Feathered Linux

[vakkotaur]

I tried another Linux distribution on icelandic today. This one actually boots, at least.

Feather Linux is another LiveCD (or USB memory gadget) based distribution built from a stripped-down Knoppix, which is itself a very customized Debian.

From the CD, it wasn't bad. It found the hardware, it found the network, and unlike a few other Knoppix derivatives it didn't stupidly find and ignore the serial trackball. It semi-stupidly found it and then asked where the mouse was with a few dialog boxes. Then it started X with the fluxbox window manager. So far, so good. For web browsing there's the tiny and fast Dillo, or the not as tiny not as fast but fuller featured FireFox. For irc there's nirc which is probably wonderful for someone else, but I found it irksome.

I tried the HDD install and that took off fairly well with the usual partitioning tools and such. The dialogs were clear (the default name of the machine is 'box' but that got changed) and it looked good. It even asked if I wanted to do DHCP and when I answered 'no' it asked the right network setup questions, including one about running sshd which it set up properly. And that turned out to be a good thing.

After install came the reboot and up came X and fluxbox - and no login. Uh oh. And no trackball. Uh oh. And evidently fluxbox, or at least this incarnation of it, hijacks the keys for virtual terminals for virtual desktops. What the? ALT-CONTROL-BACKSPACE to bail out, right? Er, partly. I found later that it must be the left ALT-CONTROL and not the right. I got in via ssh from belgian where with help from jmaynard I found the tool that had asked the mouse configuration questions when running from CD.

A bit more work got apt-get and synaptic going. Overall, synaptic is impressive. It has the annoying bit of prefacing things with GNU/- which shows its Debian roots. But now I have joe and x-chat and nedit installed. I was disappointed to find that it was a version behind on nedit and so wasn't the one with nice file tabbing. I did try using gaim for IRC and found it weird. It works, but it doesn't work the way I expect an IRC client to work.

I'm not at all pleased by fluxbox hijacking the virtual terminal keys. Nor am I happy about the lack of any login. I get dumped to a working X as user 'knoppix' whether I want that or not. I did create another user - but that user can't start an X session, it seems. I also haven't worked out what I need to edit to customize the menus. There's a bunch of stuff I'd get rid of and a few things I'd like to add.

I'm not sure I'll be keeping Feather around, but it has a few other distributions beat: even with its problems, it did install and boot into a system that could be made runnable. That's more than some have managed.

My two big issues with it are:

No login - this feels very wrong to me. It's fine for a LiveCD, but not for a proper install. I tried changing the runlevel to get around this, but wound up not being able to start an X session for any user other than 'knoppix' which is rather annoying.

Fluxbox hijacks the virtual terminal access - I've come to really appreciate having at least a virtual terminal around. And I've come to like to get at it without having to kill the X session to do it.

I have other issues, but those relate more to Debian's irksome GNU/- prefixing which Feather itself fortunately avoids committing.

Comments

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

fluxbox has a configuration file that can be edited (for a GUI to do that, there's fluxconf). To be sure, it can be argued that they should've made better choices to begin with.

About no login... that should be fixable, too. /etc/inittab would be the place to start looking, I think. There, too, folks who make Live CDs that offer to install for you should set things up so that the installed version goes through login, or at least tell one how to make it work that way.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

The config stuff for fluxbox seems not to have anything to deal with the keys. I did find one file that looked like it did and still had the hijacking issue. Looking at inittab didn't gain me anything.

It's frustrating as this system is technically usable, but it's just not right. I suspect, as nice as it started out looking, that it's best to look to other choices. And perhaps keep an eye on the Feather linux forums in case the questions others have asked get real answers.