Damn Small Linux is back, and I am very happy!

 

I used to use Damn Small Linux, or "DSL" a lot back in the day.

If you are old enough, you remember cd's that were the size of a 50 cent piece (or a little bigger).

The entire distribution would fit on one, and was only 50 mb in size. That is insanely tiny.

In order to make a distribution these days that is flushed out for most users, it has to be larger.

DSL now is about 700 mb, but I have been pleasantly surprised at how it had some of the old DSL charm.

Then again, I could be seeing things through nostalgic glasses, but it's still cool.

The funny part is, what I used DSL for most back then was fixing windows problems. :D

Here's my screenshot: (Click to enlarge)

If you look, you won't see conky. I always felt like it was a neat idea, but got in my way, so yeah, I turned it off.

The creators of "The New DSL 2024" have this to say:

"The New DSL 2024 has been reborn as a compact Linux distribution tailored for low-spec x86 computers. It packs a lot of applications into a small package. All the applications are chosen for their functionality, small size, and low dependencies. DSL 2024 also has many text-based applications that make it handy to use in a term window or TTY.

DSL 2024 currently only ships with two window managers: Fluxbox and JWM. Both are lightweight, fairly intuitive, and easy to use." -https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

If you are the nostalgic geek I am, or just love checking out Linux distro's, I suggest checking it out. :)

-Denny

I met myself on the internet today...

My "Val-U-Mart"

If you are as much of a geek as I am, sometimes you run into "yourself" on old, forgotten parts of the internet that still exist.

I wrote some programming for a text game nearly quite some time ago. Turns out the game is still working, and you can still connect to it.

My job was to make a run down "lot property" in this game. So I decided to write this about the "Val-U-Mart" I programmed in 1993.

So this is the description I wrote for the outside of the mart:

A large old Kmart with yellowed walls, a food court in the back, and a frosty machine. There are still blue light specials running throughout the store even though this hasn't been a Kmart in decades. Overly anxious clerks, most of which are pimply faced teenagers run to and fro throughout the store. Every once and a while you hear a crackly outdated P.A. system tell you where the next sale will be.

And here's the bathroom:

A dingy aged bath room that has not been cleaned enough for your liking. Rude comments litter the walls.

And the food court:

A strange little food court sits in the back of this now re-purposed K-Mart. Luncheon personnel are ready to take your order, all of them wearing name tags and years of disgust at having to work here. Most of the denizens of the food court are older ladies in shoes and clothing completely lacking fashion, but replete with sensibility. This little room is very, very heavily "70's wooden paneling" looking. The menus all have water or coffee marks on them.

As you can see, I once fancied myself a bit of an author. :D

I know this won't be interesting to most people, so if this just serves as the fun dark web chunk I stubbed my toe on today, so be it. :)

CrunchBang ++ bringing back all those old school vibes of original Crunch.

 

First off, I have to admit that I am looking at CrunchBang ++ with a bit of nostalgia.

I used to think that CrunchBang back in the day was the jam, and I ran CB specifically for years.

But I will admit now, that nostalgia aside, the new reiteration of CB is just as awesome and simple as it ever was.

If you visited the website, you will find that all the screenshots of this "no frills" Linux based OpenBox distribution are grey and lifeless.

While this is how CB "ships", it takes very little to liven it up.

Here's my desktop with CB ++, and mild changes to make it not so "dish water grey":

(Click to enlarge)

Why would you get CB ++, besides nostalgia? It's very light on it's feet.

Fully booted, it was only using 464 mb of ram, shown here...

(Click to enlarge)

I'm enjoying my trip into nostalgia, for sure, but I am also impressed with how snappy this thing is.

If you want to try it out yourself, here's the website for you: https://crunchbangplusplus.org/

-Denny

Zoom not working in Ubuntu 22.04

Currently in Ubuntu 22.04, zoom has an error and closes.

Thanks to some digging, I found a solution.

Running the command zoom --disable-gpu-sandbox in a terminal window will successfully launch zoom. (There have been some buggy error messages for some people, but it still runs)

Or, if you want a more permanent solution, you can change the file in /usr/share/applications called Zoom.desktop. 

Remember to use some option to gain sudo privileges to this file. I ran 'sudo nano /usr/share/applications Zoom.desktop' to do so.

That file looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]

Name=Zoom

Comment=Zoom Video Conference

Exec=/usr/bin/zoom %U

Icon=Zoom

Terminal=false

Type=Application

Encoding=UTF-8

Categories=Network;Application;

StartupWMClass=zoom

MimeType=x-scheme-handler/zoommtg;x-scheme-handler/zoomus;x-scheme-handler/tel;x-scheme-handler/callto;x-scheme-handler/zoomphonecall;application/x-zoom

X-KDE-Protocols=zoommtg;zoomus;tel;callto;zoomphonecall;

Name[en_US]=Zoom

I changed the "Exec=/usr/bin/zoom %U" part to read "Exec=/usr/bin/zoom --disable-gpu-sandbox" and saved the file. 

After this, Zoom launched like a charm for me.

I hope this is helpful,

-Denny

Screen corruption in Ubuntu 22.04 via Nvidia 510 driver

 I decided to test run Ubuntu 22.04 early, and I found a bug.

