tweaking Crunchbang

The nice thing about openbox window manager is the way you can configure almost everything in easy by editing text files or some simple gui's.
I use a high resolution monitor, so I need larger fontsize. Start with Obconfig,
in #! you will find that under preferences, openbox, openbox config, GUI config tool. choose tab Appearance and change font sizes. ( Note the beautiful and clever the window buttons are configured: DSLIMC
D Omnipresent S Shade L Label I Iconify or Minimize M maximize and C Close).

This is not the only way to set lettersize; you might have lxappearence running, sometimes hidden in the menu as GUI settings; here you can set the lettersize below left on the first Window tab. Don\ t forget to use gksudo lxappearance to resize letters using gui apps as root
Lettersize in Conky by editing .conkyrc
I also ad a new image viewer toe: Ristretto and for writing Abiword.
You will have to edit the .rc.xml file for adding keybindings,

The default English keyboard is also changed to US and other localization files. See a post before this one. Don't forget to choose a local server in Synaptic for faster downloads.

Localize Crunchbang (in LiveUSB install)

It's kind of tricky to change the default setup which is British to Dutch for example.
Edit via sudo gedit /etc/default/locale the default language.
Local code you will find in: /usr/share/localechooser/languagelist; for instance: nl_NL.UTF-8

and then:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

For AbiWord you will need  Ispell and the idutch voor spellingcontrole.
For interfaces: language-pack-gnome-nl   and language-pack-gnome-base.
Change English keyboard to us by saving  us as gb in  /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/

There's a much easier way to set up support for other languages than
English, in particular multi-byte languages like Chinese, Korean or
Japanese: install the package "language-selector", either with
Synaptic, or with the command 

sudo apt-get install language-selector

Once it's installed, you can call it with the (confusing) command

gnome-language-selector

Use the "Install/remove languages" button at the bottom to add whatever languages you want, and check the box that says "Use input method engines (IME) to enter complex characters". You can install fonts, dictionaries etc automatically this way, and set your system's interface to your choice from the languages you have installed

Solving problems with printing jobs

Most of the time everything goes well regarding printing in Linux. But when problems start they may be hard to solve.
I got some cups server error: "client-error-not-possible"
Here are some suggestions:
To be able to manage the cups printing jobs through web, you need to login first. Click on the "Administration" icon at the top of page http://localhost:631, it will prompt for user name and password.

This is also the place where you can cancel printing jobs that are hanging for some reason.

Then I noticed the printer was not active.
I already found out about this by giving this command: lpstat -t
printer HP_LaserJet_2100 uitgeschakeld sinds

On the cups webpage you can enable the printer again.
But also via terminal: lpadmin -p -E will reenable it.

Now the pinter is recongized in the HPLip Toolbox and accepts printing jobs, and gives no errors but nothing happens!!
Another solution was brought up: to install printconf.
When I had done that (sudo apt-get install printconf) I got the next error message: Unable to read printer database. Please ensure the "foomatic-db" package is installed properly.

I found the suggestion to see what drivers are available for the printer, using this command as a regular user:
foomatic-datafile -A | grep HP_LaserJet_2100

No output. Found out that installing gnome-cups-manager was sometimes an effective workaround; seems to be part of a normal install but was missing on my pc.
Recognized the printer right away. After that while printing with a gnome (Eye of Gnome) image viewer the image was printed alright. Pfff, that was easy.... no it wasn't. These are the kind of tribulations that put people off of Linux. Happily I found some many good things in linux that even printing in Windows is not a viable option anymore ;-)).

Install Adblocker extension for Chromium

Another reason I didn't want to use Chromium or Google Chrome was because of the ads all over the place. If you have lived years in the save hands of Adblock Plus it's unbearable to see the millions of ads coming by.

Now there is finally an adblocker extension that works with the new versions; I have version 4.0.249 (it has to be 4.+). You can install the adblocker extension here: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblock/

After install you have to subscribe yourself manually to adblocker lists that are also used by adblock plus. You do so by clicking on the extenson icon on the upper right side , left next to control page and config button. and choose Subscribe.

More extensions here but don't use the adsweep extension, listed there; it didn't work for me.

Set minimum font in Chromium

I found Chromium unusable because of the way too small fonts om my high resolution screen until I found this tweak:

To set the minimum font size in Chromium (Linux), you must edit the ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences file:

gedit ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences

Look for this inside the file you just opened:

  },
"webkit": {
  "webprefs": {
     "default_fixed_font_size": 15,
     "default_font_size": 16,
     "fixed_font_family": "Monospace",
     "sansserif_font_family": "Droid Sans",
     "serif_font_family": "Liberation Serif"
  }
}
}

And add this two lines under "webprefs": {

 "minimum_font_size": 16,
"minimum_logical_font_siz": 16,


If you don't see this for change the default fonts in Options Under the Hood

Removing older kernels

Warning

Don’t follow this process unless you’re sure you don’t need to boot into the older kernels. If you’re not sure, just leave things alone. Also, it is possible to remove all of the kernels from your system and make it unbootable. I suggest leaving the latest kernel and one version previous to that. You can find out the kernel version that you’re currently running with

uname -r

Find and remove old kernels

The first step is to figure out what kernels are installed. The following command will do the job.

