Goodbye Ultima, Hello Wolvix

[vakkotaur]

I put Wolvix on percheron and got things set up about how I think they ought to be. There wasn't much to move off of percheron as the only thing on it besides a fresh Ultima install was a set of mp3 files made from tape, those being the result of using the Musix LiveCD.

That was a practice run for the laptop and it went fairly well. So after letting things sit for a day or so and one last boot into Ultima just to be sure I had everything off of caspian it was time to install Wolvix.

Overall it went rather well. The installation itself took a while as the laptop is by no means fast machine nowadays, being a PII-266. The nice thing about installing from a LiveCD is that when the install is done, you're still running the LiveCD. This let me set up a few things, such as replace the included WiFi Radar with the newer version (transferred by USB stick) and edit a few configuration files.

Booting from the hard drive, things pretty much worked. I still had to change the root password and create a user account, of course. The wireless networking didn't connect automatically on boot, but WiFi Radar had no trouble connecting. I spent some time copying over configuration files so things are as I like them. Time was also spent putting the program I use that weren't included with Wolvix into place. Then the usual tweaks of the look and feel, as far as I could go.

That was the fairly easy part. Getting time set up right wasn't too bad, just had to get the tools into place to make it simple, and that included the ntp stuff so the clock should remain properly set, or as close as I'll care about.

Sound took me a while, but only because I wasn't aware of the tool to make it easy. Once I found alsaconf the problem became trivial. It's a bit curious that the boot messages include one about not finding a sound card but the ESS1879 stuff is there and used since I can play mp3s just fine. One pleasant discovery was that the feedback squeal I had on boot with Ultima does not happen with Wolvix.

It took me a little while to find out how to get GRUB to see the Compaq diagnostic partition. Eventually that was taken care of with some hand editing of /boot/grub/menu.lst since the configuration tool insisted that that partition did not exist.

While pondering some the above I changed files, including editing the splash graphics, to remove the silly GNU/ that doesn't belong in front of Linux. Wolvix can ship that, but my machine will be right, dagnabbit.

There is only one issue remaining, and it has a workaround. It is that if a program needs root access to run (such as Gslapt or WiFi Radar) and I launch it as a user, the gksu program isn't reliable enough to pass the root password correctly every time. The obvious workaround is to open a terminal and become root to launch the program. Otherwise it's rather hit and miss as to if things will work or just generate an error message.

Overall though it's a pretty big win and worth the effort to get it set up. Many of the programs I'd want were either already there or had a suitable replacement. As an example, xmms was replaced with audacious and audacious has a default skin that doesn't suck by trying to look like audio gear. There are programs that I might not have put there myself that I expect will be useful, like gtkam. There is a nice graphical tool to mount and umount removable media. To my utter surprise there are even a few things in the games menu I might actually play. The start-up feedback is gone. The shutdown option to turn the computer off actually turns the computer off rather than tell me it's now okkay for me to turn it off.