I’m been really getting into Dreamlinux, it appears to be a distro with pretty much everything I need. Like I said in my previous post, the only downside is that the system isn’t always up to date as well as it should be. With that said, Dreamlinux doesn’t come preinstalled with an easy network manager. Nore has the Dreamlinux team made the current network manager much easier to use. The problem is most related to laptop users. Laptop users, need an easy way to scan wireless networks, and pick an available one. I wrote a quick mini tutorial at the Dreamlinux Wiki about it.
But now, I have a new gripe. Engage Panel dumps the sys tray when it recycles, I hate this, because guess what, network-manager-gnome doesn’t automatically recycle it nm-applet! In other words, edit the Engage Dock using Engage Admin, and lose system tray icons, and need to restart the applet.
I found a quick way around that, and am providing my modified Engage Admin code. Basically how this works, is you replace the current Engage Admin with my modified one (or you can install them side by side, there are only 2 line additions), install a sh script to your home directory, enter the commands to run after recycle in the sh script. And now, when you recycle the Engage Dock, it will also run the commands in the sh file, easy - no more manually reloading nm-applet! Of course you can follow the small guide here, but I’ll also be adding it to the Dreamlinux Wiki .
Just follow these codes in your terminal window:
cd /usr/local/bin
sudo mv engage_admin.rb engage_admin.rb.bak
Posted by admin at 11:58 am on October 31st, 2007.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Installation of the binary ATI Linux driver, always seems to be a pain in my ass. I try out generally 3-4 distributions of Linux a week. I always seem to run into the same problem with every ’special’ distribution, they don’t like the driver packages - or there is no documentation to help! That is the case with DreamLinux 2.2 MMGL. DreamLinux is a merge of several distrbutions, along with some sprinkled in love of great applications to pull it all together. While DreamLinux may have some short comings, it makes up for them more than enough, with its XFCE 4 desktop, and Engage Dock bar, and all the Multimedia goodies throwen in at the start. Its based on Debian with a Kanotix Kernel, this means that it isn’t always obvious what needs to be done to get something running with in this distro.
The biggest misfortune for DreamLinux, is the small team of developers behind it. With a group of 4 people (last I found a count), keeping the distro up to date, seems to be a little hard to do. The ATI installation script that is provided, is SEVERAL releases behind. Since 8.40 had made leaps past 8.36, it is a MUST to have the latest drivers available. However, because of the special nature of this distribution - I found it a little daunting to compile the driver into a package manually - and install. After all, we started saying this distro is Debian + Kanotix, did you know it likes to use the Ubuntu/edgy package for driver install!?
So now my mini tutorial on 8.42.3 and DreamLinux.
Obtain updated Kanotix Debian fglrx script.
cd /usr/local/bin
sudo rm install-fglrx-debian.sh
sudo wget http://kanotix.com/files/install-fglrx-debian.sh
sudo chmod 755 install-fglrx-debian.sh
Now that you have the updated script, press CTRL+ALT+F1 to switch to a text terminal (to get back to your X session, CTRL+ALT+F7). Log in to the Text Session as your self. Run the following command:
sudo fglrx-install
Now once the script is finished running, it should restart Xorg, and you should be all set and running with the latest 3D driver.
To check type
fglrxinfo
If you return Vendor: ATI you are good to go. If Vendor: Mesa, try again!
Posted by admin at 10:26 am on October 30th, 2007.
Categories: Uncategorized.