Tinkering my Arch Linux i3 installation to perfection

Throughout my Linux distro hopping journey, I have steered clear of Arch Linux primarily fueled by my fear that it is something very difficult to learn and is best reserved for advanced users. But then I thought to myself, I have been a Linux user for so long that I can no longer tag myself as a novice or even as an intermediate user. I know that my curiosity will lead me to something new that I would want to try and I know where to find help if I run into issues. Worst case I can always fall back and continue with distros that I am already familiar with.

When I installed Manjaro Mate on my Raspberry pi, I was already making myself familiar with Arch and its nuances. When I dabbled with Manjaro i3 on my laptop, I made myself more comfortable with using i3 as a window manager as against a full-blown DE such as Gnome or Mate. That lead me to consider Arch installation as a minimal system and work my way up to install and configure an i3 desktop on it. If what I end up with, can become my daily driver, I may leave PopOS!’s Cosmic desktop behind for a while.

The official site for Arch Linux was my place to go and get familiar with the steps I needed for the setup. As a disclaimer, all that I try here was done on a VM. So when it comes to installing Arch on my laptop, I know I might still have some issues which I can only deal with when the time comes.

This guide is the place to start. I downloaded the latest 64-bit Arch iso and booted into my virtual machine. The arch iso, barely 800Mb, boots into a barebones terminal with no ui. This is unlike any other distros I have used. But again the idea is a have a minimally functional system and then build your own system with only the components and applications which you want. This makes the setup very lean and purpose-built. I decided to build myself a developer machine with setup and tools to develop, build and run applications in java, python, kotlin, etc. That is where this blog will ultimately lead to.

The barebones setup involves a lot of steps which require connecting to the internet, creating partitions, installing Linux core packages, etc. Arch includes a super useful installation script called “archinstall” which takes away the complexity of manual steps and really simplifies the installation. I opted to use this. Here is a useful guide for using the “archinstall” automated script. I followed all the prompts on the script, choosing to select i3 as the desktop and other sensible defaults for locale, timezone etc. At one point it asks for list of packages to install during the setup. This was a good time to pull in some essential packages before I could start with the config changes that wanted to do for i3. I chose to install the following

firefox pcmanfm file-roller zip unzip

This is really the bare minimum I need to kick off my i3 customization.

I continued with the installation. The script takes care of creating partitions and installing the core system. The download is roughly 550 MB and the installed size is a little over 1.2 GB. Installation took some time though but once done I just rebooted the system.

Upon fresh login, you can really see i3 in its raw configuration. Nothing really looks pretty and that’s where I have written scripts to automate most of it. Actually, I have spent enough time tweaking on a previously installed i3 system. So I could cut things short by copying those config files over and replacing everything in the fresh install. I have done and redone these steps several times to finally have config files that I am happy with. All those scripts are uploaded onto my dropbox account for use.

I launched Firefox, logged into my dropbox account, and downloaded the install scripts that I need. The way I have organized the scripts for the initial setup, dev setup, and some multimedia setup.

Initial setup – This script really takes care of creating appropriate directories under the home folder, copying some wallpaper files and fonts for eye candy. Then it installs the following packages

feh - for setting up wallpaper for arch

alacritty - this is terminal program which I prefer over the default

lxappearcance - for setting up gtk and icon themes

rofi - lightweight text based application launcher. I chose this over synapse after some deliberation.

arc-gtk-theme - for a beautiful dark theme

papirus-icon-theme - for awesome icons

The script also downloads and installs Visual Studio Code which is excellent for coding as well as basic text editing. By the time the script is done. It copies over my custom configs for alacritty, i3 and i3status and sets up rofi for use.

Here are some snapshots of how the system looks after a quick script run.

i3 config changes include tweaks for the main i3 file with some keybindings as below

$mod+d - To launch rofi instead of dmenu

$mod+q - To close window. Removed the Shift key binding for ease of use

$mod+Enter - To launch alacritty instead of default terminal

Print - To take screenshots using scrot

Some more key bindings for logout, shutdown of the system, volume control etc.

Alacritty and Picom config changes to make the windows look more sleek and set some transperancy for windows that are out of focus. This gives a very modern look to an otherwise drab desktop.

