[OLPC-SF] March 15 OLPC meet at SF State

[John Magolske]

* Sarah Mei <sarahmei at gmail.com> [080326 20:49]:
> ...
> My project to turn my XO into a development machine in ongoing. I've
> installed everything I need for Rails development, but now I find
> myself in need of an alternate, more programmer-friendly window
> manager. Not being a linux sysadmin type, I'm not sure what to look
> at. One of the guys I met at SHDH last month from this list (and my
> apologies, I am awful with names) was using ... screen? It was a
> text-based manager but he could launch Firefox - and that's pretty
> much all I need for web development.
> 
> Any suggestions? Can I unintall Sugar completely, and/or make it not
> the default window manager?

Hi Sarah, that was me at SHDH.

I boot my XO straight into the Linux framebuffer console (changed a
setting in /etc/inittab so Xwindows doesn't even start up) and run a
screen session. GNU screen could be considered a sort of text mode
"window manager", it can multiplex multiple terminals in one Linux tty
or one Xterm. Each screen terminal can then run a different text-mode
application like elinks (web browser), irssi (IRC client), mutt (email
client) or vim (text editor).

I've found running screen in the framebuffer console is the fastest,
least memory-intensive set-up. Not without its limitations -- but
surprisingly capable with some tweaking. You can listen to music, view
images and even movies without starting up X.

But to run Firefox does require X and some sort of graphical window
manager. For that I use Fluxbox, which is very lightweight. IceWM is
another lightweight window manager (roughly equivalent to Fluxbox in
my experience), but these days I'm leaning towards Fluxbox. I left
Sugar installed, so when booting up X I can choose between Fluxbox or
Sugar.

At the moment my notes are a bit scattered, but by the end of the week
I hope to pull together and post a HowTo describing how I set up the
framebuffer-console/screen and X/Fluxbox configurations. There were
lots of little details to sort out along the way...

Regards,

John


-- 
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact