CrunchBang & Xubuntu Linux

Some interesting events this week, a relative of mine had the terrible experience of being burgled. I hope those responsible are caught and prosecuted, however with crimes of this type its so difficult to find the culprits.

This event left my relatives family with NO computers, i had some old PC hardware that I could supply them, very low spec and frankly I had a dilemma.

Windows XP was the system that my relatives had used for years, they unfortunately had lost their Windows XP install disks as the laptop bag went with the computer.....a lesson for everyone there, keep your install disks separate from your computer.

Thus Linux came to the rescue, this really was interesting from a 'switching from XP to linux' perspective.

The low spec hardware dictated that I could not use Ubuntu Linux or Mint Linux in their standard form, thus i had to find a easy to use desktop that was light on system resources.

After trying out both Crunchbang and Xubuntu in virtual machines (under virtualbox running on my ubuntu desktop) booting from ISO to evaluate the front ends.

I really liked the minimal style of Cunchbang (seen below in the screen shot), the speed on the low spec machine was very impressive, the openbox window manager provided a acceptable user experience. My only concern was the default application

launch menu being initiated by a right-click, which would i feel cause initial discomfort for new users.

I was so impressed by Crunchbang in fact, I moved one of my test machines to this distro.

However from a ease of use point of view i thought my relatives would adopt Xubuntu more readily, simply due to the APPLICATIONS button acting like the XP start button. Also Xubuntu provided a lot more eye candy without using a huge amount of system resources and used open openoffice, which i have more experience in rather than the Abiword and Gnumeric apps supplied as default with Crunchbang.

The PC is now installed, working nicely and with 5 more people converted to Open Source Software. However DO please try Crunchbang linux, its minimal, slick and way fast, however i think its for users with some existing linux desktop experience.

Linux Nibbles Number 2

A tip i grabbed from tuxradar.com -- nice wireless distance vector tip - less speed = more distance all via the command line

Wireless speed management

Difficulty: Intermediate

Application: iwconfig

The speed at which a piece of radio transmission/receiver equipment can communicate with another depends on how much signal is available. In order to maintain communications as the available signal fades, the radios need to transmit data at a slower rate. Normally, the radios attempt to work out the available signal on their own and automatically select the fastest possible speed.

In fringe areas with a barely adequate signal, packets may be needlessly lost while the radios continually renegotiate the link speed. If you can't add more antenna gain, or reposition your equipment to achieve a better enough signal, consider forcing your card to sync at a lower rate. This will mean fewer retries, and can be substantially faster than using a continually flip-flopping link. Each driver has its own method for setting the link speed. In Linux, set the link speed with iwconfig:

iwconfig eth0 rate 2M

This forces the radio to always sync at 2Mbps, even if other speeds are available. You can also set a particular speed as a ceiling, and allow the card to automatically scale to any slower speed, but go no faster. For example, you might use this on the example link above:

iwconfig eth0 rate 5.5M auto

Using the auto directive this way tells the driver to allow speeds up to 5.5Mbps, and to run slower if necessary, but will never try to sync at anything faster. To restore the card to full auto scaling, just specify auto by itself:

iwconfig eth0 rate auto

Cards can generally reach much further at 1Mbps than they can at 11Mbps. There is a difference of 12dB between the 1Mbps and 11Mbps ratings of the Orinoco card - that's four times the potential distance just by dropping the data rate!

Linux Nibbles Number 1

Where has all my disk space gone on my linux box?

login as root and "du -x / | sort -n | tail -10"

My home linux example on my debian lenny (5.0) server (running under virtualbox)

du -x / | sort -n | tail -10

89656 /usr/local/webmin

89704 /usr/local

140544 /var/cache/apt/archives

140776 /tmp

159692 /var/cache/apt

165380 /var/cache

190484 /usr/share

248276 /var

395552 /usr

890608 /