So much for eye candy and now I can move on to setting up my dev tools of my choice. This is in the dev setup script

Dev setup – I am looking to install git, python3, java, gradle, maven, kotlin etc. git and python3 can be installed using pacman. But for others I am relying on the use of sdkman which will help me manage the installation of different versions of various tools I need to install. After this, all I need is an IDE such as the IntelliJ Idea Community edition and I would be good to go.

Checking all the things that were installed

Ram usage barely 300MB on initial login

This is where I am stopping at my attempt at creating an Arch-based developer machine with i3 as the windows manager and some other essential packages. This is still a very lean setup. On boot, the RAM usage is barely 300MB which is impressive. In this age of resource-hungry distros which are bloated with several processes running in the background, most of which an average user may not even need, this lean setup is an awesome feat. Of course, the list of software one needs is a personal choice and so from here on I can choose to curate only the software that I really need. I can think of a UI client for git or even a file diff program like Meld. Other choices could be installing programs for multimedia creation and consumption – vlc, mpv , audacious, audacoty, gimp etc or even productivity suite LibreOffice and a pdf reader.

Once the base system is ready you could always add more stuff by being mindful of programs you really need and maybe regularly purging out packages you don’t need.

That’s it, folks. That is how I have been trying to create a perfect Arch Linux i3 installation with software and packages tailored to my needs for a developer’s machine.

Pi Land Adventure 3 – Pop OS

The Pi journey continues with Pop OS. I could quickly get started by flashing the latest pi image onto the micro SD card and booting it right away. The official image is a hefty 2.2GB and does take its time to written on the SD card.

First boot was a familiar experience, since I have been using Pop OS as my daily driver for almost a year. And so I was very curious about its ARM spin. The welcome screen asks you to enter the user details, set up a password, allows some quick selection of themes, dock positions etc and you are ready to go. Pop OS has the cosmos desktop with its window tiling feature which is a breeze to use. One thing I noticed though, that the dock does not auto hide which is annoying and wastes valuable screen real estate.

The RAM usage hovers at 1.7 GB which is definitely on the heavy side and the fresh install of the image takes 7.6 GB disk space. WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity is also not an issue.

The list of applications isn’t that exhaustive, the only good thing being that it came with full Libre Office suite. Even Firefox had to be installed as a snap and not native application. It did not have a audio player either. Things weren’t looking as bright. And the biggest gripe I soon discovered was Pop OS’s inability to update/upgrade or install any more software. Repeated attempts to install unmet dependencies and then continue to install applications like gimp, vlc etc failed.

I just felt like stopping here. What good is this OS if it wont allow to install applications esp when preinstalled list does not fully serves its purpose. I understand Pop OS for Raspberry pi is still nascent and may have a long road ahead. Maybe I will revisit this once it is more mature or at least functions better.

Seems the one Raspberry pi image that I was most excited about has fallen way short of my expectations. Partly because I have come to really like Pop OS as my Linux distro of choice for laptop, maybe it is not yet ready for the pi. I do not think I will hang around beyond this point anymore. Time to flash that micro SD card with something else.

Pi Land Adventure 2 – Manjaro Mate

The next pit stop in the Pi land journey is the Manjaro Mate ARM version which I downloaded from here and flashed onto the micro SD card using Etcher. The Manjaro Mate arm image for Raspberry Pi is 923MB. Flashing it to the micro SD card is super easy and flawless with Etcher. Once flashed, just pop that card into the pi and you are good to go.

Upon first boot, Manjaro greets with the Calamares installer which asks for user setup information and sets up other configurations for WiFi, timezone, keyboard settings etc. The setup is quick and painless. It took me just 2 mins and after a reboot I was on the Manjaro Mate desktop. The RAM usage hovered just over 780MB which is impressive. And the complete install took less then 5GB disk space.

First impressions of the Manjaro Mate desktop were really good. It feels more polished and well put together than Ubuntu Mate. The default dark theme works for me and I don’t feel the need to tweak it. No issues when connecting to my WiFi network.

The next I checked was the list of installed applications. I find this list is minimally curated. It has Firefox for internet browsing, Audacious for music and mpv for video file playback but that’s it. No photo editor like Gimp or even the Libre Office suite. Although it is not a deal breaker, I would have loved to have these installed by default. I guess these are left out to keep the install image size manageable. Media playback is flawless. Audacious does its job well when playing different audio formats. No complaints about mpv either. YouTube also works well. No lag or buffering was noticed. Bluetooth connection was not an issue but I did face some lag when listening to music via Bluetooth. Will have to check if this is a persistent issue.

