Im running DSL on an old stinkpad 560z that my friend Jeff donated as being unuseable - 7 mins to boot an old bloated win2k! 64Mb RAM and no CD. Now it boots in a few seconds into DSL from HD, not that I shut it down very often. Suspend works great outside X so I just CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE, type sync and close the lid. When I open it up again and startx its all back in a couple fo secs. Picked up a 64Mb upgrade buy.com (~$25) and a refurb Dlink DWL 122 usb 802.11b dongle from tigerdirect ($20) and I now have a pretty mean box. The dongle works on my Tivo as well so I bought a couple.
So, now Ive got my lappy with DSL on hard disk, what to do next? Time for a prog methinks. Well, actually no time. After changing job, buying a house/car and getting married in the last couple of months Ive got almost no time at all. Still there is that 35min each way commute on the train... time enough for writing some progs on my lappy using DSL & gcc1.dsl.
So Ive been doing that for about 2 weeks now, and my prog 'TrainGUI' (yes, I know... no imagination) is starting to take shape. So what is it? Well, I found myself writing all sort of bash & perl scripts to do things under DSL... init my wifi card, pump dhcp, sync files with my server, etc. So I thought I'd write a simple front end that would allow me to add buttons to kick things off. That was the original idea anyway.
Now Ive embedded the FLTK & Perl libraries and TrainGUI is almost a full blown IDE. It works a bit like FLTK's fluid but with Perl instead of C++. That way I should be able to change the interface on the fly. Why not use lua-fltk or tk/perl etc? Well, wheres the fun in that? Anyway, I like hacking C/C++ and perl so thats what Im doing - all the perl GUI extensions seem to suck.
nuff for now, almost beer time