Linuxland: Ultima and icelandic

[vakkotaur]

I've been trying Linux distributions on icelandic for a while and I think I might have found one that works.

A few days ago I saw an entry for Ultima Linux on DistroWatch. Looking into it a bit, it was a Slackware descendant, it was claimed that it would run on a 486, KDE was an option, GNOME (rather vehemently) was not, and the standard install had a choice of a few lighter window managers. Pretty good.

It seems to be pretty much a one-man operation, with a notice to please not get the ISOs by ftp unless you had no other choice. I snagged them via bittorrent. The first ISO initially looked like it would take 100+ hours to get, but things sped up overnight and it finished in a more reasonable time. The second ISO was obtained faster, also by bittorrent.

The install wasn't as nice as the documentation claimed, but it wasn't too bad. The intro screen is nice enough (welcoming you to Ultima, I think, but much of the install maintains that it is Slackware), and helpfully suggests pressing F2 for more information, which you get. And then F3 is suggested which yields more information, and F4 is suggested. F4 did nothing. Oops.

The first try at installation, the installer insisted that the CD drive wasn't there as I'd had the installer hunt for the CD first, rather than in sequence. After starting over (just the installer sequence, not a reboot) things seemed to work fine. Until the real time to reboot. Despite not setting it to do anything with a floppy, the startup stopped and said to put in the boot floppy (which I did not have as I had not expected to need it and so did not create one) and trying to go on resulted in a kernel panic. A few tries at recovery with the boot CD were fruitless as well.

Rather than give up in disgust, I had another go at things and this time figured I'd omit KDE and see if that helped. I didn't get any error messages in the first attempt, but icelandic doesn't have a huge hard drive. By today's standards, it's downright tiny.

This time I did everything in sequence, selecting the menu install as I had before and de-selecting KDE and things supporting KDE as well as all the games and other things I figured I'd never use, at least on that machine. I also made the boot floppy, just to be sure. Without KDE, there was no need for the second CD and the install went fairly quickly. Unlike many distributions I've tried, Ultima did not stupidly assume that I had a PS/2 mouse and simply asked me where the pointer was. The one glitch here was the "Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot" message was a bit pointless as that key combination was merrily ignored. Issuing "shutdown -h now" gave me an error message. So I gritted my teeth and pressed RESET.

And icelandic booted into Ultima without bothering about a floppy and let me log in as root, using the password entered during installation. I immediately created a user account and logged out as root and in again. Issuing startx resulted in a nice Xfce screen after a while (icelandic is a 166 MHz Pentium, so not terribly fast). But the pointer wasn't right.

The bad news: the install doesn't set up X to use the type of pointer (mouse) even though it does ask about that. The good news: the installation guide on the web does mention what file needs attention and in what way. The other good news: sshd is up and running so things can be fixed from another machine where I can use a working browser easily.

That done, I tried X again and got a working graphical system. Firefox started, eventually, and rendered, eventually. It had to chew on cnn.com for a while, but it wasn't too bad. Dillo (a small, fast, simple web browser) came up faster and rendered faster. Xchat 2.4.4 performed as expected, though I did need to take some time to de-stupid the defaults (someone at xchat decided that it's cooler to omit the angle-brackets around nicks and use color coding... which is 1) jarringly non-standard and 2) weird to read in a log when all the colors are gone).

It took me a while to find an Xfce scheme that didn't require my looking at a white-hot window background and I still need to find a terminal emulator that has both a dark background and a readable font.

I've only tried Xfce, so I have a few other choices, though I'd have to download and install icewm if I want that, which I might just end up doing.

I'd set things to use a graphical log-in and discovered that I couldn't use a graphical log-out. Or at least I couldn't shut the machine off through Xfce. I simply couldn't get to a virtual terminal (not good) and I hope that's just an Xfce thing and not an Ultima screwup. Nor could I then forcibly quit X with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. I wound up logging in as root and I still couldn't use the graphical shutdown - it was there, but grayed out. I had expected maybe a normal user couldn't shut the machine off, but root doesn't get the choice either? What the...? But a terminal window was available and so "shutdown -h now" took care of things.

So far, it's not perfect and is a bit quirky... but I can work around the quirks. The problems I have seem to be ones that I can solve. The setup was fairly hands-on compared to some, but with the exception of the graphical login setting and configuring X to use the right mouse type, there was no tweaking config files. Ultima at least asked about things, and could be made to deal with them without too much effort. The network card was found and used without hassle (some other distributions didn't manage that!), vi was available but I knew from doing the menu type install that jed was available and so used that.

Right now I'm figuring:

1. That Xfce might be a bit goofy and another window manager will work better for me.

2. That if it isn't Xfce being goofy about the graphical login, that typing startx isn't a big hassle.

3. That most of the rest is more a matter of setting up each program or perhaps replacing some (like the terminal emulator).

I suppose I can compare Ultima Linux to DeLi Linux, and in this case Ultima wins, at least for the moment. Unlike DeLi, Ultima's sshd works right off which is a big win as far as I'm concerned. Also, Ultima uses a 2.4 kernel (and offers "an experimental" 2.6 kernel if you're willing to try it) rather than DeLi's 2.2 kernel. Ultima is probably a bit bigger, but it's a fair trade for what's there.