Got Ipod and gtkpod working. Found X-Fools on the net. Now getting NVU.

KDM background

Very obsessed with the time it takes for my computer to boot up and the number of processes that are running. Found some processes called portmap, postfix, mdnsd, hal, dbus. Googled for them. Apparently portmap is something for nfs and nis (or was it nic??), postfix is for some mail server, mdnsd is for apple rendezvous and hal and dbus are something to autodetect hardware (I think...). Anyway, fat lot of good those informations had... what in the world do they mean??? (I'm half-computer-illiterate). In the end... I just disabled all of them. So far system still boots up fine. I think I don't need hal and dbus since I mount all my usb-drives/cd/dvd/ and what-nots by myself.

Timed the boot up process. From the time I pressed 'Enter' in the Grub screen to the time kdm appeared, it took 50 seconds. And it took Fluxbox 5-6 seconds to load after I've keyed in my password. Prima!

Also disabled the kdm theme today. Although I've chosen a nice tux picture as a background for kdm login screen, it insisted on displaying an ugly green SuSE background each time. Finally figured out why.

$vim /etc/opt/kde3/share/config/kdm/kdmrc

## Edited this line and entered false instead of true:
UseTheme=false

## In order to edit background picture without logging into KDE, edit this file:
/etc/opt/kde3/share/config/kdm/backgroundrc

All in all, a very satisfying day.

Fluxbox rocks!

Very very pleased with Fluxbox... I like it even better than Xfce4. :D

Found a new system monitor application called 'torsmo'. Very neat and clean. Now I'm torn between a simple system monitor or one with skins to choose from...

Figured out how to get shutdown and reboot to work with normal users (aka non-root users).
1. Open terminal. $su and then '$visudo'
2. Inserted these lines:

User_Alias USERS=username
Cmnd_Alias SHUTDOWN=/sbin/shutdown
USERS ALL=NOPASSWD:SHUTDOWN

3. $vim ~/.fluxbox/menu #to add these lines:

[exec] (Reboot) {sudo /sbin/shutdown now -r}
[exec] (Shutdown) {sudo /sbin/shutdown now -h}

## Ta-da!! Shutdown and reboot work and are listed in the menu.

Now I'm wondering if I want to add icons to the entries in the menu. I like them as they are now. But the menu would look nice also with icons beside each entry... hmmm...

Root-tail, Xterm & Fluxbox Menu

1. Finally found out how those log messages appear on the desktop in all those screenshots. Installed 'root-tail'. Opened terminal. su and then entered this command 'root-tail -color violet -fn lucidasanstypewriter-14 /var/log/messages' and voila! A nice list of log messages on the desktop. I've always wanted to know how to do that!

## To find out what fonts are installed in the com, run 'xlsfonts'.

2. Xterm - doesn't support transparency, unfortunately. Aterm does but there are no rpms for SuSE. So that's put on hold. I just want to get everything in order first before I start compiling (aka screwing-up-my-com-cos-I-don't-know-exactly-what-I'm-doing) any other applications. But the transparent aterm looks sooooo nice. Anyway, I changed the command line for xterm in the ~/.fluxbox/menu to 'xterm -fn lucidasanstypewriter-14 -fg white -bg black' because if I just run 'xterm', it appears with a very ugly font-type and an equally ugly dirty beige (if there's such a colour) background and I have no idea how to change it other than typing this command.

3. Had a lovely time editing the Fluxbox menu in order to insert all my applications in there like xmms, mplayer, gimp, yast, sax and blah blah blah. Chose a system style called Cthulhain - I like it very much!

Gkrellm and Xmodmap

Saw a really cool system monitor on many Fluxbox desktop screenshots. Took some time but in the end managed to find out that the system monitor is a programme with the name 'gkrellm'. Installed it. Choose a nice 'alien' skin and also inserted entries to mount my usb stick and usb hard drive. Entered 'gkrellm -w' so that it will start in a slit and then change the transparency of the slit to 0 and placed it at the centre right side of the screen. Very happy! Still don't quite understand what the slit is though...