Manjaro Mate doesn’t have a app launcher. So I went ahead and installed Synapse using the pacman cli. pacman is quick and simple for application installs, system updates and upgrades. I was able to upgrade the OS and find and install Gimp. All via simple cli commands using pacman. Though there is a UI to add/remove software, using pacman is simple enough and just works. I am more used to using apt-get but using pacman is just a small learning curve.

Here are some screenshots for the quick changes that I made to Manjaro post install.

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I think I am getting the hang of things quickly here and find the Manjaro Mate usage even better than Ubuntu Mate. It is less resource hungry, feels more polished, has easy access to new software and in general just works. I don’t have to worry about the system being out of date or upgrades that fail. I will eventually have to curate my own list of software which are more suited to my daily needs, should I decide to stick with Manjaro Mate.

This has been a fun pit stop. Let me spend some more time with this before I move on to exploring Pop OS. The way I see it, Manjaro Mate is winning over Ubuntu Mate by a good deal and its showdown with Pop OS will be interesting to see.

Pi Land Adventure 1 – Ubuntu Mate

Ubuntu Mate is the first pitstop on this journey into Pi Land. Getting hold of the raspberry image from the website is straight forward. It is a 1.9 GB image which can be flashed onto the SD card using Etcher. Etcher has become my go to tool to flash any OS images onto pen drives or now even sd cards. The SD card in question is a SanDisk 64 GB class 10 card. I plan to keep flashing this for further test runs. Flashing the image and then verifying it does take some time but I let that be. A hasty move of skipping the verification messed up the sd card and it would not boot on my pi. Lession learnt.

Once the sd card is flashed correctly, just slide it into the Raspberry Pi and let it boot into the setup screen. It asked for user details, location, wifi etc as it continued the setup. My only complaint was that it took too long to configure the hardware. On one hand its familiarity is helpful, but then for an arm device, the configuration and setup should not really take that long. After it was done it landed on the familiar Mate desktop. I was already feeling at home.

At idle, Ubuntu Mate for RPi used about 1 GB of the 8 GB ram available, which later crept up to 1.8 GB as I started using more applications. The OS took 7GB space on the available 59GB sd card. This is leaves reasonable space for user files and additioanl software installation.

I started looking around and checking the preinstalled apps. Mate does not dissapoint in this aspect. It has sensible defaults with Firefox, Libre Office, Rhythmbox and video player. Having a full office suite is a great plus. I could not find GIMP installed and also would have liked VLC instead of the default audio/video players. But that is a personal choice.

For multimedia support, I could take Youtube for a spin and also play some sample mp3 and mp4 files. Everything was smooth. Playback over bluetooth also worked without any hiccups. Audio playback via HDMI output was a pleasant surprise., which means I could also play audio via my monitor speakers. No need to always have a bluetooth device connected to the Pi.

Appearance wise, I cannot complain about Ubuntu Mate. It’s dark themes with accent colors are comfortable to work with. I made a few changes to the themes, set a different background image and was happy with the defaults provided. I really need not go theme hunting to make this desktop look any better. I could work with what I saw.

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Software installation is also very easy using Mate’s Software Boutique. All the familiar apps are available for download and install. I tried to install and use Gimp just to get a feel of it. I will have to work on a curated list of softwares once I settle down on the correct OS for my pi. For now just testing ease of finding and installing new software was good enough for me.

Now is the time for the verdict. The first pitstop has been welcoming and I find the Ubuntu Mate for Raspberry Pi perfectly usable. It certainly feels that the 8GB pi with 4 CPUs is more than capable of running the operating system and has the potential to become a daily driver. This ofcourse is subject to how much of daily computing tasks it can carry on its shoulders. For this test run, I haven’t been pushing it. But once I decide on which OS to use and which softwares the keep, I am sure the Pi will keep its promise.

I plan to move on to the others on the list. For now Ubuntu Mate is a strong contender unless Manjaro or Pop OS! toss it out the window.

