Trollinger64 install

[NGIB]

Fired it up on USB drive last night and immediately liked it enough to do a hard disk install. Went very smooth. The problem came when I tried to login to the new install - it just kept looping back to the login box even though I entered the right username/password. Thought maybe I fat fingered one or the other so I reinstalled with the same result. The site was down so I couldn't ask this last night. I'm real impressed from what I saw on the USB drive and I think this would be the perfect base for me if I can get past the login issue...

[machinebacon]

Hi,

Choose the LXDE session in light DM :)

[machinebacon]

Hello again,

sorry for the (possibly too) brief answer in the post above, I was logged in on my Tab.

So, the thing is that there is an Openbox and an LXDE session that can be chosen.
In LightDM, you have fields to enter the username and password, as well as to choose a session. There you pick LXDE.
If you want to keep LXDE as the default desktop for the future (to make login a bit smoother), we will need to edit a file in the /usr/share/xsessions and/or the ~/.dmrc file. If you are interested in this, let us know. I warmly recommend getting rid of LightDM because it might break when you do the first dist-upgrade (due to some gtk3-problems on which LightDM depends). This was also the reason why I made a new remix called "Coal"

If you don't care much for graphical logins, you have two ways:
1) remove lightdm completely and use xinit's startx to start the Xserver (session)
2) you to pick the newer "Coal" release: it is a bit fresher, has fewer dependencies and comes without login manager.

[NGIB]

I'll try again later today. I need the graphical login as I really need to find an OS for my wife that I can setup to be VERY simple. I booted Coal as well and while no login manager would be OK for me - it would freak her out big time...

[machinebacon]

You can go a step further: automatic login and start of LXDE. If the computer isn't moved or used in a workgroup/office, this is a sane option. systemd boots into the session in less than 30 seconds. Let me know which option you prefer and I'll guide you :)

[NGIB]

You can go a step further: automatic login and start of LXDE. If the computer isn't moved or used in a workgroup/office, this is a sane option. systemd boots into the session in less than 30 seconds. Let me know which option you prefer and I'll guide you :)

I really like the sound of this. I spent a lot of time setting up my wife's computer to make it simple and efficient for her. She only wants to see the programs she uses and does not ever want to be bothered by popups telling her to update or reconfigure. I really want to wean her off of Windows but I have yet to find the "perfect" distro. Here's what I mean by perfect distro for me:

Accurately detects and configures hardware at boot.
Auto login. (To main user account)
Only basic software: text editor, synaptic, terminal, GUI configuration tools, calculator, simple task bar.
Pre-installed codecs to watch video and listen to MP3s.
Ability to take a snapshot of an installed/configured system and put it on a USB drive to move it to other computers.

I have programs I like to use and I can load them through synaptic. For example, I read a lot and I like Calibre so it's generally the first app I load. A spreadsheet is nice and either Libre Office or Gnumeric works well. I'm tempted to look at Kingsoft Office but having roots in China worries me. Trollinger was/is really good as it met the things on my list generally. I really like the fact that OBmenu was pre-installed and configured as I like the right-click Openbox menu for myself. I like Mate as a DE but I've run into little issues in every Mate distro I've tried, maybe it's still maturing. LXDE is simple (I really wish there was an efficient GUI main menu editor) but I can manually work with the .desktop to get the main menu "perfect". Anyway, just some rambling...

[NGIB]

BTW, I really appreciate the support and guidance I have received - I'm actually amazed that the boss even converses with me!!!

[machinebacon]

We will make it as comfy as possible for the wifey. Have you compared Coal and Trollinger? I'm just asking because tere are some minor (and major) changes or differences between the two, and the instructions would be slightly different.

Of course, the hardware compatibility is always a bit of hit and miss, especially for wireless adapters and for the graphics chipset. If the stuff works from USB stick, it will work on the installed system, too, so you might try them from a USB stick first. (Be sure to dd onto the right device, after inserting the stick "dmesg |tail" will show you the device node, hopefully)

In the HOWTO section of the forums you find a post by pidsley entitled "Enable Auto-login in tty" (or something like this, it's quite recent and the title is obvious). You can follow the instructions there step by step, I have recreated them on various installs and they work. Your installed system will then boot directly into the desktop. Be sure that we execute "startlxde" for the LXDE desktop.

