Installing Wheezy on my eeepc 701

My eeepc 701 4G has been with me since 2008 each and every single day giving me the best of what it's got. No wonder I love it so much.

I have tested Wheezy on it for a whole week using a custom built debian-live image (without installer). It works flawlessly using full persistence. The only problem is that everytime I turn on the machine I have to reinstall Dropbox because it does not seem to work fine with cow (This is just a wild guess. The problem might be anything else.)

This afternoon I'm going to install Wheezy on a mini sd flash card of 16 GB I bought yesterday using the regular debian installer. The procedure is quite simple.

1.- Wipe grub from the master boot record of the usb stick I'm going to use as installation media. (This is just because I have been playing with siduction on that usb pendrive for a couple of days. It boots the iso using grub.)

  # dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1 # X is the device letter

2.- Download the debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso (227M) and dd it to the pendrive:

   $ dd if=debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdX

3.- Boot the eeepc from the usb pendrive. Select expert install and there you go!!!

New linux counter.

http://counter.li.org/ is going to be replaced by http://linuxcounter.net/ I already transferred my account from one place to the other and updated my machines information. This is the new image signature I got: https://linuxcounter.net/cert/388768.png


In case you can't follow that link for any reason. I upload the image here as well.

nvlc - ncurses vlc

Last week I discovered nvlc installed on one of my Debian laptops. It was in fact installed in all my Debian boxes. I scratched my head at first because I didn't remember ever having installed it and what is more, I discovered that it isn't even a package. It comes with vlc player.

Well, I played with it for a while just to find out that with nvlc you can do almost everything you do with vlc. It can for instance, write to the framebuffer so you can watch video. What is more, having a curses interface makes it easy to use. It was nice and that was it. However today I thought about a great use that I can give to it.

I'm right now sitting at my eeepc *yumi*, but my music collection is in my main desktop *odd*. From here I ssh into the box and launch *nvlc*. Then I can select the songs I want to listen to, raise the volume and do other things, as if this small netbook were  a remote.

Awesome isn't it?. nvlc, welcome to my pool.

Here is a screenshot:

Minimal desktop.

This weekend I have been configuring a rather small, relatively minimal desktop using openbox. I have also installed a bunch of applications to work with this gorgeous window manager. Among them: gmrun, wbar, tint2, conky ... I have also set Midori as default browser. In my first tests I installed rox-filer, but since I intend to thoroughly try rox desktop someday I removed rox-filer and I left the good old midnight commander as file manager.

I need to remember (for future reference):

• Openbox: create .config/openbox/autostart file (nm-applet and all other apps. Launch wbar -pos < top >)
  
• Edit wbar /usr/share/wbar/dot.wbar (icons and commands)
  
• gmrun: Edit openbox keybindings in .config/openbox/rc.xml
  
  

   <keybind key="A-F2">
      <action name="Execute">
      <command>gmrun</command>
       </action>
    </keybind>
  

Here is a screenshot for you to sneak a peek (Screenshot taken with scrot):