Well.... DSL 1.3 is out. Congratulations to everyone involved, it looks like it took a lot of work. Thanks to everyone for all the hours that must be spent to keep DSL going.
I've downloaded it and have run it from LiveCD several times. I probably will not upgrade my 1.2 frugal install right away. There isn't a lot in the new release that I "must have". I think I'll wait a couple weeks and see if there's a 1.3.1 update. I've got several DSL boxes running and they range from DSL 8.something up to DSL 1.2.0 I've started doing Frugal installs because I've heard it's so easy to upgrade. There are plenty of entries in the forums about how to upgrade. Here's a good start
As always... Use the Forums to get questions answered and for reference. The Documentation Project is another great place to look for answers.
Just a couple items today....
18) I don't need to transfer files between computers very often but when I do using FTP is one of the quickest and easiest ways to do it. I did set Samba up but I don't run it all the time. This frugal installation is on a slower box and Samba does take resources. If you have an FTP server on your network you can use your DSL machine to access it. Open an xterminal, enter FTP ipaddress at the promt and off you go. If you'd rather point and click DSL comes with AxY FTP, a very nice graphical FTP program.
On some occasions I don't have an FTP server to use so I need to start one on my DSL frugal install box. Here's how I do it. First I create a new user...Right click on the desktop, select System then AddUsers. Create a user called "ftp" with a password of "ftp". I could have made up any name and password. The big thing is to remember the name and password, remember the case (upper or lower) of each. When logging in "Ftp" is different then "ftp". OK so now you have a new user. If you go into emelFM and look in the /home directory you'll see there is now a "ftp" subdirectory. Now you can use the MyDSL panel or the desktop menu to start BetaFTP.
Once BetaFTP is started you should be able to login from any machine in your network. You'll be limited to the home directory of the user "ftp" but that's usally good enogh for me. I move files to that directory and then move them out again. It's just a safe place to keep things for a short time. I've read where some people give their "dsl" user id a password so they can use it with BetaFTP. I tried that but the password didn't take and I didn't pursue the problem since this "ftp" user solution works for me. I've also heard that once you log into BetaFTP you have access to the entire machine. That could be true, I'm not a whiz at FTP but it seems to restrict you to the "ftp" user home directory.
The thing I really like is that when you're all done. All you have to do is reboot the machine and the whole "ftp" user home and all the files in it are gone. When you want to do another ftp just add the user and start up BetaFTP again. If you want a more long term solutiion give the forums a search. I'm sure there's a lot of people running FTP servers all the time. It might seem like a hastle to create a new user but it really only takes about 30 seconds to add a user and start BetaFTD, probably less once you get experienced.
19) There are a lot of good reasons to know what your IP address is when you start your machine. You could open a terminal and enter 'ifconfig' but that's kind of low tech. While looking around in the forums I found a neat piece of LUA code from the user called FriedGold. LUA is a relatively unknown language. You can find out more about it here at DSL and here at Sourceforge. This code will present a little gui display of the IP address. I had to change the code slightly because one of my machines had some trouble getting the address the first time the program is run.
Here's the modified code, copy it to your home directory (home/dsl/) and name it something like ipaddr
#!/usr/bin/env flua
-- (c) 2005 Richard Osborne
-- Show IP current Address in a dialog box
function get_ip_address(interface)
local command="ifconfig " .. interface .. " > /tmp/pipe.lua &"
execute(command)
local file,err = openfile("/tmp/pipe.lua", "r")
if not file then
print("Cannot open file. ".. err)
exit(1)
end
local dat = read(file,"*a")
local label = "inet addr:"
local i,j = strfind (dat,label .. "([%d.]*)")
if not i then
return("Not Configured")
else
return (strsub (dat, i+strlen(label),j))
end
end
-- Main GUI loop
w = Window{200,80, "IP Address"}
ip = Input{40,10,120,25,"IP:"}
ip.value = get_ip_address("eth0")
od = Button{100,45,70,25,"&Again"}
ok = Button{10,45,70,25,"&OK"}
function ok:callback()
flush()
exit(0)
end
function od:callback()
ip.value = get_ip_address("eth0")
end
w:end_layout()
w:show()
After you save it go into Emelfm and highlight the file, right click on it, select Properties....Permissions... and select all the EXEC buttons. This makes the file executable. Click OK to save the changes and then double-left click the ipaddr file in emelfm. If everything is working you should see a gray box displaying your IP address and two buttons. One says OK and one says Again. The Again button will re-look for your IP address incase you got an error the first time. The OK button will close the display.
Once you get that working I think it's a good idea to have it run at startup. So add this line:
~/ipaddr &
to your .xinitrc file, just above the fluxbox line. Now the next time you reboot or restart X you'll have your IP address displayed.
20) When the system starts up there are some hard drive partitions that I want mounted. That little doc app to mount partitions is great but if I know I always want it mounted here what I do. Start emelfm and navigate to the /opt directory. You should find the bootlocal.sh file. Add all the "mounts" you want to this file. In my case I only want to mount one partition so I added:
sudo mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3
Save your changes and then set the permissions on the file to allow execution (elelfm...highlight filename....righ-click...Properties....Permissions then click all the buttons under EXEC). Reboot the machine and see if the partition is mounted. Watch for error messages.
That's all I want to do for now. Enjoy. Share your experiences in the Forums and Blogs.