And The Pop!_OS Journey Begins…

I had come to believe that Fedora 33 was my home and I dwelt in it for almost two years without even considering moving to another distro. This has to be my longest streak with any distro. F33 did represent the latest and greatest at the time it was released and though I did try Endless OS and Elementary OS 6, I never felt I would ever need to move to another distro. Then came the time to upgrade to F34 and that’s when I hit a wall. The download failed to get certain files due to version conflict and no matter how many times I tried, the upgrade kept failing. I was losing patience and decided to move on.

I took this opportunity to make some extra space for my Linux installation by playing with the partition tables. Initially when I dual booted my Windows laptop with Fedora, I dedicated half of my 250GB SSD to each operating system. I soon realized that devoting 125GB for Windows was a waste of disk space since I barely used it. I took time to back up my important files from Fedora and started with Pop!_OS installation. Using gparted, I deleted my existing ext4 and linux_swap partitions. Then logged into Windows and shrunk my C drive to afford another 30 GB to unallocated disk space. And when installing Pop!_OS, I divided the available space into a EFI Boot (1 GB), Linux Swap (8 GB) and the rest for ext4 root(~ 155 GB).

Installation went pretty smooth, I suppose this was one of the fastest installers that I have seen. And I was on their Cosmic desktop in no time. Pop!_OS seems to have done a pretty good job of building this layer on top of Gnome. Cosmic has brought together best of several desktop environments. The workspace management is spot on and makes it very easy to move apps across the work spaces and switch between them. This would be very helpful when used along with the Tile Windows. This tiling feature reminded me of i3. I have been wanting to switch to i3 on many occasions but something always troubled me and I could never make myself at home. But Pop!_OS Cosmic had me going from the moment I switched to tiling mode. I can always switch back if I want to. That’s how flexible Pop!_OS is.

The dock reminded me of Elementary OS. I like how it gets out of the way and lets you use the entire screen real estate. I have my usual apps pinned to the dock as favorites. But what is even more useful is the launcher provided by Pop!_OS. The super key is used to invoke the launcher which allows you to open new applications, switch to current open applications across work spaces etc. The launcher however does not find files from the computer. I have seen Fedora do that seamlessly. It would have been cool if Pop!_OS launcher could do it as well.

The Application menu is simple and functional, nothing to brag about and with the convenience of Dock and Launcher I doubt I would ever use the Application menu. The selection of apps is quite minimal, which is good since I would most likely opt to install my usual go to apps anyway. It comes with LibreOffice, Firefox , some other useful system tools etc. Anything else can be found on the Pop Shop which is well categorized and had several of the application that I would want to install. It does have the option to install flatpaks rather than deb installs. But when I see the amount of disk space a flatpak gobbles up as compared to a deb install, my choice is already made. If at all I want to use an application in its own sandbox, I would probably opt for some AppImages that I have been using and already familiar with.

Pop!_OS theme just gives a choice between a Light and a Dark theme. I kind of liked the dark theme, but wanted to do away with the icons. I have really come to like the Arrongin Theme along with Paper icon set. So I decided to install these over and also install the Gnome Tweaks to be able to change the themes and icons.

All in all I am happy with this distro hop. Have been following the Pop!_OS since some time and it is now that I am going all in. I definitely liked what I saw and thus the Pop!_OS journey begins….

BunsenLabs : Crunchbang reborn

No degree of hopping from one linux distro to another seems to satitate my wanderlust. I want to be a Linux nomad all my life, knowing well that sooner or later I will find my way to something clever, more interesting and deceptively simple.

After being a faithful Linux Mint Mate user for quite some time, I saw myself moving to something new. And so while searching for something interesting I stumbled upon BunsenLabs. It was a resurrection of my long time fav Crunchbang and though I was aware that after the demise of Crunchbang few worthy successors were waking up to the challenge to keep the uber light, minimalist distro alive, it was only now that I cared to go back and read about them. Crunchbang++ and BunsenLabs were two interesting projects and after a quick look around I decided to go with BunsenLabs.

I had go through the installation process twice, thanks to my own wrong doings, but I had the opportunity to use the cli installer as well as the graphical installer. I noticed that the cli installer is noticably slower than the graphical one. But the installation went smooth and in some time I was logged into the familiar openbox environment. Bland as usual. But I knew what I was signing up for. BunsenLabs is true to the minimalist approach. All you see is a bare minimum desktop with a BunsenLabs wallpaper, a neat conky on the right and thats all. What impressed me is the resource utilization reported by conky. At idle, it was barely touching 125MB of RAM usage, CPU usage also hovered at just about 1%.

