2005/06/01

Downloaded iso file for latest release of Mepis, 3.3.1, 05/05/13, from http://www.mepis.org, on Yara, and burned installation CD on it.

Made backup of files from loaner laptop I had been using for last two months while Xeta at Fujitsu having hard drive replaced under warranty. Retrieved Xeta from Fry's, returned loaner.

Defragged hard drive. Installed and launched Partition Commander http://www.v-com.com. Used it to repartition the 60GB hard disk as follows:

  1. Resized the main, NTFS partition, to a little less than 20 GB. It was already moved down, but if it had not been, I would have done so.
  2. Created new primary partition of about 15GB, set it to Linux, with an ext3 filesystem, to become the root / partition. Would have moved it down if it had not already been as low as possible.
  3. Created new primary partition of about 20GB, set it to Linux, with an ext3 filesystem, to become the home /home partition. Would have moved it down if it had not already been as low as possible. This left an extended partition with the approximately 1.5GB drive image for restoring XP on one partition, and about 2GB not allocated.
  4. Resized the extended partition to include the unallocated space.
  5. Created a small Linux swap logical partition of about 1GB, twice the size of RAM, within the extended partition.
  6. Created a logical partition within the extended partition of about 1 GB, being the space not needed for the drive image, with a FAT 32 (VFAT) filesystem, to serve as a transfer area for files between XP and Linux, named it XFER.

Booted live Mepis CD, selected Install. Assigned the 15GB partition, designated hda3, to / (root), the 20GB partition, designated hda4, to /home, and of course, the swap partition to swap (hda5). The original NTFS partition was designated hda1, the XFER partiton was designated hda6, and the drive image partition hda7.

The 120GB firewire (IEEE 1394) drive was designated sda1, and mounted as /mnt/flash. Previously that had been /mnt/drive, and before that, /mnt/WD-120-00, taking the label of the drive.

Previously, in V3.3, further upgrading from the remote repositories was done from the "Mepis OS Center" tool, and the sysadmin had to manually edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file where the remote repositories are defined, but found that function missing from it. Launched the Synaptic package manager, and found it now has a menu item for "Repositories", which enables the sysadmin to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file. Used that to enable all repositories.

One of the first packages installed from the newly enabled repository sources was mozilla-thunderbird, which I prever to Evolution, and dragged its icon launcher to the taskbar, removing the OIM icon to make room. I also installed the quanta plus HTML editor by installing the kdewebdev package using the 

apt-get install kdewebdev
command from the konsole as root. Dragged its icon to the taskbar, and removed the icon for the K3B CD/DVD burner utility, which I use less often.

Saved the output of the apt-get commands to files named yymmdd_apt-get.txt in the /home/jdr/notes directory, using the left-button select on the konsole window and the Kate editor.

Configured the clock display to central time, set the time to show seconds and time format to HH:MM:DD (24-hour), set the date format to YYYY-MM-DD and the font to "Bitstream Vera Sans 9".

Set the Kweather tool to get its data from the nearest reporting station, which is KATT, Camp Mabry, Austin, Texas.

Found the wireless tool KWiFiManager did not detect the wireless AP when I launched the 2.6 kernel, but does work when I launch the 2.4 kernel. Need to figure out what is happening and fix that.

In Konsole selected Settings | Configure and set "Black on light color" and "Random hue".

Set up the gFTP utility to enable uploads to my website.

Installed utilities wvdial and minicom. Set up wvdial to enable it to use Motorola E680 cellphone/modem for GPRS wireless access to the Internet. To make it work, set username and password to " " (blank), since none needed, but wvdial gives error if both are not provided.