With regards to Synaptic I would like to tell you that there is no real benefit in using this frontend - actually quite the opposite. We are running on Debian sid, and the synaptic tool has (by design) some settings that apparently don't work perfectly well on a sid base. I would like to recommend the usage of the command line to search and aquire packages:
"upd" is what we usually do to apt-get update the local database
"upg" combines apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade - be sure to use this one, and not Synaptic's built-in upgrader
"search calibr" will find all packages that have calibr in their name
"ins calibre" will install Calibre
"policy calibre" will show you the version of calibre both on the server as well as on the local system, if installed
"depends calibre" shows the dependencies of the package, which is quite interesting if you want to see how heavy certain applications weigh

I hope this brings us a step closer to the dream setup. If you get stuck, please report.

[wuxmedia]

hey irish,
if its a laptop, installed without a Display Manager - you might have trouble with suspend (on lid down) and stuff, at least i did.
WRT, the boss talking to you, isn't it great!
The reason for Coal is - to upgrade trollinger takes a long time to get upto speed.
Coal is a more recent snapshot (in time) of the current packages.

Bacon has included a great set of aliases in the CLI, as listed above. which frankly makes synaptic look a little clunky.
typing 'upg' is a cinch instead of sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

have you tried XFCE? that can be made windows like.

[NGIB]

I could live without synaptic I suppose as once you get a system the way you want it all you need to do is keep it updated. With gdebi available, it's easy to find and install the apps I need. I realize this place is focused on "CLI, no bloat" type stuff but to reach the mainstream you need to balance GUI with CLI and Trollinger does a good job of that. It picked up the wireless in both machines I tried it on without issues. I booted into Coal and no wireless at startup on either. Yes, I could have figured it out but just this small issue will prevent many folks from "taking the plunge". Believe me, I'm not being critical as I lived at a command prompt for many years and I know the inherent efficiency. I resisted moving to Windows and stayed on DOS years longer than most folks. Now I'm just looking for simple and efficient - I'm to old and grumpy to learn the intimate details of a new OS...

[NGIB]

hey irish,
if its a laptop, installed without a Display Manager - you might have trouble with suspend (on lid down) and stuff, at least i did.
WRT, the boss talking to you, isn't it great!
The reason for Coal is - to upgrade trollinger takes a long time to get upto speed.
Coal is a more recent snapshot (in time) of the current packages.

Bacon has included a great set of aliases in the CLI, as listed above. which frankly makes synaptic look a little clunky.
typing 'upg' is a cinch instead of sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

have you tried XFCE? that can be made windows like.

All the computers in my family have been laptops for the last 8-9 years. My last desktop crashed in 2004 and I just never fixed it. I have 2, my "desktop" is a Core I7 with nvidia and my portable is a Core I5 with Intel. This is my first nvidia equipped laptop and in some ways I regret it as it can be difficult to get stuff to run right. I bought it used (and cheap) so I can't bitch much. I'm not a gamer and it's sure overkill to have a 2GB graphics card.

I have toyed with XFCE quite a bit and it's OK. I just like LXDE on top of Openbox as it gives me a nice panel, friendly menus, and the Openbox menu on a right click if I want it. I really like Mate as it's very simple to set it up exactly how you want as far as the panel and the menu. For my wife it would be perfect as I could setup the "Start" menu that would only contain apps she needs and configure the panel to look near exactly like her Windows setup. Sadly I have run into glitches with all the Mate distros I've tried. PCLinuxOS was really good but I can't shutdown properly on my nvidia laptop - it just hangs. No answer on this from the forum folks either. A buddy at work has run into the same problem and he's running Intel graphics on an I7 laptop so it's not a nvidia issue. The only way to really shutdown the computer was to issue "shutdown -h now" from a root terminal...

[wuxmedia]

I ran MATE for ages, with compiz 8^0
then just normal MATE, have you tried bacons MATE64 spin? (is that up to 1.6? if not i wrote a 'recipe' for upgrading) it *might* have been the DM in the other spins?
BTW (nearly) all DM's can be tweaked to autologin.

