Brief update: After about 11 years the Presario finally gave up the ghost. Consequently I won’t be describing the process of making a usable system out of it.
BUT: there is a new computer in my life with a ridiculously big hard disc just begging for a Gentoo installation, so maybe one day I will return to it.
AAARGH! I’d forgotten the mockery of aesthetics that is “fonts in Linux.” Since I work with Classical Greek, I need to be able to distinguish otherwise incidental markings (e.g., whether an accent leans right or left).
Also, the ability to type classical Greek and use the extended Latin keymap is almost mandatory for work on web browsers. Fortunately, with LaTeX, I can produce beautiful documents with nothing more than a text editor (VIM, of course).
So we begin here for on our journey from serviceable legibility to joyous eyes.
I can’t recommend that guide strongly enough. Although I didn’t update all of my packages yet, it took a few minutes and now things are greatly de-uglified.
Dropbox is a tool that syncs a particular folder on your computer with the cloud, in a sense it’s an instant backup of the most recent changes. You can then access this folder via the internet or on any other computer with Dropbox installed. In other words, it’s especially handy when your computer stops working and the manufacturer avoids honoring its service contract.
<code># emerge dropbox</code>
does install something, but it is not clear how to get Dropbox up and running from there. Consequently, I’ve uninstalled the Gentoo package and gone to Dropbox’s Linux page, and I’m following their install procedure.
And that was about the easiest install I’ve done on Linux. Works great, but being a bit unsophisticated on the Linux side, I’ll have to do some tinkering to get the script to start automatically.
While proctoring my students’ final I’ve been tweaking the system a bit (after finally getting on UT’s Restricted network) and now I’m going to try to get ACPI up and running so I can suspend to disk instead of shutting down every time the computer needs to be moved. Gentoo is as accommodating as ever with their guides.
My goal is that the computer will enter a hibernate-like state when the lid is closed.
I’m trying out Uswsusp instead of TuxOnIce because I don’t want to use a different kernel and I like the idea of keeping everything in user space, as described on this page.
I have had to add static-libs to my USE flags, and they’re getting a little long. Ah well.
Well! The important things have been taken care of now.
Before I call it a night, though, there are a few important things I want to do:
In the next couple of weeks I would like to post a concise description of my efforts that might help guide me through this process in the future and might help other folks first.
UPDATE: I will add things as they occur to me in this list, but the priority for these is lower.
Ha! It seems that the problem was with my router. I have a Cisco Linksys E1000 capable of b/g, n, or mixed speeds. It seems that there was a problem with the mixed setting, and when I brought it down to b/g connection was possible! Of course, I did have to reset the router to factory defaults and I haven’t tried security yet, but who cares! I’m going for a beer to celebrate.
UPDATE: Oh yeah! I’m posting this from the Compaq with the wireless up and running!
Ugh, it looks like I need the gtk library for this. Looking at a long install time for wicd.
*stretch*
Alright, now in /etc/rc.conf I’m adding
rc_hotplug="!net.eth* !net.wlan*"
As suggested after wicd emerged.
I’m also instructed to update /etc/pam.d/system-login
Gentoo has a guide (of course!) for wicd which I will follow until I don’t.
# /etc/init.d/wicd start
works.
Wicd connects to the router, but I can’t connect to any other computer
I love fluxbox! It’s easy on the system and the eyes. By default it’s little more than an empty desktop with a background.
As with most processes in this endeavor, I begging with Gentoo’s fluxbox HOWTO
So I’ll unmerge twm and xterm. They don’t take up much space, but they’re ugly and will soon be redundant.
I’m adding truetype and vim-syntax to my USE flags in /etc/make.conf and then:
# emerge fluxbox xlockmore eterm
Next, we install a graphical login manager. With it, I can have the desktop environment start at boot with a login screen. Gentoo recommends slim, so that’s next up.
I need to edit /etc/conf.d/xdm with
DISPLAYMANAGER="slim"
Once I know it works, I’ll add it to the run level with:
# rc-update add xdm default
followed by some eye-candy in the form of themes and wallpapers.
Now we try to start things up with
# /etc/init.d/xdm start
Fortunately the login comes up and looks pretty. Unfortunately, Whether I log in as root or my user I get
Failed to execute log in command
To fix this I followed this forum posting:
# echo "XSESSION=fluxbox > /etc/env.d/90xsession
And when logging in, I need to press f1 to select fluxbox.
Also, since I uninstalled xterm I needed to replace the instances of ‘xterm’ in ~/.fluxbox/menu with ‘eterm’
Hmm, for some reason eterm isn’t coming up, which makes the desktop kinda useless :/ So back to xterm and I can worry about prettying things up later.
Make fluxbox the default and start it at boot to polish it off.
Okay, now back to wireless.
This is where the big memory savings come.
X
Server Configuration How-to is much less
aggravating than the wireless, and that’s what I’ll be using here.
Before a windowing environment is installed I need to emerge the X Window Server
Overnight I emerged the xorg-drivers and attendant packages. I prefer a minimalist environment, somewhat by necessity, so in /etc/make.conf, I have the following:
USE="-gtk -gnome -qt4 -kde -cdr ncirses libkms dvd alsa X acpi ipod latex unicode pcmcia wifi
This will avoid installing the infrastructure of the gnome and KDE windowing environments, two very nice systems, but a little resource intensive for a decades old computer.
The next step:
emerge xorg-server
making sure that udev is in the USE flags for this package.
Now I install the barest of bones window manager and terminal:
emerge twm xterm
And the initial test
$ startx
It’s not pretty, but it works!
Next up, fluxbox.
Okay, I found this old guide that seems like progress. The basic steps
I took:
update-modules
ndiswrapper -i lsbcmnds.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper
vim /etc/conf.d/modules
modules="ndiswrapper" (to add it at boot)Now I can scan for wireless networks, and I can start wireless services, and even got assigned an ip address, but I cannot ping an outside address.
It seems that the card is working, now I need to check some settings, such as might be done with wicd, although it requires a desktop interface. sigh.
Skipped pub quiz tonight in exchange for (modest) progress. Also, I think it’s below freezing outside. At least below 50°, in any case just as bad.
