They say shit happens. Well yeah, if dropping your laptop and crashing down the hard disk irreversibly counts in. Though I would love to blame the TV for distracting me with Selena Gomez's raunchy new video while carrying my laptop from my bedroom to the living room, but whats done can not be undone. Good thing I had all my data backed up in an external USB hard drive.
As I'm unemployed at the moment and had to sell 2 of my other ancient laptops because of low performance and troubles maintaining them, I planned to use whatever resources I have at this time with utmost efficiency.This laptop in question is a 4 years old Lenovo G430 with Intel C2D processor and integrated Intel HD graphics. Not fancy but has been taking the abuse since 4 years pretty well.
For OS, I've been running Slackware Linux 14.0 32-bit in dual boot with CentOS 6.3 64-bit to accomplish day to day task although majorly I was always on Slackware for daily chores and to practice Linux systems programming (in c of course). After the tragedy, I realized I don't want to spend any money on hardware before I regain a good place to work, so there came handy the 8GB Transcend USB drive I had. But I had to carefully select what to install and what to skip because the default Slackware install generally takes around 7 GB.
I mainly used KDE as my primary DE because of some applications like Kppp, Konsole, K3B etc. and extreme configuration ability but I thought of going the xfce route to save up some space. I searched around and found that I would be able to use Kppp in xfce without the whole KDE suite just by installing Kdenetwork and additionally Kdelibs, Kde-baseapps & Kde-runtime in Slackware. I totally need Kppp because I use a USB modem for the internet and there's no native application for the task in xfce.
Please note that its not straight forward to install Slackware on a USB drive. It takes bit of hacking around. you can see the whole procedure in here:-
Installing-slackware-to-a-flash-drive
I installed Slackware 14.0 on my USB drive without KDE and KDEi. The whole installation took around 4.5 GB of space. I tweaked the whole install to suit up my daily need of System programming environment, audio-video, web browsing and manipulation of office docs using following steps:
I'm using a swap partition too even in the strict restriction on space, just in case, you know:
A screenshot would be appropriate at this moment of how the final setup looks like:-
Though everything is working normal, there are some minor issues which I would like to point out for all to see and if possible to provide any workaround:
That's it about my struggle and the final Slackware14.0 setup on a 8GB USB drive. See you around next time with next post.
Regards.
-PrinceCruise
As I'm unemployed at the moment and had to sell 2 of my other ancient laptops because of low performance and troubles maintaining them, I planned to use whatever resources I have at this time with utmost efficiency.This laptop in question is a 4 years old Lenovo G430 with Intel C2D processor and integrated Intel HD graphics. Not fancy but has been taking the abuse since 4 years pretty well.
For OS, I've been running Slackware Linux 14.0 32-bit in dual boot with CentOS 6.3 64-bit to accomplish day to day task although majorly I was always on Slackware for daily chores and to practice Linux systems programming (in c of course). After the tragedy, I realized I don't want to spend any money on hardware before I regain a good place to work, so there came handy the 8GB Transcend USB drive I had. But I had to carefully select what to install and what to skip because the default Slackware install generally takes around 7 GB.
I mainly used KDE as my primary DE because of some applications like Kppp, Konsole, K3B etc. and extreme configuration ability but I thought of going the xfce route to save up some space. I searched around and found that I would be able to use Kppp in xfce without the whole KDE suite just by installing Kdenetwork and additionally Kdelibs, Kde-baseapps & Kde-runtime in Slackware. I totally need Kppp because I use a USB modem for the internet and there's no native application for the task in xfce.
Please note that its not straight forward to install Slackware on a USB drive. It takes bit of hacking around. you can see the whole procedure in here:-
Installing-slackware-to-a-flash-drive
I installed Slackware 14.0 on my USB drive without KDE and KDEi. The whole installation took around 4.5 GB of space. I tweaked the whole install to suit up my daily need of System programming environment, audio-video, web browsing and manipulation of office docs using following steps:
- Removed Koffice and installed Abiword (and wv as Dependency) using Ponce's packages. I trust AlienBob's and Ponce's packages any given day.
- Removed GIMP, though I actually need to create internet memes. But It looked wise to free up the space. ;-)
- Installed Kdelibs, Kde-baseapps and Kde-runtime from the install DVD and then installed Konsole, Okular and Kppp. All working fine so far.
- Installed VLC and Adobe flash player using AlienBob's package
- Installed complete lxde environment using Ponce's packages because the space footprint is negligible. His repo is here: Ponce's lxde packages for Slackware 14.0
- Installed Kfaenza theme.
- Removed the generic kernels (both smp and non-smp) and huge non-smp as I'm using huge-smp kernel.
cruise:/~]$ cat /proc/*version*
Linux version 3.2.29-smp (root@hive) (gcc version 4.7.1 (GCC) ) #2 SMP Mon Sep 17 13:16:43 CDT 2012
[cruise:/~]$ df -hT
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 ext4 6.8G 5.6G 902M 87% /
tmpfs tmpfs 768M 0 768M 0% /dev/shm
I'm using a swap partition too even in the strict restriction on space, just in case, you know:
/dev/sda5 14330043 15679439 674698+ 82 Linux swap
A screenshot would be appropriate at this moment of how the final setup looks like:-
Though everything is working normal, there are some minor issues which I would like to point out for all to see and if possible to provide any workaround:
- The system is slow. And that is expected because of the USB drive being very old.
- The fn keys are not working for brightness, for everything else its fine. I always had the entry appended "acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux" in my lilo and working since 2 years but not this time. I'm still on it.
- My integrated Lenovo webcam is not detected anymore, so talking to the family on Skype is out of question at the moment
- As you can see in the screenshot, in the system tray along with the battery icon, the connected USB modem's icon is invisible. Installing kdeartwork didn't help. Still looking up on this.
That's it about my struggle and the final Slackware14.0 setup on a 8GB USB drive. See you around next time with next post.
Regards.
-PrinceCruise
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