Now was the time to look around for installed software. The menu is accessible via right click and is neatly categorized which helps look for the required applications. The most commonly used apps like the terminal, web browser, file manager, text editor are available on the top of the menu. Under each application category, apart from the installed list, BunsenLabs has managed to provide nifty scripts which allow to install additional software in one simple click. I quickly checked my options and installed LibreOffice Writer and Calc, Gimp, Vlc, Transmission etc to have my list of daily use softwares complete. It made me wonder shouldn’t these be already available in the distro rather than having to install them separately. But its better this way since the bare installation is minimal and one can customize it the way he wants. Gone are the days when having full installable iso distributions were needed for offline installation. With better broadband connections, its way simpler to have hand picked the apps that are installed in the distro. BunsenLabs just gives a plain canvas to paint whatever picture you can think of. Based off debian, it provides the stability and security and most applications can be quickly and effortlessly installed to make it a more complete, practical and useful Linux distro.

This time around I spend some time trying to configure the menu.xml. This file is what renders the complete menu invoked on the right click. It is easy to add more options, shortcuts etc to this configuration and make the menu easy to use. I added vlc as a quick shortcut, changed my default editor to sublime etc. These changes helped me understand the menu xml configuration better and now I am more comfortable making these changes. For those dreading the xml file changes, the same config is available via ui using the “GUI Menu Editor” under preferences.

I am not dwelling into the cosmetic changes, since setting the icons, themes and wallpapers is really a personal choice and I have already written quite a lot about these in previous posts. Over time I have come to settle for same set of themes, icons etc and so I quickly drop in the files under .themes or .icons, configure them as appropriate and get going with the cosmetic changes. I no longer seem to bother myself with how fancy my setup looks. Been focusing on simplicity, functionality and productivity off late. If all I care about, is getting the job done, then fancy UI should really be the least of my concern. For this same reason I was mulling over use of Manjaro i3. But lets keep it for later.

With few quick tweaks and installations I am onto my brand new BunsenLabs setup ready to take on daily computing in a new stride. Help is easily available. Online forums give enough information to get started in the right direction.

With BunsenLabs, I am transported back to my Crunchbang days which I absolutely loved. The amount of tinkering that can be done and ease of use make it stand out. Needless to say, the less resource hungry it is, the happier my laptop will be. That thing has been around for almost a decade and lightweight distros are all that it can handle. I am happy that 32-bit iso are still around and being maintained by some distros. BunsenLabs fits the bill perfectly. Let me take it for a ride and hope to stick to it for longer. Manjaro i3 is already the next big thing for me. But BunsenLabs will stay for a while now.

Antergos : A New Frontier

Who knew that distro hopping would be such a never ending process! Any new distro that shines bright among others quickly catches my attention and I am tempted to try it out.

I had always wanted to try Arch since quite some time and while I consider myself as a fairly advanced linux user, the manual process of installing Arch has really intimidated me for the longest time. To get over Arch installation I tried my hands at Manjaro and even Archbang but never got to using them longer than a couple days. But I always had that craving for a rolling release and was left wanting for more.

This is when Antergos caught my eye. From the reviews that I read, it is a purer version of Arch than Manjaro, since it uses Arch repositories and does not add any of its own. This means all the upstream goodies in Arch are available with it. Antergos also makes it very simple for new and seasoned users alike to install a Arch based system and comes with a variety of desktop environments to choose from. It is also available in two types of installable iso files. One is a full fledged gnome 3 live cd while other is a minimal iso which has enough packages to start the live session and then the user can choose to install packages and desktop environment of his choice.

I put my faith in the full installer and chose the Gnome desktop environment. The installation was smooth and the only care I had to take was install it to a 32 GB pen drive with relevant root and swap partitions. This external pen drive is the only storage option I have for my laptop ever since its HDD got busted. For some time I was using Portues installed on this pen drive and for the sake of an Arch based linux distro I decided to forego my Porteus setup and do a full distro install on the external pen drive. The install process is pretty much the same except that care needs to be taken to install the linux boot loader on the pen drive ‘/dev/sdb’ in my case. Antergos does require an active internet connection during installation since this is when it also tries to download and install the latest packages. In that sense installing from the full live cd makes sense, since it does not have to install huge number of packages later. On a slow internet conection this can be quite cumbersome. I think I had a power nap couple of time before the installation was successfully complete. I now have an up-to-date Arch based installation on my laptop in the form of Antergos.