ls /boot | grep vmlinuz | cut -d'-' -f2,3

Your result could look something like this (running Hardy).
2.6.24-19
2.6.24-19
2.6.24-21
2.6.24-22
2.6.24-23
2.6.24-24
2.6.24-25
2.6.24-26

his is the list of kernels installed on your system. Now you want to find out which packages are installed relative to the kernel you want to remove. For my example I’m going to remove the oldest one 2.6.24-19

On my system, (JHardy) the resulting list is:

linux-headers-2.6.24-19
linux-headers-2.6.24-19-generic
linux-image-2.6.24-19-386
linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic
linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-19-generic

Now that we know what packages to remove we can remove them with dpkg, apt-get or aptitude.
sudo aptitude remove linux-headers-2.6.24-19 linux-headers-2.6.24-19-generic linux-image-2.6.24-19-386 linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-19-generic

source:
http://tuxtweaks.com/2009/12/remove-old-kernels-in-ubuntu/

USB_Creator also in Hardy for USB Flash Ubuntu Install

=== How to install Crunchbang to a USB flash drive using USB-Creator ===

There has been some discussion here about ways to install Crunchbang on a USB flash drive. I haven't found any mention though of using the Ubuntu program "USB Creator" for that purpose. It's very easy to do, works well and makes a persistent install to the flash drive. USB-Creator works for many Ubuntu-derived distros.

Here's how to do it:

1. Prepare a USB flash drive with a capacity of 1 GB or more, i.e. format it with a FAT32 or FAT16 filesystem and put a boot sector with MBR on it. To do that, I generally use the "Quick Format to FAT32" option of the Hewlett-Packard USB Disk Storage Format Tool, running in Windows XP (regrettably, it doesn't work in Wine). Among the many ways of setting up a flash drive, this utility seems to be one of the most reliable tools for doing this job. You can download it from http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/f … ption.html

Perhaps you can skip step #1 and use your flash drive as is; it may already be set up properly. I believe USB Creator merely writes the syslinux bootloader code to an already existing MS-DOS-type MBR in the boot sector; it does not reformat your flash drive, anything that's already on it will be kept.

2. Download the Crunchbang ISO and put it somewhere on an easily accessible HDD or USB flashdrive, or pull out your Crunchbang live/install CD, if you have one.

3. Boot into a v.9.04 Crunchbang, Ubuntu, Mint or other Ubuntu-derived system (either into a HDD or USB install or a live CD/DVD), install the Ubuntu usb-creator package (with its two dependencies mtools and syslinux) from the Ubuntu Universe (?) repository.

If you're using Hardy LTS like me:

It is not in the Hardy repositories;

Here are the sources:

USB Creator for AMD64

USB Creator for i386

The packages were built for Intrepid but should install nicely in Hardy. Thanks to Scot's Newsletter for the tip. The forum also reports that the latest two versions, 0.1.9 and 0.1.10, have problems; I chose to install 0.1.8 instead.

Note: USB Creator relies on syslinux and mtools so make sure to install them before installing usb-creator. usb-creator is also a plain .deb file, so you have to install it via

sudo dpkg -i usb-creator_0.1.8_all.deb

and then open the program in that distro. It's a python program, so you have to have Python installed, too.

4. In the source disc image (CD/ISO) box put the location of the crunchbang ISO or CD, in the USB disk to use box put in the location of the flash drive and then set the reserved extra space slider (for the size of the persistent overlay) to some sensible value. Click on "Make Startup Disk". The install will take less than 10 min.

5. Boot into the flash drive (you may have to change the boot sequence in your BIOS to have your computer look for and boot into any attached bootable USB device ahead of booting into the internal HDD). Any changes you make in Crunchbang (customizing applications, creating files, installing additional software, etc) will be persistent, i.e. carried forward to the next boot.

Some computers with AMD hardware may stumble over a bug in the boot code of Ubuntu 9.04 and not allow you to boot to the Desktop (e.g. see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/366678). The workaround for this is to pull out and reinsert the flash drive after the Crunchbang splash screen has appeared.

6. The unused space within the FAT32 filesystem of the USB flash drive is freely accessible from within any OS, including Linux, Windows and MacOSX, i.e. you can put ordinary files in that space. The reserved extra space (the so-called overlay) is in the file casper-rw in the root directory of the flash drive. It can be accessed from within any other Linux distro through the command

# mount -o loop casper-rw /mnt/xyz

where /mnt/xyz is any available directory that can be used as a mount point in the currently running Linux distro. For as long as the casper-rw loopback image is mounted in that distro, you can read and write to its filesystem by going to /mnt/xyz.

sources:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/4287/installing-crunchbang-to-a-usb-flash-drive-using-usbcreator/

http://ubuntuliving.blogspot.com/2008/11/usb-creator-for-hardy.html