[machinebacon]

Just to clarify, the Coal release comes with the newer 3.10-x kernel on which many wireless chipsets fail to run, it's not a BBQ trouble but affects all (!) Linux kernels, apparently. The repositories have kernels back to version 3.3, plus the stock Debian, so if you have a wired connection, you can roll back to a previous kernel (I prefer the 3.6-x versions, but that's subjective)

wrt to MATE, the base release at the BBQ is (at the moment) 64bit only, but comes as version 1.6, so it's recent. I might bump the 32bit version soon.

The BBQ is not necessarily "CLI only", and I can give you a very good example what I mean with "not necessarily":
all Base Releases (for example Trollinger, or Coal) do only come with the holy GUI trinity Browser, Editor, File Manager. Everything else I leave to the user. Even these 3 apps don't satisfy all users, there are around 16 web browsers in the repos, countless editor interfaces and at least 5 GUI file managers. It's not that I luv the CLI, I just hate to read the whining of people who "prefer app X over app Y". If you take a look at the special editions (Enough!, Rocks!, Mother, Argentina, Count, Quacksalver, StudEx, and my favourite Elitist) you see that there is a lion share of GUI, and just a few CLI apps (usually those that most users like: irssi for IRC, mocp for music, nano as editor, mc as file manager, and ranger as file browser)
The real problems are happening upstream in the house of GNOME: the libgtk3 is being developed, but themes are not fully compatible. Of course one might say: what do I care about themes? Actually, the themes cause segmentation faults in the applications that need gtk3 libraries: LightDm, network-manager applet, synaptic, gdebi, file-roller, transmission, you name it.
To prevent borkage, I have recently removed all libgtk3-* dependencies, leaving the decision to "remove the safety cap to drink bleach" to the user. It is not that I love the CLi so much, I just hate to work on a distro/remix that is going to be broken by non-FOSS rapists upstream.
I really recommend to stay away from gtk3-applications in the next months, because they do cause a lot of trouble in Sid recently (check the Crunchbang forums for so reports, where users blindly upgraded to Sid and got the whole GNOME desktop pulled onto their computer, just to find segfaulting applications) -- on a side note: our users did not run into this problem on recent releases, and there's a reason behind it.

Now I forgot what the original post was about :D

[machinebacon]

By the way, gdebi doesn't really do much for you - in the worst case it just helps to install software that is not to be found in the repos, and this can possibly lead to problems (either with the installed application or the system)
I really really recommend using the three commands "upd" (to update the cache, do this once a day before installing packages) "search <searchterm>" and "ins <packagename>" over synaptic. It's not that Synaptic is evil, but APT (the command line) has a clever function to warn you about bugs in the desired application (apt-listbugs is the name of this little helper, you don't need to do anything to get these reports printed to the screen after attempting to install packages)
But of course, you are free to do as you wish - I just talk from my own experience.

[NGIB]

I am learning a lot just by this conversation. I may experiment with Coal and my wireless this evening. This means dragging my laptops over to the desk where my wired connection is - physical effort sucks!

Maybe I'll just get a 30 foot ethernet cable!!!

[pidsley]

Maybe I'll just get a 30 foot ethernet cable!!!

http://www.monoprice.com/products/produ ... 1&format=2

:)

You might also like this (bacon mentioned it, but here's a direct pointer): http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=510

[machinebacon]

Thanks Pid, I was in tty when I posted before and too lazy (shame on me) to copy the link over.

Now OP just needs to decide which base he takes and then we can either make LightDM autologin into startlxde or use the sexy systemd autologin in a no-DM version.

[NGIB]

I'm going to fire up Coal when I get home from work and attempt to get WiFi working. If I pass that hurdle - then that's the base I'll use...

[machinebacon]

^ Sounds like a plan :) You'll get it to work with an older kernel. We're here if you need help.

[NGIB]

Possibly a stupid question but if the newer kernels have these issues - why use them? Would it be simpler just to upgrade Trollinger and remove LightDM? I have fast internet so large upgrades are no hassle at all...