Antergos was definitely unchartered territory for me. But the dev folks have done a great job at putting together a friendly Arch system which has great aesthetics. The look and feel of gnome DE is great and I could not help but think why I didnt jump onto it before. I have moved from Pantheon DE to LXDE to MATE, and that progression was from good to worse. I always thought maybe I was making some compromise along the way partly due to aging hardware. Starting to use gnome 3 again was great. Its a fantastic DE with nifty features that work well on my old laptop. I do not experience any lag and with a modest 2.5 GB RAM, I would safely bet that this Antergos setup is not that resource hundry.

The installed softwares are the usual bunch. Nothing extra ordinary, but enough for all daily basic computing needs. It has an ebook reader, a pdf reader, video player, audio player, chromium browser, pidgin chat client and the usual photo viewer and screenshot applications. All the essesntials for a workable linux distribution are in place. Any additional softwares can be found on the AUR repositories using the package manager to add and remove softwares. This is very similar to using the synaptic package manager and does not confuse me at all. No sooner I was already comfortable adding and removing softwares that I wanted. I might consider installing gimp and libre office later. A pro tip here is to remove all the unwanted software so that the rolling release updates are easy on the downloads. If there are packages you would rarely use just get rid of them and spare yourself the pain of downloading updates. A rolling release means your system will always be up to date with bleeding edge versions of the softwares and so the updates should be for the packages that you use and not the ones which are just there since you didnt bother to do anything about it.

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As I tinker more with Antergos, I find myself on my way to finally using an Arch based rolling release distro. Only time can tell how faithful I have been to using this linux distro before making my way to the next. For now it is great and I like what I see.

Porteus Strikes Back

I was all gaga over the fact that Slax saved my laptop and did what Porteus could not have done well. But I could not get over the fact that Porteus was in fact based on Slax and so I could expect it to do at least as good as Slax if not better.

I went back to the basics and started reading bit more about Porteus and why it was being dubbed as the best portable linux distro. Was it really better than Slax, did it borrow on the idea of having modular approach to Linux and make it better, much more easy to use? And if so, what was I doing wrong the first time around when I started looking into it.

The answers were easier to find than I had thought. Porteus pretty much follows the same approach to installing itself onto any pen drive or even a laptop hdd. You just need to copy the /boot and /porteus to wherever it is that you want to install it and execute the installer script to install the bootloader. Loading optional modules also works pretty much the same way. The only thing I had not figured out the last time was the use of USM or the Unified Slackware Package Manager. It is kind of a repository search tool which looks for packages across various package databases that are available. It downloads the selected package onto a tmp directory and it is up to the user to activate the packages. It is pretty good at managing dependencies as well and pull along the required modules.

The last time I was attempting to use the pen drive formatted as a FAT32 so that I could use it on windows and linux machines alike, but this was posing as a limitation since saving any changes made to Porteus required setting up a DAT container which could house the changes. This was limiting in the size of the DAT container that I could set up. Switching to ext4 filesystem has ruled out that option. Now I can make changes and let me file size grow to the maximum. It is now only limited by my 32GB pen drive, which I would think is enough for now, since the aim is not to have a mean machine but something which is just about functional.

But the biggest advantage I see is the variety of desktop environments that Porteus comes with. With Slax I was only stuck with KDE4, which I would admit I wasn’t comfortable working with. It has all got to do with my unfamiliarity with the KDE environment. Over time I felt it was really sluggish and limiting in the amount of customization I could do while using it. With Porteus, I was spoilt for choices. If you head to the Porteus download page, you have a choice among KDE, LXQt, MATE of XFCE. I settled for MATE with the idea to get myself familiar with it. I knew it was based on Gnome2 and so I knew what to expect and find my workarounds when I get to customizing it.

My choice paid off well and in no time I had a functional Porteus setup up and running on my machine. Replacing the Slax I was praising just a moment ago. It booted off quickly, found my wifi and got me onto a nifty desktop in no time. I spent some time tweaking its look and feel, some cosmetic touch up here and there to make it look like this.

