UNIX Administratosphere

Things are working well with the combination of the new FreeBSD 6.3 and the Compaq Armada E500. The machine has a great feel to it, and despite the huge applications of today, 128M can still be used for a KDE environment.

There are a number of nice features, including a ton of connectors (10BaseT, WinModem, USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, PCMCIA). The machine just keeps going, though I have had a few (few!) lockups (normally with Amarok and something else running). With the appropriate tweaks, the KDE desktop can be as polished as any from Red Hat or Novell.

Some of the things I did:

• Replace the shutdown picture with something else; the picture of the dragon was too smarmy.
• Replace the background (of course!) - personalization to the max.
• Switch to the “Macintosh” version of menu layout; it’s the most user-friendly.
• Load KDM from ports, then activate and theme it.
• Load a splash screen for the boot loader
• Switch the boot loader to grub then use a splash screen to start it off.
• Configure the special buttons to work.
• Change the KDE menu for something easier to use (such as TastyMenu or KBFX).

When all of these are combined, the environment is very slick and professional. It still wants more than 128M though.

One pet peeve of mine I might mention with regards to menus (such as KMenu or KBFX): menus should respond instantly!! I absolutely despise hiccups and watch cursors because the menu is loading its stuff. It should just pop! into place, not thrash the hard disk. Maybe one day…

What was the best part of this? I learned a ton about themes, X keys, configuring KDM, configuring the boot loader, and using grub. And learning is the best part, right?