DSL Talk

Hmm.

I just had to create one of these blog accounts once I knew they were available. However, I've got absolutely no idea what to write.

Scite is my favorite text editor. I like the syntax highlighting and the ease of use. Searching and replacing is easy and every command is easy to find. I thought that I would never find another text editor I liked that much. If you haven't tried the vi editor yet, you're probably going to be as surprised as I was. There is a little learning curve, but it's worth it. It is a very powerful program and it even lets you write your own macros. Here is a really short introduction to vi for newbies that I wish I had when I was learning it.

In the last six months or so,
I've seen many different and interesting ways that the
DSL distro is being put to work by the userbase.

While the stock DSL does come complete with many light and fast
apps and servers, many times the needs of the user require
that another program or application be used that offers more
features or functions not available in the distro.

Here is where the fun comes in , designing your own personal
distro from base .iso up to run in your DSL box..
Where you are the master of its design, events and purpose.
Shaping the distro to be much more than a "LiveCD"

updated 15 dec 2004 - mikshaw

Here is a list of available Fluxbox commands/actions.
These commands are not the same as the shell commands
entered into a "run" dialog such as fbrun. They are
instead commands built into fluxbox to accomplish tasks
which may not be available from the menu.

After giving up on Xvesa I downloaded the old XBF Red Hat X-Server that has accelerators for the Neovision chipset and everything works great on my old thinkpad 560z. Fast scrolling... yeeha! :-) Looks like it uses a couple more MB of RAM but other than that it seems to start up just as fast or faster than Xfbdev. I had to remap the Delete & BackSpace keys using xmodmap, but no other problems so far.

Maybe I'll post details on the forums tomorrow if I get time. Happy happy happy! :-)

DSL is reaching its potential. With the hard limit of 50MB each additional improvement or feature enhancement grows harder to accomplish. Truth is the canvas will never be fully painted, but each new stroke is harder to place.

If DSL were a car I sort of see it like the old Porshe 911. I say that not because of it's speed, or power to weight ratio, but because of how the 911 evolved. For decades, the 911 kept to it's original design and made diligent improvements.

Last night I received two emails enquiring about PC's for poor families. Now that I have given away my first PC, the floodgates are being slowly opened. I only hope I can keep my head above water! I've had 3 inquiries all based off my first PC. As they say, word of mouth is the best form of advertisement. I will find out soon how well my OS design and documentation will hold up. Since one lady told me she didn't know what a modem was, I am guessing no amount of design or documentation is going to cover everything! :-)

Internet access will be the big thing. I am trying to find external modems in bulk but it isn't easy to find at a reasonable price. It is a selfish request but it would be great if DSL could natively support some of the common winmodems such is the case with MEPIS.

Hmm lets see...

1) write lecture proposals
2) make a .dsl of a forensic program
3)post it for the forensic community
4) pimp DSL
5) play in the Snow!

So I built the latest fluxbox this past week, and it seems to be working great in DSL.
The 0.9.10 extension was sort of a rushed job, and I found a couple of glitches in it (my fault, not a fluxbox bug). I've got a few configuration tweaks to do for the extension, and I could put it together tomorrow....except I started thinking about making a new style to showcase some of the new features....

If it weren't for the fact that I spent the last 24 hours researching every possible option for fluxbox/init I might have already made a decent style....but such is life.

Okay, I am going to let some of my personal opinions slip out here and there in this blog. Otherwise, what's the point?

So Coolworlddsl pointed out that some opportunist in Singapore is claiming to have invented a USB bootable OS when the method has been around since at least 1999.