It has a good set of default applications, all familiar to me. So getting productive on this setup was not much of an issue.

Here are some more snapshots of my setup.

The iconset is Aw0ken and Gtk2 theme is Siva Flat. Most themes designed for GTK 2.x and GTK 3.x will work with MATE and so I headed to gnome-look.org to check out my options.

Finally I got to using Porteus the right way and learnt it by going back to basics and trying to understand how it all works. Both Slax or Porteus are excellent choices for Linux on a pen drive. Porteus brings some more flavors along with it so users like me can indulge in the environment they like best.

 

 

 

Slax for the uninitiated

After an initial rendezvous with Slax and successfully using it while booted from a usb drive, I decided to put together a quick step guide to help readers setup something similar on their machines should they choose to use Slax.

The key to using this live distro is to be able to save the changes and user data, so that the next time you boot into Slax, you could start off from where you left. Persisting data is a default option in Slax, so its already taken care of. To make most of the usb drive format it with ext4 file system. Use Gparted to format the drive to ext4 (may require root access on host pc). This native file format will allow to save changes upto the physical capacity of the drive. Thus using a higher capacity drive (say upto 64GB) will go a long way in case you want to carry your entire work with you.

Slax is a simple zip/iso download and the first thing you should do is extract the contents to a local folder and have a look at the contents. Iso and zip files are available for 32 bit and 64 bit architectures so get versions compatible with your laptop. Likewise all dependencies will have to be compatible. Slax download just has a /slax folder at top level. Under /slax you will be able to see stuff like boot, modules and few default sb files.

Slax is pretty small in its core size, and this comes at the cost of pre-installed drivers. Intel drivers for wifi are not installed by default and it would make sense to download them before hand to the “modules” directory. While you are are it, you might as well browse the Slax modules catalog and download all sb files that interest you along with their dependencies into the /slax/modules folder. At bare minimum, I settled for chrome, nano editor, abiword, gnumeric and their dependencies, which i manually copied into the “modules” folder. When Slax boots, all these modules will be located and activated for use.

Now its time to copy your “custom” slax setup onto the ext4 formatted usb drive and install the bootloader. Copy over /slax onto the root of the pen drive. You may need root access for this, Use sudo command if required. Once copied, locate bootinst.sh under /boot on the pen drive and execute it. It will try to install the bootloader onto the usb drive. Once done the installation is complete. Its that simple.

Boot the laptop from the USB. If booting from usb is not an option due to older BIOS, use the PLOP boot manager to enable the boot from usb option. Once done, you should be able to boot into the Slax KDE4 environment without any issues. The wifi module installed manually will allow you to scan available networks and connect to your wifi. Check options “connect automatically” and “system connect” to be able to connect automatically on every reboot.

These are the basic steps in a nutshell-

1) Download and extract contents of Slax to a local folder.
2) Copy essential sb files and related dependencies from Slax modules web page and manually copy them onto the /slax/modules folder
3) Format a USB drive in ext4 format. Capacity of the drive is an individual choice, higher the better.
4) Copy the “custom” slax folder with all dependencies to the root of pen drive. Use sudo if required (or copy as admin if using Windows machine).
5) Install boot loader by running /slax/boot/bootinst.sh (or bat if you are using a Windows machine).
6) Restart laptop and boot from USB. ( If booting from usb is not an option due to old bios, use the PLOP manager ).

Enjoy the new Slax setup!

SLAX : I can’t thank you enough!

A while ago I was thrilled to discover Porteus, a small portable Linux distro booting and running off a pen drive. It was cool to carry your distro with you wherever you went and simply boot it off a USB port.

But truth be told, I never got around using Porteus much and installing any useful softwares on that thing puzzled me a lot. It still remained a fancy toy for me to be used only in case of system recovery. Soon enough I got the chance to see it in action. My trusted Lenovo 3000 N100, which I had been using for almost 9 years, had a failed HDD and could no longer boot from it. Attempts to use Porteus to recover any data didnt bear much fruit and I was left with a dead machine and no option but to spend on a new HDD.

