Sunday 14 September 2008

Where next ?

A good question (!)

Here is the wishlist I will be less than happy if I do not succeed in geting running. I may be back to edit this in good time (!)
  • X Windows (that may be fun with the webbooks 1024x600 screen)
  • GNOME (see comment above)
  • Wireless Networking (with wifi-radar)
  • OpenOffice
  • Email, Web, Pidgin
  • Alsa Sound
  • Some means to play youtube videos and the like
  • Some means to run my webcam
  • A port of the wader-gtk utility to permit the webbook to once again connect me to the mobile internet !
I am hoping the work I have to do to achieve this is little more, in most cases, than the work already documented to such high standards in the Arch Wiki. If so, the next few entries will be sparse. SOMEHOW though I don't think that is going to happen easily.

Well, I started off by reading the Official Arch Linux Install Guide and the first thing I thought I ought to install above and beyond the norm was abs. With that out of the way I barnstormed on to install Xorg.

Installing the basic Xorg system needed no more than the slavish following of the details in the Arch Wiki and an edit in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file created by hwd. I removed all the "modelines" and set a single screen size, 1024x600, for the one resolution I wanted, and I deleted all the rest.

One thing that must be done before you load and auto-start gdm is the setting up of a non privileged user account otherwise you enter an endless loop where your attempts to log in as 'root' are blocked because by default gdm is configured to ban root login. It's a pity the arch docs don't bother warning you of this, one day I will get caught out by it (!)

Oh yeah, before I forget. In the arch wiki for gnome is a near-throwaway comment about adding "portmap, fam and hal" to the daemons line in /etc/rc.conf. Don't forget to do it !

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