It's frustrating sometimes that Debian (and much of Linux!) seems to be set up as a workstation operating system running X - apps like hnb come configured to launch X apps - when I want to use it tucked away on my server... tools like vim require gpm - when I'm hundreds of miles away from the mouse port, ImageMagick requires most of an X environment and epinfo requires digital camera stuff, when both of these tools are good to have for in-situ image work on my webserver...

I've just tried out Flonix build41

Hmmm - it has a fancy media centre app which feels like a full-screen DOS thing - good to hardwire as an interface for idiots - like in a public access terminal, but over-all I wasn't impressed with Flonix at ALL :o(

My (negative) comments are:

• The first thing I noticed was that it didn't give me a boot menu or any boot-option help like DamnSmallLinux or Knoppix do.


• Next it didn't get my video mode right and I was in 256 (or 16???) colours and it looked HORRIBLE!


• Next thing was that the colour palette wasn't fixed, and when you moused over different windows things on the screen would all change colour - YUCK!


• Next when I brought up a shell the default colours are gross.


• THEN, the PS1 prompt has a HASH!!! you NEVER give a hash prompt to a non-root user - that means "you're root, so be careful!" - This says to me that Florent is either ignorant of or doesn't care about *nix standards.


• The next thing is it uses the username damnsmall - you should never use a username that has 9 or more characters - always use 8 or less - it breaks things - you do an ls -l and the columns are pushed out of alignment - i.e. you try and write a script that cuts out the columns you want and does something with them - it will break on this.


• damnsmall is messy in that it uses so much knoppix, flonix is even worse, it has Debian, Knoppix and DamnSmallLinux leftovers all over it - not tidied up.


• I don't know if it was meant to - I'll need to go back and look if I can be bothered with it - it didn't detect or set up any network.


• When I crashed out of X I couldn't re-start it with startx. It may have taken looking around and reconfiguration to restart it, but I didn't try changing the runlevel down and back up again - that may have done the trick.

As a final whinge, the website isn't all that easy to get around - like how to find the download link...

All in all, it looks like a rough hack to serve a purpose, good on him for putting it online for people to use, I hope it's that he's a newbie, not a rough oldbie... but at the end of the day it's not in the same league as Knoppix or DamnSmallLinux...

Turning the "My Documents" icon on and off...

I feel terrible about this, but I've been reduced to being a L00z3d0z3 luser again... new workplace with "thou shalt have thy productivity hobbled by using this inferior gunk on our hardware" - i.e. I have to run Win2K, can't use Linux... geh!

I deleted the "My Documents" icon from the desktop and wanted to put it back a week later for some reason...

I wrote this inf file:


;
; This turns on and off your "My Documents" folder on the desktop...
; Use to restore a deleted "My Documents" icon in Windows 2000
;

[version]
signature="$WINDOWS NT$"

[DefaultInstall]
DelReg=ClearOut
AddReg=MyDocsOn
;AddReg=MyDocsOff

[MyDocsOn]
HKCU,%MD_SWITCH_PATH%,"Attributes",65537,74,01,40,f0

[MyDocsOff]
HKCU,%MD_SWITCH_PATH%,"Attributes",65537,74,01,50,f0

[ClearOut]
HKCU,%MD_SWITCH_PATH%,"Attributes"

[Strings]
MD_SWITCH_PATH="Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CLSID\{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}\ShellFolder"


It says "Installation Failed" when I run it, (not sure what it's missing), but it does actually work :o)