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676

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 19, 2014, 01:47 AM »

So far I have had to just grumpily sit down and use Thunar.

-Edvard (March 18, 2014, 08:19 PM)

When I use XFCE, I go for Thunar too   Lately I've been trying Fluxbox and Openbox though so XFCE has been..."resting".

Xfe - Comes closest to being comparable to Xplorer², though still a little rough looking (uses the Fox Toolkit) and a lot of features up front that I never used, but it has what is most essential: a tree view and two file panes.  That rules plus one.  For some reason, the devs tacked on a bunch of desktop extras as if it was on it's way to being a new window manager.  Did not want.  Looks like they've scaled back recently, maybe I'll give it another shot.

Somehow never tried this one -- just installed it.  Thanks for mentioning it!

Gentoo - Dual panes ru... SO MANY BUTTONS AT THE BOTTOM!

Ha ha ha -- so true!

SpaceFm - Dual panes ru... sooo many panes... my God, it's full of tabs... o_O.  I know this one has been mentioned, but I gotta add my two cents and say the possibilities for 4 panes each with their own tree view is pretty darn impressive, but I got lost in it.  Maybe one day I'll take a deep breath and try again.  It's still installed, so that's saying something. 

IIRC, it doesn't start up with four panes showing


Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

677

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 19, 2014, 01:35 AM »

Interesting screencast on SpaceFM customization and features here:

 

-40hz (March 18, 2014, 12:05 PM)

Definitely things in there that I didn't know -- thanks!

678

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 18, 2014, 08:39 AM »

Thanks!

679

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 18, 2014, 12:55 AM »

Mmm, a digression

(VirtualBox 4.3.8 made portable)

-Shades (March 17, 2014, 08:07 PM)

I know of:

  http://www.vbox.me/
  http://www.linuxlive...om/en/other-versions

Do you know of another?

680

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 17, 2014, 07:50 PM »

I haven't used Krusader in a long time -- but the last time I had KDE installed, I remember being happy with it (especially the KIO slave functionality).


I'll give Rodent a try.

681

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 17, 2014, 05:41 AM »

Ah, the Wine route!  Thanks for the reminder

682

Non-Windows Software / *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?

« Last post by ewemoa on March 17, 2014, 03:28 AM »

Any favorite GUI file managers?

Until a few days ago, was using PCManFM, but do to certain difficulties, went "shopping" and am now trying out SpaceFM (mentioned a bit back by Steven Avery).


There's a list of *nix-only ones at Wikipedia's Comparison of file managers page but I seem to have trouble linking to it directly

683

Developer's Corner / Re: On HTML...

« Last post by ewemoa on March 17, 2014, 01:37 AM »

In summary, Web browsers are like quantum physics: they offer probabilistic guarantees at best, and anyone who claims to fully understand them is a liar. At this stage in human development, there are big problems to solve: climate change, heart disease, the poor financial situation of Nigerian princes who want to contact you directly. With all of these problems un solved, Web browsing is a terrible way to spend our time; the last thing that we should do is run unstable hobbyist operating systems that download strange JavaScript files from people we don’t know. Instead, we should exchange information using fixed-length ASCII messages written in a statically verifiable subset of Latin, with images represented as mathematical combinati ons of line segments, arcs, and other timeless shapes described by dead philosophers who believed that minotaurs were real but incapable of escaping mazes. That is the kind of clear thinking that will help us defeat the space Egyptians that emerge from the StarGates. Or whatever.

684

Living Room / Re: Against TED talks

« Last post by ewemoa on March 15, 2014, 10:04 PM »

Wow!

685

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by ewemoa on March 14, 2014, 03:57 AM »

Would this count?


Hmm...off by a year or so?

686

Living Room / Re: Dumb question but ...

« Last post by ewemoa on March 13, 2014, 05:42 AM »

If I try that my camera just shuts down — it's too frightened by what it sees 

-cranioscopical (March 11, 2014, 10:33 AM)

Ha ha ha

687

Non-Windows Software / Re: LINUX: Free book for the Tiny Core Linux distro

« Last post by ewemoa on March 13, 2014, 05:35 AM »

It's not something I'm doing intentionally -- that's just how it turns out.

I'll go back and edit.

688

Non-Windows Software / Re: LINUX: Free book for the Tiny Core Linux distro

« Last post by ewemoa on March 12, 2014, 10:30 PM »

May be some hints here?

  http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,12544.msg68122.html#msg68122

689

Non-Windows Software / Re: LINUX: Free book for the Tiny Core Linux distro

« Last post by ewemoa on March 12, 2014, 02:13 AM »

SCM extensions seemed to have been dropped in the 5.x series:

  http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,15895.0.html

Found this confusing because:

  http://tinycorelinux.net/

mentioned:

There are no major changes to the base, but X libs have been updated to Xorg-7.7 and imlib2, libjpeg and libpng have been factored out of the base. In addition, sce extensions have been dropped from this release.

May be a typo (sce -> scm)?


Found this nice picture:

  http://tinycorelinux.net/arch_core.html

I guess it hasn't been updated for 5.x.

690

Living Room / Re: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone: Choosing between tiny DIY computer kits

« Last post by ewemoa on March 12, 2014, 01:53 AM »

In the comments of the comparison that phitsc mentioned there was also:

  https://www.gumstix.com/
  http://www.friendlyarm.net/
  http://www.pcduino.com/

691

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 11, 2014, 08:23 PM »

Ah, how could I have missed the two emoticons!  Seven plus or minus two I guess

692

Non-Windows Software / Re: LINUX: Free book for the Tiny Core Linux distro

« Last post by ewemoa on March 11, 2014, 07:07 PM »

Also skimmed it -- looks like one could spend many hours tweaking!  IIUC, the version of the book I looked at seems to cover the 4.x series -- the most recent version seems to be 5.2.  Not sure how different the two series are but details might be available via the Final Releases section of the forums.

Thanks for sharing

693

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 10, 2014, 08:06 PM »

Mmm...as an ex-Sun OS 4.1.x user, I was never fond of Solaris...but may be things have changed

694

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 10, 2014, 05:38 PM »

Thanks to all for participating.

I'm still considering whether to test out the various BSDs -- it may have been more than a decade since my last serious use of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD (and now there appear to be others...)

695

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 09, 2014, 07:33 AM »

In the meantime don't neglect to create a disk image backup of the install.

-40hz (March 09, 2014, 06:57 AM)

Out of curiosity do you have a favorite method?  I used Redo Backup for a while but it doesn't seem to be actively developed.


I also went through a similar procedure with Manjaro's Net installation iso with some success:

1. Boot from iso-on-USB
2. Log in as manjaro user (with password as reported on screen)
3. Start installer via sudo setup and proceed to the end appropriately
4. Reboot and log in as a non-root user that can use sudo
5. Using pacman install the following packages: xorg-xinit, xterm, virtualbox, linux310-virtualbox-host-modules (match to linux kernel version), and qt4
6. Add non-root (current) user to vboxusers group
7. Load VirtualBox modules via modprobe vboxdrv
8. Edit $HOME/.xinitrc to exec xterm as last line
9. Start X via startx
10. From the xterm start VirtualBox
11. Test a guest OS

The total disk space used in this case was around 1.5 GB.

696

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 09, 2014, 06:01 AM »

I got the stable net install iso from Debian and performed the following steps:

1. Boot from iso-on-USB (dd-ed to USB memory)
2. Run the text installer and at the tasksel step unselect everything
3. After rebooting, install the sudo package and add the non-root user to the sudo group (then relogin)
4. Tell apt-get to install the virtualbox and xinit packages and accept the installation of the additional packages
5. Add the non-root user to the vboxusers group
6. Reboot for the VirtualBox modules to load (modprobe might work instead)
7. Log in and use startx to start X
8. From an xterm, start VirtualBox
9. Test run a guest OS

Seemed to work here.

For reference, I think the total disk space used (not including swap) was about 1.3 GB.

697

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 09, 2014, 03:54 AM »

Start with a Debian net install. Skip the desktop environment and widows manager options and only have it install X.

Once you've got that, do an 'apt-get install virtualbox'. If apt works as advertised (and the VBox config was set up correctly for the repositories) it should also install all the dependencies needed.

