Linux & Laptop Related Question..

Ok.. i have a small clutter in my head..
Im thinkin of installing Slackware to a Laptop.. but some friends told me it takes AAGGEESS and roughly 7 hours to install Slackware..

so they told me to pic a distro which can easily be compatible with any box.. and light (which means its not damn huge and takes 5GB of your HDD just for the OS space)

so what distro would it be? i had experience in RedHat.. and so far installing RedHat wasnt a problem.. it was quite easy actually compared to installing Debian..

ooh and i have a question


when i saw some slackware screen shots.. i liked the transpiracy of the command prompt to the desktop.. in lamemans terms.. the command prompt's background becomes transparent and blends in with the desktop..

Is there any other distro of linux that does this??

here is an example:

http://www.mycgiserver.com/~slackwar...creenshot2.png

as you could see, on the top left corner of the screen shot you can see the command prompt blending in with the background.. thats what im after..

You can do that on Mandrake and probably on Red Hat too. It's a setting in the shell-program (it's called konsole).

I use Redhat 7.2 on my laptop. Never had a problem with it. Slackware doesn't take that long to install, but unless you have used it before, I wouldn't recommend starting with it on a laptop.

There is a program called eterm. It was originally a terminal for Enlightenment. Kinda like Kterm for KDE. I believe the one in that picture is called aterm. Well, eterm is freeware. eterm has themes so you can make it look any way you want to.

btw> looking at the screen shot, they are running enlightenment for their xwindows client. aterm (or eterm) for the terminal. Mozilla web browser. I can't remember the name of the bar on the right, but it is a program that can monitor ANYTHING on your linux system, including file contents. Also has a lot of plugings. I had problems downloading it though, so I haven't tested it.

Enlightenment is at www.enlightenment.org
eterm is at www.eterm.org

Umm, after googling aterm, it appears that aterm is the Afterstep X windows terminal emulator. http://aterm.sourceforge.net/

haha kewl! thanks.. so i guess ill just install RedHat and Enlightment... and eterm.. kewl

Just to warn you enlightenment is VERY customizable, but can also be VERY much pain in ASS. It has been around a long time (used it back in 96 the first time), but they do maintain it. You can probably run eterm or aterm on KDE/Gnome if you already know them. If I remember correctly, Enlightenment can also be a memory hog, but I am not sure.

I have installed slackware on a laptop and it took 2 Gb (quite clean install)

I haven't had any problems what so ever....

Mardrake Linux 7.2 works excellent on my Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop. It even recognised the winmodem. (but did not install the drivers).
X installed flawlessly, and it found my Intel Etherexpress Pro 100 card in my port replicator, and the PCMCIA Linksys Etherfast 10/100 in slot1. Both installed
without any further mods. I have used quite a few distros of Linux, and I have found that Mandrake is the most robust.

P.S. All the nonsense you hear about Mandrake being for Newbies is a wives tale. Its the same ol kernel with an impressive collection of software that
comes with it.

Quad> You want an impressive collection of Software, get Suse. What we mean by "for newbies" is that everything is done for you. It is extreamly simple to set up, but it is much harder to customize. With something like Slackware, you determine where everything goes. It is more difficult, but you actually learn the OS.

I have Red Hat 7.2 running on my Dell I5Ke. I have X running with KDE as my desktop. The installation went smooth. Konsole does allow for transparency but you still get the window frame. I think eterm and aterm made the whole window transparent. I even got my DVD player working as well.