February 17, 2010 by rich scadding
Well, I just found time from developing Tota to post a few bits and bobs on my blog.
Tota Beta was released: http://www.totalinux.org/forum/index.php/topic,82.0.html
Palemoon supplied and awesome Window Maker config, Bruce has kept us all on our toes testing his latest and greatest Conky scripts. We also just invited Mahngiel to the dev team as he has proven to be another Conky whizz who has taken an interest in the Tota project. Ch@d has produced some amazing graphics and Darthlukan provided us with an awesome Awesome window manager setup. This will be configured for the RC release.
Me, I had to create a few workarounds to build the isos and provide both user and root passwords for the live CD. Next up was to edit the installer to create a new installed user, as the default Tota user was being transferred instead.
Regarding passwords and other Live only configs which you don’t want on the installed version, never underestimate the power of rc.local which is a great help.
I installed and compiled manually everything that was needed to provide an iso worthy of Beta status. This time downloads were available via zsync and a torrent along with mine and Palemoon’s servers.
There’s still a bit of tweaking to do, but Tota as a concept and Conky + Window Manager showcase is coming along very nicely.
Whatsmore I am now confident that I can produce any Debian Squeeze based Live/Installable distro.
There has been a month of Googling, reading, forum and manpage searching, sometimes into the early hours of the morning, but it has all been worth it.
I am now outlining the design for a pure Fluxbox Hacker edition which will incorporate everything I personally feel epitomizes Linux.
A fast, lightweight operating system for network and server admins, just packed to the brim with networking tools.
I spend a lot of time online using web and network based applications for my servers and databases which run my websites and forums.
I have a home wireless network with a Debian Apache server and will soon be building another IPcop standalone Firewall. The server and firewall are just toys really which I use to learn more about networking, hacking techniques, and security issues as well as using them as a testing platform for forums, websites, cms, wikis etc.
Only Geeks will understand the fascination of watching network data scrolling by as packets come and go. Or the fun you get out of cracking the keys on (your own) wireless routers, or cracking passwords on your networked Windows box. For me that is a laptop with a WinXp partition which I boot up just to hack. It has wireless and wired local network access but no external internet access (for obvious reasons).
My ideal distro has fluxbox and only network tools. I’ve done this before with a Dreamlinux remix as well as with Ubuntu, but for Debian I already had Grml which basically provides what I want to create for myself, only installed, not just a Live CD.
Have to get Tota finished first though.
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