Brandon Holtsclaw: Using a low end system with Ubuntu 7.10

[Administrator]

Well this post is mostly just notes for myself , if someone else benifets from them great.

I have an old Intel P200 mhz , 128mb RAM, and a 6GB HDD I wanted to setup as a Web ( Dillo ) and IRC ( irssi ) station.

Since it was to be lightweight , for personaly reasons I decided to use fluxbox ( not fluxbuntu ) so I installed a from a Ubuntu server edition disk and then just installed fluxbox , dillo, and irssi from there. Thats the normal boring stuff, here is the stuff i need to rember.

I wanted this system to boot right into Fluxbox , no login, no anything, just post then Desktop so I did the following:

Installed GCC



sudo apt-get install build-essential



Created a text file called autologin.c with the following:



int main() {

execlp( “login”, “login”, “-f”, “brandon”, 0);

}



( Note: Replace “brandon” with your login name ) and staticly compiled it, striped it, then put it in /usr/local/sbin :



gcc -static autologin.c -o autologin

strip autologin

sudo cp autologin /usr/local/bin/



Now to make it run this when tty1 is created, edit /etc/event.d/tty1 and look for



exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1



And change it to



exec /sbin/getty -n -l /usr/local/sbin/autologin 38400 tty1



( Now uninstall KDM/GDM if you are not using a server install )

At this point we will be autologed in when the system boots up , but only to a command prompt requiring the command `startx` to be run to get into fluxbox, so here is how to make fluxbox autorun on login

Create a file ( or edit the existing one ) called .bash_profile ( note the . in front ) in your home directory ( e.g. ~/.bash_profile ) and add the following :



if [ -z “$DISPLAY” ] && [ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]; then

startx

fi



and also a file ~/.xinitrc with



idesk &

sleep 2

exec startfluxbox



( Note: only use the idesk line if you have idesk installed for icons and such on fluxbox )

Thats it, save all open files and reboot, you should be greeted with a fluxbox desktop for a single user system with low end specs.

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