Trustworthy.net

As mentioned in my recent post about installing Vista, I have a spare computer I need to test with various software and operating systems. Now since I am pretty handy at setting up dual-boot systems, this made for a perfect opportunity for me to go about setting up Vista and Linux on an even playing field to see how each compares on identical hardware.

Strangely, setting up the partitions took quite a bit more effort for some reason. I did manage to wrestle Vista into a single 20GB primary partition but it meant having to delete all other partitions in the process. Whatever, linux fdisk worked flawlessly (as it always has in my experience).

Here’s the basic layout I created after Vista was finally happy:

• hda2 (20GB) “/” aka “root” — where all the system files go (ie. c:\windows)
• hda3 (1GB) for the swap partition or virtual memory (ie. windows pagefile)
• hda4 (35GB) “/home” (ie. c:\My Documents and Settings\)

The reason I gravitate toward that partition scheme is because I enjoy trying out various flavors of Linux from time to time and that scheme allows me to only format the system files without touching my personal files or settings (Microsoft dabbled with partition mapping and their half-hearted attempt was evident because you could only “copy” files to the trash). Anyway, once I answered a few questions about my username, timezone, etc, I found myself once again greeted by the familiar Kubuntu login prompt.

1. First thing I wanted to do would be the equivalent of setting up the proper drivers for my video card if I was in some flavor of Win32. Here’s how it worked in this environment:
   1. sudo aticonfig –initial =
   2. logout (end current session)
   3. control-alt-backspace (restart the xserver)
   4. The resolution on my machine just went from 1024×768 to 1600×1200 (hurray!)
2. The next thing I had in mind was a really nice wallpaper I had come across so:
   1. right-click on desktop and choose configure desktop
   1. click on Get New Wallpapers (I picked NIGHT)
   2. I set the color to black
   3. I set blending to flat to darken the image a little more so that when I set konsole (the KDE command line window) to have transparent background the brighter parts of the image don’t obscure the text output from the commands I type.
3. Next I left-clicked on the ‘K’ start button, choose the system menu and drop-n-drop the Konsole icon to left side of my panel (that long strip where the icons are along the bottom).
   1. Starting up Konsole, now I opened ‘Settings’ from the menu and selected ‘transparent Konsole’ (woohoo pretty!).
4. Next I right-clicked on the panel and chose ‘Configure Panel’
   1. I then chose ‘Appearance’ on the left, and ‘enabled transparency’ (nice!)
5. Next I added a few alias to my ‘~/.bashrc’. So from the command prompt I typed:
   1. echo alias ll=’ls -lh’ >> ~/.bashrc
6. Next I always like to set my command line environment so that after I quit reading a longer text file or man page the last page viewed will remain visible:
   1. echo export LESS=X >> ~/.bashrc

I’m going to go ahead and post what I’ve got now since I think this is somewhat of a timely subject. But I will continue edit this post as time goes on since I also want the documentation for reference. Here’s the way things look so far though.