While I kept wondering what else could be done, I came across SLAX which again is a live distro that can be booted off a pen drive. Apparently Porteus is based of Slax and while I was having a tough time grasping the way Porteus worked, I was immediately at home with Slax. What caught my attention was the modular approach to software installation within Slax. It came with pre budled softwares which you would simply drop into the distro and activate. The changes made to the base installation could be persisted and resumed on next boot. This suited me especially since I wanted something more than booting into a fresh live cd everytime I used by laptop.

So I set out to put this distro to test with couple things in mind

i. It should be able to boot off a usb which would then double up as my storage device

ii. It should be able to add/remove softwares for daily use so that the computing experience is more complete.

iii. It should be customizable to some extent. Didnt really know what to expect here since I am very much new to KDE environment.

Lets see how Slax fared on these parameters for me. Bear in mind, I was least interested in buying a new HDD for a laptop that was almost a decade old. Another concern was what if I did purchase a new HDD and some time down the line another major laptop component gave way, then I would be stuck with a dead laptop with an HDD upgrade that would not be much worth.

Installing Slax onto a pen drive is as simple as copying the “slax” folder from the downloaded zip onto the root of a pen drive and installing the boot loader script bootinst.sh found under “boot” folder. This way when the laptop tries to boot from the usb it knows how to start Slax.

I went ahead and removed the failed HDD physically from my laptop. With the HDD gone, I could change the bios settings to boot from the usb. I had to use the PLOP boot manager here to first boot from a cd and then enable the boot from usb option from the PLOP menu. My laptop does not have a boot from usb option so using PLOP is a handy thing. The PLOP cd can now reside permanently in my cd rom drive with bios boot order set to boot from cd. Selecting usb option from PLOP menu springs Slax to life. It takes some time to boot the entire operating system and a beautiful KDE desktop is ready for use in no time.

Persisting OS changes is really not an issue with Slax. All changes made to the setup are stored under the “changes” folder it creates at the root of the pen drive. If the pen drive is using the native ext4 format then the extent to which changes can be made to the Slax setup is only limited by the pen drive capacity. So I set out with a 32 GB pen drive formatted in ext4 format with Slax installed at its root. This now gives me a freedom to install several Slax modules to make my Slax more functional and still have enough space for documents, music and video files and possibly some space for downloads.

This was perfect, since now I could do away with installing a HDD and still use my laptop with more options to install software and have space for my stuff.

First impression after the boot were impressive, Slax is all of 200 MB, yet it manages to give some basic applications and a KDE desktop which works well and feels stable. But I almost immediately hit a road block. Seems Slax was not able to connect to my wifi. It did not have the required drivers installed. That was bummer. Without a wifi connection how was I supposed to start downloading other things!

I grabed another laptop with a working internet connection and headed over to the modules section on the Slax website. It had the wifi drivers module for Intel which I promptly downloaded and physically copied into the “modules” folder on the pen drive. This got detected and activated on the next boot and my Slax setup was now connected to wifi. That’s the fun part of managing software on Slax, they are available as bundles and either can be manually dropped into the “modules” folder or choose activated via a right click on the downloaded sb file. Pretty soon, I was browsing through the catalog of modules and had nano editor, Abiword, Gnumeric, Chrome and other useful programs downloaded and installed onto my Slax setup. Once activated, these bundled showed up on the KDE menu and I could start using them right away.

With storage and software taken care of, I started customizing things the way I wanted by adding some widgets or changing the task bar with program shortcuts and other things. This is where Slax seems to give me some trouble. Apparently the changes made to the task bar and widgets would not load correctly the next time I rebooted and the screen would go blank making things unusable. I reverted back by simply deleting the “changes” folder and letting slax create a new one as if it were its first boot. Things seem to work well after that. So I guess I will stay away from customizing KDE panels should they cause me any trouble going ahead, because once I start using slax on a regular basis I shouldn’t feel the need to backup and restore things because of some config changes. Either ways the default KDE4 desktop is good and usable so I guess I will stay away from the temptation of customizing the setup. For me, the functionality of this OS would preceed its looks.

And that brings me to an end of my attempt to resurrect my laptop. Compared to an HDD upgrade, I would be spending peanuts on the 32 GB pen drive. I may be compromising a lot on space with just 32 GB to use, but what I gain instead is a completely usable linux distro with softwares that are easy to manage.  My decade old laptop has been a trusted machine and I cant thank Slax enough to give it a new lease of life.