This is just my attempt to let the world know about it.

I installed Ubuntu 22.04 without issue a few days ago. Then I installed the Nvidia 510 driver through the "additional drivers" app in the "show applications" menu system (bottom left on the Ubuntu desktop).

As soon as I did that, I was bombarded with screen glitches. Videos I watched and video games had a very jagged, jarring scrolling affect. Also sections of the GUI would just disappear for a few seconds before being re-drawn.

I decided to switch from the Nvidia 510 driver to the 470 driver, and that has resolved all the issues I had, so far.

I did post this to launchpad after a search for duplicate bugs, it's posted here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1967609

This is just a screenshot of what I was referencing in regards to the driver switch.

Bodhi Linux 6, very nice indeed!

 

I decided to check out an old "frenemy" of mine. Bodhi has always been very lightweight, and because of that, very fast Linux distro.

I had issues with Bodhi 5. Moksha, the modified enlightenment desktop that Bodhi uses, would just decide to lose elements I had placed, or would decide they should be in new locations. It's frustrating to log in one day to find your clock is gone or some other useful item is misplaced or has shuffled off it's mortal coil for some strange reason.

I am glad to say I have not seen the same behavior in Bodhi 6.

Now before I go any further, this is by definition a very chopped, speedy environment. If you want all the bells and whistles of Ubuntu, this is not the Linux for you. 

But if you were to add the entirety of Ubuntu, it would no longer be fast, so choose wisely before jumping ship to Bodhi.

When I first installed Bodhi, this is what I was treated too: (click any of these images to enlarge them to full size)

It's not ugly, but It's not for me. Green is just not a color I want a lot of on my desktop.

So, the first thing I did was change the theme to the default. It has some nice gun metal grey with blue highlights feels going, and that I can get behind.

Then I installed the entire Google Chrome browser after ditching the chromium browser that was installed. I like my drm content like netflix, which does not work with Chromium. (I know, Google Chrome is bloated).

I also installed neofetch, htop, and telnet services, to show off a little ansi art from my favorite bbs.

 A nice wallpaper, and a bit of tweaking, and I could use this as my daily driver. Here's my tweaks:

and this is my Bodhi tweaks doing some busy work:

You can see that Bodhi isn't even touching my resources, and this is already trimmed quite a bit from my real machine, because this is running in a virtual machine.

It's fast, very stable, and I love some of the old school touches to it. Like Terminology for a terminal emulator. You get all the fun of feeling like you are in a 80's or 90's hacker flick, with all the useful extras like multiple tabs...

If you are in the market for a new Linux Os, or just want to monkey around in a different desktop environment or a spartan Linux distro, Bodhi is for you.

This is Bodhi's website: https://www.bodhilinux.com/

And this is the download page: https://www.bodhilinux.com/download/

Thunar File Manager - My favorite Linux file manager

It may seem strange that anyone would wax poetic about a file manager. After all, mostly any Linux based file manager can do most of what Thunar does.

It's not just what it does however, it's the clean, fast, and virtually bug free manner in which it does it.

Thunar for me has three distinct advantages over what came as default for my chosen operating system, Ubuntu 20.04 lts, which is gnome 3's default file manager, nautilus.

First off, file transfer speed. I can't for the life of me tell you why, but thunar transfers files faster than nautilus does. And it's not by a small factor, at least as far as I've seen on my machine.

Secondly, it's far less buggy than nautilus is, from my own personal experience. Moving large files with nautilus can cause lag, or even outright complete stop of the program itself, to the point I may have to terminate the app manually. I never have this issue with thunar, so it's clearly a nautilus issue.

Third is the large amount of plugins/addons for thunar. I don't personally use much for addons, but it's a nice feature.

As the page at https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/start says: 

"Thunar is a modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. It has been designed from the ground up to be fast and easy-to-use. Its user interface is clean and intuitive, and does not include any confusing or useless options. Thunar is fast and responsive with a good start up time and directory load time. Thunar is accessible using Assistive Technologies and is fully standards compliant."

I thought I would also add this small blurb from Thunar's Wikipedia page:

"Thunar is a file manager for Linux and other Unix-like systems, initially written using the GTK+ 2 toolkit and later ported to the GTK+ 3 toolkit. It started to ship with Xfce in version 4.4 RC1 and later. Thunar is developed by Benedikt Meurer, and was originally intended to replace XFFM, Xfce's previous file manager. It was initially called Filer but was changed to Thunar due to a name clash.[2]

The main goal of the Thunar project is to create a file manager that is fast, clean, and easy to use.[3][4] It is designed to start up faster and be more responsive than some other Linux file managers, such as Nautilus and Konqueror.[5] Accessibility, another goal of the project, is accomplished using GNOME Accessibility Toolkit. Like the rest of Xfce, Thunar is designed to comply with standards, such as those stated at freedesktop.org. Thunar is simple and lightweight by design, but its functionality can be extended through plugins.

Thunar is the Old Saxon name of god of thunder in Norse mythology, and uses Mjölnir, Thor's hammer, as its icon."

You can get thunar from your Linux distro's package manager or "store".

If you have issues with stalls and other frustrating things with your file manager, I think you might like Thunar.

-Denny