Clerry Computers

Looks like a news magazine. How about that?

Paul Sherman has done an incredible job of integrating IceWM and Rox. It is a great distribution and worthy of download. The only reason that I am customizing it, is that I need to add certain programs for educational purposes. These programs include, KDE Edutainment, GCompris (though I’ve had no luck adding it yet), GutenPy, Nano, and others.



The first thing was to add Enlightenment DR17. This is dead easy thanks to the Slack-E folks. I ran a max install because I was interested in many of the packages, especially entrance. This would provide a graphical login without having to add GDM or KDM.



The first thing I had to do, was have entrance appear at the login. Changing the runlevel to 4 gave me an ugly xdm screen. After running around chasing my tail doing that, I decided to leave the runlevel back to 3. It seems 4 is predisposed to look for xdm,gdm or kdm. Changing it back to 3 still gave me a prompt, and I could just type entranced at the prompt, but why do that?



I modified /etc/rc.d/rc.local to run entranced. I simply added it to the bottom of the file.



Reboot and Viola! I had entranced. This may not be the best way to do it, I could have modified rc.M, but rc.local already exists on Absolute for custom folders and CD links.



Next, I wanted to include choices for IceWM, Fluxbox, and E17 as sessions when Entrance popped up. I had to find the build_config.sh script that is supposed to be located in usr/share/entrance. I found it thanks to Google and started to modify it for what I needed. I’m not finished with the fine touches, yet, but, here’s the rough draft.



Pay attention to this line:
ecore_config - c $DB -k /entrance/session/count -i 7



session 0 is always the default. sessions 1 through 7 give you all kinds of choices. I was adding IceWM, so I have to change the count to 8.



Next, I added these three lines:
ecore_config - c $DB -k /entrance/session/7/session -s "icewm"
ecore_config - c $DB -k /entrance/session/7/title -s "IceWM"
ecore_config - c $DB -k /entrance/session/icon -s "blackbox.png"



I saved the script, ran it, and copied the output to /etc/entrance_config.cfg



On rebooting, I got the choice for Ice, but selecting it put me back in Enlightenment. I consulted the icewm website and figured out the issue.



I should have to exit the Xsession file to tell X how to execute icewm. However, being Slackware, the file was slightly modified. I added the following lines to /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession
icewm)
exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.icewm
;;




Saving this and rebooted gave me the choices and allowed me to boot into IceWM. I can switch back and forth, through entrance, from enlightenment DR17, IceWM, and Fluxbox. How cool is that?

The obvious question is, “why another Linux distro”? It has been pointed out that Edubuntu has similar goals. It has also been pointed out that the world does not need Yet Another Distro.

Those points are valid, so the best way to explain is to start with the history of the project.

In October 2006, discussion about a computer giveaway project began. During that discussion, the operating system became an issue. A private company could become a licensed redistributor of a famous proprietary operating system at a mere $5 a license. However, since unsupported legacy operating systems would be used, concerns arose about security and malware issues. As those issues were being worked out, one person began to explore F/OSS alternatives.

The obvious choice appeared to be Edubuntu as it had all the educational software needed as well as a solid Debian base. However, the system requirements were too high for some of the computers that would be refurbished. At first, Xubuntu was modified to hold the KDEEdutainment software, however, the system performance was still not ideal.

At that time, news spread about Absolute. A Slackware derivative that was speedy and contained nice-to-have utilities. Not only that, Paul had created tweaked KDE libraries and other packages to fine-tune performance. When a 200Mhz Pentium Pro with 128Mb was loaded with Absolute, it sang.

While adding further tweaking, such as installing certain packages, deliberation began about the UI. Someone suggested using Enlightenment. To my suprise, the old Pentium Pro still performed well.

At this point, the development folks realized that we weren’t making another *buntu and we certainly weren’t making a Slackware clone. If anything, we were making a derivative of Absolute, with a few compiled packages of our own. For now, it was decided to use a different name, but give back to Absolute, Slackware, and others as much as we can. This decision is subject to change. In other words, we may decide to now be an independent OS and simply provide our customized packages and artwork.