Today, I’ll be going over the jet and flotsam I’ve been thinking about lately. Since everybody’s desktop is extraordinarily unique in Linux so there should be something here for everyone :).
Parted Magic
I love Parted Magic. I have gone so far as to say that it is the de-facto stardard in repair CD’s available in Linux. Parted Magic is still turning out release after release, but for me personally I haven’t upgraded since 4.2. Since then Chromium has taken over Firefox (still have not gotten over the “(paraphrase) anyone can invoke the Patriot Act can access Google records” phrase :), and then by taking Clonezilla out. Clonezilla is an invaluable tool for me to clone an entire hard drive, including partitions that have various filesystems. Version 4.2 is difficult to find so I decided to put it up here. I hope, but don’t think, the people at Parted Magic would mind. The good news is that it looks like Parted Magic is developing their own backup scripting framework that might resemble Clonezilla. Ok, this is really good news :D.
If you download this and are available to help spread it via a torrent or by your own server… I’d appeciate it and the server it’s currently hosted on would apprecitate it as well.
LXDE bah dah bap da dah
Two computers, one to go. Got relagated to my 300Mhz 10 year old laptop, and this is why I love Linux, put LXDE on it and Epiphany and am getting by alright. I’d actually go as for to say that I’m real happy with it. This iBook works pretty much out of the box, pbbuttonsd really is a lifesaver fixing all the quirks of the iBook (backword Fn1-6 keys, sleep on laptop lid/powerbutton, disabling trackpad tapping). Of all the computers I’ve tried Linux on, this is the only one where everything works as expected (hardware-related) out of the box on.
Gnome Smaller Icons
For a smaller screen like I got (800×600) having smaller icons helps save a good amount of screen real estate. I figured I wanted them about half the size they normally were. I was using Lxappearance which controls a few Gnome desktop attributes, but not the icon size unfortunately. Lxappearance writes to the gtk configuration file (~/.gtkrc-2.0) and is supposed to be able to inherit additional settings in (/home/user/.gtkrc-2.0-mine) which it wasn’t doing. Had to give up Lxappearance and just manually write to the (~/.gtkrc-2.0) file directly. By adding this I get nice appropriately felt sized icons:
gtk-icon-sizes="panel-menu=16,16:gtk-menu=16,16:panel=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=16,16:gtk-small-toolbar=16,16"
Have you taken a look to SystemRescueCd? It comes with Firefox. And it seems to be able to clone partitions with partclone or partimage. And if you need clonezilla, somebody seems to have tried to integrate it on SystemRescueCd.
if your gtkrc isn’t inheriting properly, make sure the following line is in it:
include “/home/username/.gtkrc-2.0.mine”
and then you should be just fine