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vijay's weblog

Ahead of iPAD

The Touch Book seems to be way ahead of iPAD. It is based on open standards, gives more choices and freedom to the user. The Touch Book comes with an optimized home-made Linux-based OS. With a simple finger press at startup, the Touch Book will run either its own AI OS, Ubuntu, or Android. Mer, Gentoo have also been adapted to the Touch Book. Google Chrome OS and Maemo are on their way! The Touch Book uses an innovative ARM processor from Texas Instruments. Like a cellphone, it is always-on, so there is no need to reboot each time. It also promises a completey silent operation. It has a detachable keyboard and a 3D touch screen interface. 

 

Slax replaces Cygwin

On my Windows machine, I have replaced Cygwin with Slax, running in VirtualBox.  Slax is a small but full-featured Linux distribution,  ideal for running a complete Linux development environment in Windows.  The default installation is aimed for normal desktop users.  It is possible to build your own Slax ISO by following the easy steps given here.   Slax has a great module system.  New application modules can be activated on the fly.  All development tools - compilers, editors and various language interpreters are available as Slax modules. 

Follow these steps to get Slax working in VirtualBox (assuming that you already have some experience installing Linux):

1. Create a new generic Linux Virtual Machine with 256MB RAM and an 8GB (less will do) dynamically expanding hard drive.
2. Boot from the default Slax ISO, and go to a shell.
3. Create a new partition (say /dev/hda1) using fdisk by using the entire HDD.  Make this partition bootable.
4. Format the partition to FAT32:   mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda1
5. Mount this partition to /mnt/hda1:  mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
6. Copy the /boot and /slax folders from the CD to /mnt/hda1:  

           cp -R /mnt/hdc/boot /mnt/hda1
           cp -R /mnt/hdc/slax /mnt/hda1

7. Configure Slax to boot from the HDD:

           cd /mnt/hda1/boot
           ./bootinst.sh
           ./liloinst.sh

Optional:

8. Create some swap space on the HDD (here we make it 200MB):

          mkfileswap /mnt/hda1/swapfile 200
          mkswap /mnt/hda1/swapfile
     swapon /mnt/hda1/swapfile
9. Go to the modules page and download or activate the applications you need. (also see the note below)
10. Set the root password using passwd command. (the default root password is 'toor').
11. Create a new user for normal use with the adduser command.
12. If you need a lightweight window manager, you can configure to use FluxBox, instead of KDE.
     For this, open the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc in a text editor and change the last line to startfluxbox.
     (The default entry will be startkde)
13 Reboot the system. 

Note: The modules activated from the browser will be lost once you reboot the system.  If you download the modules to /mnt/hda1/slax/modules, they will be automatically activated on system start-up.  You can also use the activate and deactivate commands to dynamically add and remove applications from your system.

Puppy Linux

Made my sister's old computer usable with the help of Puppy Linux. An amazing Linux distribution! This machine has a 1700 Mhz single core processor, 256 MB RAM and a 40 GB HDD. Even on this "outdated" configuration, Puppy boots in less than 20 seconds and is really responsive. She can browse the net and use a word processor to prepare her projects. Puppy needs only 100 MB of HD space, still it is not a frugal distribution. There are lots of useful software - for playing music, videos and doing graphics. Before throwing away your old hardware, give Puppy a try. You can use it even if your hard drive is broken - boot from the CD and save your data to a USB stick!