I own a Microsoft keyboard and other than the windows key, there are some other keys with the symbols of envelope, music, computer, play, volume, home and so on at the top. Well, time to put those keys to good use!

1. Run 'xev' and find out the keycodes of those keys.
2. Map the keys. Opened a new file called '.Xmodmap' in home directory. Here are the entries:

keycode 162 = XF86Video
keycode 237 = XF86Music
keycode 235 = XF86Tools
keycode 161 = XF86News

## To view the names which those keys can be mapped to. do a 'cat /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB'

3. Edit ~/.fluxbox/keys to add the shortcuts in. Here are my entries:

Mod1 Tab :NextWindow
Mod1 Shift Tab :PrevWindow
Mod1 F1 :Workspace 1
Mod1 F2 :Workspace 2
Mod1 F3 :Workspace 3
Mod1 F4 :Workspace 4
Mod1 F5 :Workspace 5
Mod1 F6 :Workspace 6
Mod1 F7 :Workspace 7
Mod1 F8 :Workspace 8
Mod1 F9 :Workspace 9
Mod1 F10 :Workspace 10
Mod1 F11 :ExecCommand firefox
Mod1 F12 :ExecCommand xterm -fn lucidasanstypewriter-14 -fg white -bg black

Mod1 w :Close
Mod1 m :Minimize
Mod1 Shift m :Maximize
None Super_L :RootMenu

## Multimedia

None XF86Video :ExecCommand gmplayer
None XF86Music :ExecCommand xmms
None XF86Tools :ExecCommand kdesu yast2
None XF86News :ExecCommand acroread

## They are by no means complete. But at least, now I can run some of the more frequently used programmes by just pressing a key or two.

4. Add this line to the startup.sh:
xmodmap /home/username/.Xmodmap

Holiday! Fluxbox: 1. Startup script

Finally ... a much-needed one-week break. I think I'm going to crack soon. Sigh, whatever possessed me to study this course.... anyway, on with Fluxbox. The time it takes for Fluxbox to load as compare to KDE is SOOOO much faster!!

1. Startup script. In order to run commands during startup, I entered eg the fbsetbg -f command in ~/.fluxbox/init under "session.screen0.rootCommand: fbsetbg -f ...". However, as I have some other things that I want to be loaded during startup as well, I created a startup script named "startup.sh" and enter this instead in the init file: "session.screen0.rootCommand: ~/.fluxbox/startup.sh".

In the startup.sh file, I entered these lines

fbsetbg -f /home/username/Personal/Bild/what-is1024.jpg
setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us_intl -variant basic # US international keyboard layout
setxkbmap -option compose:menu # Compose key so that I can type ß
xmodmap /home/username/.Xmodmap # File that contains mapping of multimedia keys
gkrellm -w # a really cool system monitor (the -w is so that it will appear in the slit)

REMEMBER to make startup.sh executable. I didn't and spent some time again racking my brain thinking "Was zum Teufel ist los?!"

Fluxbox

Installed Fluxbox today through YaST. Fine and dandy installation. Still very bare and have no idea how to work on this desktop. First task though:

1. Set the wallpaper. Used fbsetbg
a. "fbsetbg -i" to see if there is any suitable wallpapersetter. Apparently not, as the output was something that said that my wallpapersetter did not support transparency.
b. Installed WindowMaker so that I have wmsetbg. Other alternatives: feh (no idea where to get that)
c. Output of 'fbsetbg -i' this time: wmsetbg is a nice wallpapersetter. You won't have any problems.
c. To set wallpaper: $fbsetbg -f /wherever/your/wallpaper/is.jpg
d. Have to put that in ~/.fluxbox/init file or in a startup script file so that the wallpaper will appear every time I log in. Took a pretty damn long time for me to figure that out.