Wolvix Newsletter

Welcome to the first issue of the Wolvix Newsletter!

Note from the Editor

Since this is the first issue, let my introduce myself. I am MasterGH (MasterGoodheart) from the Wolvix forum and IRC channel. I’ve been using Wolvix since 1.1.0 Beta, and have very much enjoyed the experience. It was a bit of a surprise, though, when I was asked to be the editor of this newsletter. I’ve never done something like this before, so I was a bit unsure at first, but happily accepted after a bit of thinking.

There are quite a few reasons for this newsletter,

1. To have something for the community to check so that they easily know what is going on in Wolvix.
2. For us to be able to share useful knowledge we may have to help others.
3. To help bring more users to Wolvix.

To start with, most of the content will be written by me, but hopefully, as more people learn of it, we will start getting more user submissions soon. If you would like to help, please send an email to news{at}wolvix.org

I hope you enjoy reading!
MasterGH

Bugs in Wolvix 1.1.0

I thought I’d start this with some fixes for two of the bugs in Wolvix 1.1.0. Both are available on the Wolvix website.

Links here:
fluxbox menu icon problem
broken symlink for fonts

Wolvix 1.1.0 in the Press

There has been a surprising amount of press coverage about Wolvix 1.1.0 after its release. Todd Robinson, the Systems Devlopment Engineer of On-Disk, and Susan Linton of tuxmachines.org (who also provided lots of screenshots) both provided very positive reviews of it, as well as simplyjat on his blog. Caitlyn Martin from oreillynet.com mentioned she was tremendously impressed with Wolvix in an article about small distros, and later reviewed it.

User Submitted Desktops

This is where any desktops people have uploaded to the Wolvix website will be. To start it off, here is mine:

For more information about the themes I’m using, look here. For more information on customising your desktop, see the guide below. To submit your picture, use this link.

Guide: Installing Themes in Wolvix
by MasterGH

I thought it would be fitting for the first newsletter featuring a custom Wolvix Desktop to also have a guide about how to do it, so here it is.

Requirements of this guide:

* The user must be using Xfce.

Firstly, you might ask, “Where might I get these themes in the first place?” The answer to this is xfce-look.org. You will find many themes for all sorts of aspects of your desktop there, all tailored for Xfce. Some areas there are lacking, though, so you might want to try some other websites. gnome-look.org, a sister site, has quite a bit more content, and a lot of it will probably work with Xfce, like the cursors, (most) icons, and GTK 2 themes.

Once you’ve looked there, you may be wondering what things are which. Xfce themes are for xfwm, and greatly change the overall ‘look’ of the screen. GTK 2 themes are what gives the Xfce themes their colour and style over the top of the basic ‘look’. Other things (like cursors, icons, wallpapers, etc.) should be known to you.

Now that you’ve chosen some themes you think would look nice, it’s time to install them. I will separate this into two sections.

1. Installing for one user
Xfce: copy the theme folder to /home//.themes/
GTK 2: same as above
Icons: copy the theme folder to /home//.icons/
Cursors: same as above
Wallpapers: it doesn’t matter where you store these

2. Installing system-wide (root access required)
Xfce: copy the theme folder to /usr/share/themes/
GTK 2: same as above
Icons: copy the theme folder to /usr/share/icons/
Cursors: same as above
Wallpapers: anywhere the whole system has access to

Follow these instructions on how to enable them:
Xfce: Menu–>Settings–>User Inferface Settings, then select the theme from the list.
GTK 2: Menu–>Settings–>Window Manager Settings, then select the theme from the list.
Icons: Menu–>Settings–>User Inferface Settings, click on the ‘Icon Theme’ tab, and select the theme from the list.
Cursors: Menu–>Settings–>Mouse Settings, click on the ‘Cursor’ tab, then select the theme from the list. You will have to log out and in again to have the change happen.
Wallpapers: Menu–>Settings–>Desktop Settings, use the browse button in the Image section to find your wallpaper.

These instructions should be all you need to make your desktop just like you want it.

Tip: Something to try if USB

Jani Juvonen sent in some instructions on how to make a HD Frugal install work the the USB method fails.

Wolvix seems like a great distro but I wasn’t able to get it to work from my Kingston USB memory stick using the USB installer.”

After some experimentation, Jani got it to work like this:

I did a Frugal installation to the USB memory stick as if it was a regular hard drive, with GRUB. Then, to get the wolvixsave to work, I had to edit the menu.lst file in the grub directory to include on the kernel line “changes=/dev/sda2/wolvixsave.xfs” …and now it works!

Make sure you know the device name of your drive, and replace “sda2″ with it.

Another important tip:

I split the memory stick to two partitions using gparted, first one is FAT32 which Windows can see and I can save my user files to, and the second one is ext2 where Wolvix is installed. It is important that the first partition is FAT because otherwise Windows (XP) can’t see it!

Jani later sent me an email with this comment about Wolvix:

I’m really a BSD user (despite the fact that I’m typing this from WinXP :P) but every now and then I like to try some linux distro to see what’s happening there. The problem with linux so far has been that I haven’t found a distro that would work on my HP laptop - even OpenBSD and Syllable (except ethernet) does work with it so WTF… but it seems that Wolvix does in fact work. I guess the latest Slackware would work too… in any case, keep up the good work!

Thanks for the tips Jani!

User Comments about Wolvix

This is where I will put any comments sent in to me, or the answers to questions I have asked, about Wolvix.

I asked ghostwolf, who had mentioned he used Wolvix on PCs at work, a few questions about how he used it, and here is what he says:

We are using Wolvix to access a remote timeclock program on PC’s that are too old to upgrade to XP or Vista. We also use them to access OWA for several users on the same PC’s.I created bootable USB drives for 2 network engineers that work under me and they have been using it to access and retrieve data from crashed Windows systems.

I have used Red Hat, Slax, and SuSe. Wolvix runs better and comes with all the software we need to be up and running on a dated system.

Wolvix ROCKS!!!

If you would like to share your thoughts on Wolvix, write an email to me (see address below) with them, and I will try to include them in the next newsletter.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! If you have any comments, please send them to news{at}wolvix.org

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 7:25 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.