community and the Linux Community ( without calling any names out ) insist on refering to Microsoft as M$ or Microshaft or a plenthora of other mostly derogitory names. [ see just a quick search of only Ubuntu Resources I made to cite here ]

This only makes us look childish IMHO, what d you think? Personally I have met a few Microsoft Employees and read through some MS Dev Blogs at blogs.msdn.com and never seen Linux or Ubuntu refered to in such a manner, in fact some even make a point to refer to it as GNU/Linux etc. Maybe I’m way off base here and you all will leave comments telling me so, but I just had to get this off my chest.

Started by Matthew Helmke and Jorge Castro Here is my B.C. Rich warlock I play on occasion. ( Click for Larger Picture )