By nature i like to try stuff out and have a bit of a tinker so with an old dell inspiron 4150 we had in the house I decided to spend a day messing about with linux.
Now as you may know laptops are usually what some people might call “a bit of a bastard” when it comes to installing anything other than windows. Now I haven’t seriously used a Linux distro in about 3 years so I decided to check out one that I had heard a lot about recently; Ubuntu as it turned out this was a bit of a mistake the inital startup gladly informed me it was having trouble reading my floppy drive before dying horribly, not surprising really considering I don’t have one. Googling around for a bit revealed this was a known issue with my laptop the other being having the parallel port enabled in BIOS broke the sound card (WTF) with a lot of people not making much progress I decided to turn back to a distro I was familiar with Gentoo.
Gentoo’s inital kernel fired up ok and then came the fun bit; the install. Now Gentoo basically likes to compile everything and give you a load of options about how you set your system up, this is great if you have an old system and you want to install the minimum of stuff so it runs as fast as possible. The downside is it takes forever. Its not for the weak of heart but by the end you feel like you have achieved something and quite possibly learned something too. The main install guide ends with getting your system configured to your preference and fully bootable what it doesn’t do is tell you how to setup X, I really like this because as window managers go i love the little known fluxbox. Fluxbox is quite simple, lightweight and looks good too, its a brilliant window manager I used extensively during my uni days for development. Luckily someone that uses it likes it as much as i do and created a helpful guide for Gentoo users. Flux is .
Now theres quite a difference between setting up for fun and actually using it full time. Yesterday my main PC died the culprit; broken memory, result? one scrambled windows PC. With the postman a few days away I’m back on the laptop so I decide my desktop needs prittying up a bit this is where i hit a problem:
fbsetbg -f mybackground.jpg
produced something along the lines of:
Esetroot: unable to load image file
Helpful it wasn’t I found out that another program called feh could also be used to a background trying to find out if it was a general problem setting background feh firmly pointed the finger at imlib2. Emerging this imlib2 didn’t have any effect until I realised why apparently you need to do this:
USE="jpeg gif" emerge imlib2 --newuse
Now for people that don’t know how emerge works what its basiclay saying is install imlib2 with support for jpeg and gif files, now why it doesn’t do this as a matter of course ill never know and generally such questions are best left unanswered when it comes to Linux as usually there long and boring. In the end things turned out fairly nice:
