I collect things, videos, audio files, documents, images. Managing my collections is always something that is time consuming and tedious.

About two years ago I first started playing with Freevo. I was impressed, and started building up fxd files with loads of info about all my media. I figured i’d keep the work from then and build upon it, building a full blown media PC running Freevo.

The hardware:
Dual Core AMD 64bit
1 gig RAM
80 gig SATA Seagate Disk
CD/DVD-R
cx88 based TV Tuner

First attempt at getting this off the ground was with the 64 bit version of Ubuntu.. Which as ubuntu often does, frustrated me to no end.

Moving past this I stuck in FreevoLive, based on Mandriva. I gave up on Mandrake at version 10, before the Mandriva thing happened… the Live based distro based on Mandriva’s live thingie reminded me why I don’t like it. Package management is horrible (i’m a Gentoo user, and Debian on my production servers, so most package management annoys me. Hail mighty apt, praise thee, emerge.)

enter OpenSUSE, stage left

The install is neat, flexible, but unobtrusive. It has been one of the most enjoyable new distro installs i’ve used in along time. I’m installing 10.3 - I had the media handy.

The install timed out a fair bit on package and repository info; but my internet connection has been a little flakey the last few days. Manually having to retry when it did meant the install wasn’t entirely unattended for the most part.

No Gnome.

People who know me know that I like feet. Thats all feet except for the Gnome-foot, and the rest of Gnome in general. The ones made of clay with red hats are however quite nice to have around. So I selected xfce in the install. xfce is a good compromise - i’ve just gone back to IceWM on my primary desktop.

The default login picked fvwm for me… ehh. shrugs.

Thats where I am now… I’ve added the 3rd-party Packman repository, the package management system has let me pick freevo and the bits I want… I’m about to configure the TV Tuner… wish me luck…

We’ve been looking at buying a new MiniPCI Wifi card for binky (Kate’s Laptop), and we’ve decided on the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG (or similiar, maybe a 2915ABG, anything supported by the ipw2200) card, which seems to have really good Linux support.

One of our requirements is WPA-PSK, for use on the network where we are both working at the moment. There are a couple of references to a HOWTO for using wpa_supplicant with the ipw drivers (it has been at http://www.bughost.org/ipw/wpa_howto.txt) but the server appears to be down.

Google cache found a copy for me; which I will put up online as it would be very sad for a resource like this to be lost. You can find my mirror here.

I’ve spent some time recently tweaking kate’s laptop’s X configuration.

The display is an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY, using a Synaptics TouchPad.

The system is currently running Gentoo, Kernel 2.6.16 (r12) and X.org 7.0.

The major changes to the configuration have been due to an upgrade to Xorg 7.0, the fact that the nipple (Trackpoint) was not working under the previous configuration, and a general clean up.

Xorg.conf

Both my partner (Kate) and I enjoy a fairly minimalistic environment when it comes to our X setup/configurations. She got me hooked on Gentoo, while I got her rather attached to IceWM as a Window Manager.

IceWM has loads style for little cost, it all fits in minimal memory, it’s quick and very useable. We don’t need, nor particularly like the featureset of “desktop environments” and the Windows-wanna-be approach that Gnome and KDE tend to take. Taking this a step further, we both use xdm as a Display Manager, and yes - it is ugly. This is how I’ve made it a little more asthetically pleasing.

You should be able to find all of the configuration files for xdm in /etc/X11/xdm or somewhere similiar depending upon the distribution you’re using.

Firstly, make sure you’re actually using xdm (as opposed to gdm or kdm or one of the others), under Gentoo you can do this in /etc/rc.conf, look for the environment variable DISPLAYMANAGER, it should be set to “xdm”.

Starting with the /etc/X11/xdm/Xresources file, we first want to make the login box look a little prettier:

xlogin*greeting: Identify Yourself
xlogin*namePrompt: User ID:  
xlogin*passwdPrompt: Password:  
xlogin*fail: ACCESS DENIED!

xlogin*greetFont: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xlogin*font: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xlogin*promptFont: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xlogin*failFont: -*-clean-bold-*-*-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

xlogin*width: 300
xlogin*height: 120
xlogin*x: 10
xlogin*y: 10

xlogin*borderWidth: 2
xlogin*frameWidth: 0
xlogin*innerFramesWidth: 0
xlogin*shdColor: black
xlogin*hiColor: black
xlogin*background: #333333
xlogin*greetColor: yellow
xlogin*failColor: red
xlogin*promptColor: #ffffff
xlogin*Foreground: red
xlogin*Background: black

xlogin*useShape: false
xlogin*logoPadding: 0

You can leave the xlogin.translations bit as is, unless you particularly want to play with it), you can leave the Chooser section as is as well, unless you particularly want it customised.

Now to add a touch of interest to the root window while we’re waiting for someone to login. I decided to use the glslideshow component
to add some movement and interest. xdm generally runs as root, so you may want to copy your .xscreensaver file from your home directory to root’s to keep some configuration options (like the directory for glslideshow to pull it’s images from with xscreensaver-getimage).

Next setup your Xsetup_0 file, I tend to remove the xconsole entry, I find it annoying and if I want to check the console log, I’m more then capable of doing it myself. So I first black the screen, then start a glslideshow of images:

#!/bin/sh
# $Xorg: Xsetup_0,v 1.3 2000/08/17 19:54:17 cpqbld Exp $
xsetroot -solid black
/usr/lib/misc/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root -duration 26 
   -letterbox -zoom 50 -pan 4 -fade 5 -delay 0 &

You could of course replace glslideshow with anything, even tuxracer if you wanted to!

Enjoy your slightly prettier xdm configuration.