-40hz (March 08, 2014, 06:58 PM)

I think one might be able to skip specifying the installation of X -- somehow I get the feeling that just doing apt-get install virtualbox will pull X in...wishful thinking?

As you were probably hinting, after installing VirtualBox, I'd guess there may be some things to tweak such as adding certain users to the vboxusers.

Since I dug out a spare machine, may be I'll give this a try.

Quick note: Did some checking - using TinyCore as the host distro is definitely not gonna work.

I came across a thread on their forums with a post indicating someone had managed at some point (though perhaps with an older version of VirtualBox):

  http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,1761.msg27870.html#msg27870


Regarding Manjaro, I've now installed it twice -- not much luck with UEFI, but I suspect this has more to do with the specific machine I tried it on (from what I've read, a fair number of Lenovo notebooks seem to have "uncooperative" UEFI implementations).

I think Arch's docs are in better shape (many of which make sense for Manjaro), but Manjaro was much easier on my fingers and time during installation

Manjaro seems to suggest using Pamac or Octopi (roughly GUIs for Arch's packaging tool "pacman") and I'm pretty sure I'd have found those easier to use at first than pacman (though I think pacman is worth learning, I wouldn't want to start there if I had to start over).

I went for the Openbox flavor but it looks like one can choose from:

  XFCE
  KDE
  Net (bare)

and some other community-created versions:

  Cinnamon
  Gnome
  LXDE
  Enlightenment

Hmm, hadn't noticed the Net version...may be I can try out your build-up-from-minimal idea with that as a starting point.

698

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 08, 2014, 08:46 AM »

That's why I'd just go with a vanilla Debian/Ubu server setup as the base. You could always strip out anything you really didn't want afterwards if size is that important. Then install VBox. Dump a copy of installed packages via synaptic - or use a config backup tool like Aptik and it should be a breeze to build a new one (real or virtual) any time you want. The beauty of this approach is it will autoupdate through the repositories once it's built so that hassle goes away.

-40hz (March 08, 2014, 07:55 AM)

I know you said "like Aptik", but just to confirm, Aptik doesn't work with Debian, right?

One thing that I'm a bit fuzzy about is how much cruft might remain from stripping things out -- it's not so much size but not wanting extra services running (more from a security perspective than anything else).  I've had odd experiences trying to get cups-related, portmap/NFS-related, and other things to go away before when trying the "carve away unnecessary things" approach.  It's been a while since I closely examined Debian's default server installation -- do you happen to recall if it has these sorts of things by default?

May be I'll try this sort of approach with Manjaro and try out its remastering capabilities...

Hmm...damn...now you've got me thinking...

Ha ha ha!

699

Non-Windows Software / Re: *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 08, 2014, 07:35 AM »

Thanks for the suggestions


I've made a number of attempts to get Xen working over the years, but without much success...never quite make it far enough.  Have you had good experiences with it?

I'm trying to avoid too many steps during set up (cf. getting Arch and/or Gentoo installed - worth it a few times, but not great if I want to recreate a similar set up from scratch) as well as having VirtualBox or comparable stop working somewhere down the line because of an upgrade...


In the mean time, I tried out Manjaro (with Pamac / Octopi) which was a pleasant surprise -- still a bit rough but looks promising.  There also appears to be some kind of remastering support (ManjaroISO).


Now if DistroWatch.com's "Search Distribution" page would let one specify shipped-by-default packages...

700

Non-Windows Software / *NIX: Relatively Minimal Host OS for VirtualBox Use

« Last post by ewemoa on March 07, 2014, 04:08 PM »

Looking for an easy to install (so recognizes hardware well) *NIX -- though light on resources -- to run as a host OS for running VirtualBox guest OSes on top of.

Seen requests like this but usually see suggestions such as "start with some minimal system and just add VirtualBox and a few other things" -- but was hoping that there was an effort that shipped with VirtualBox as am not too keen on maintaining too much of a customized set up and was hoping if it were bundled that it might be better tested / integrated.

Any recommendations / ideas?  Am currently looking through this list but might also consider this list.


Currently trying CrunchBang, but this requires installing VirtualBox after the OS installation.