Since several of you are working on installing on older computers I thought I would mention that OpenBSD makes a fairly creditable desktop, for such older machines.
My setup is on an IBM 600E Thinkpad. i50 MB ram and a 366 MHz PII. I use the plan 9 (9wm) window manager (35.1 k size) to keep resource consumption low. The 9menu, a menu system for 9wm can list the common applications. Here is the software I have installed: SoftMaker's Textmaker (word processor) and Planmaker (spreadsheet). These are commercial applications that run in Linux emulation. See http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofl_en.htm Midnight commander as the file manager. Despite it's appearance, Midnight Commander is quite adequate as a file manger and not hard at all to learn. Xpdf - the pdf reader The Gimp Xfig for drawing (although Textmaker supports line drawings; for that reason you could dispense with Xfig) The Opera web browser along with the Opera Flash plugin (run in Linux emulation) calendar - the native BSD appointment calendar system. See man calendar. mpg123 - and mpg payer Workman audio CD player Aumix - an audio mixer control. Pine MUA Fetchmail to get the mail from the pop server. A few details on getting things working in OpenBSD: 1) If you plan on using Firefox make sure you add the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf kern.shminfo.shmseg=128 kern.shminfo.shmall=32768 2) When running Opera, you may get a message that says "Too many files open". To fix that, change openfiles-cur=64 to openfiles-cur=128, in /etc/login.conf. This would apply to either the Staff or Default login group. 3) To setup the traditional lpd print spooler, use the following, which supposes that your printer is a HP 600 Deskjet 1) Go to http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=HP and look for the Deskjet 600 *.ppd. Download the *.ppd from here: http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-DeskJet_600 Also, click on the LPD link for generic instructions and download the foomatic-rip Pearl script. 2) Install a2ps-4.13bp3-a4.tgz from pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.0/packages/i386/a2ps-4.13bp3-a4.tgz 3) copy the foomatic-rip script and the HP-DeskJet_600-hpijs.ppd to /usr/local/sbin 4) pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.0/packages/i386/hpijs-1.5.tgz to install the HP print driver 5) Modify your /etc/printcap so that it looks like this: lp|HP600:\ :lp=/dev/ulpt0:\ :af=/usr/local/sbin/HP-DeskJet_600-hpijs.ppd:\ :if=/usr/local/sbin/foomatic-rip:\ :sd=/var/spool/output/lp:\ :lf=/var/spool/output/lp/log:\ :mx#0:\ :sh: 6) Go to /var/spool # cd /var/spool/output do: #mkdir lp then do: #chown daemon:daemon lp/ as root. 7) edit /etc/rc.conf by changing the variable lpd_flags=NO to lpd_flags="" 8) Reboot the computer and printing should be working. Now printing will be slow unfortunately and I do not know an easy way to speed this up. I read at http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/chap-print.html that: Printer driver and HP printers Example 11.1, "/etc/printcap" uses the lpa0 device (polled driver) for the printer, instead of the lpd0 (interrupt driven driver). Using interrupts there is a communication problem with some printers, and the HP Deskjet 690C is one of them: printing is very slow and one PostScript page can take hours. The problem is solved using the lpa driver. It is also possible to compile a custom kernel where lpt is polled. I am not sure how to fix this in OpenBSD. -- Kind regards, Jonathan _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
