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Gkrellm is a system monitor.  A handy tool for watching for process, cpu spikes and hard-drive usage.   That’s not cool enough for you yet? How about 100’s of themes to tweak your desktop look, plugins for email, pictures, clipboard, bluetooth, and much more.  All customizable to lauch the app you want when you want it.

Here are a couple links you may want to check out after seeing the video.

plugins Themes

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Vectorlinux light 7.0 has just released it’s first beta.  So I thought I’d give you a sneak peak and show how to go about the installation process.  Hopefully some of you will jump on board and help with the testing.  You can report your findings to the forums here.  There is quite a bit to test as light may be light on resources, but it is not light on treats.  It offers 4 separate window managers (icewm, jwm, openbox and lxde) a plethora of software and pulls off the same repo as Vectorlinux standard.

If you have an older system with limited ram and an older processor, this just may be the breath of life it needs.  Through it on a newer system and it will be blisteringly fast, at any rate give it a try and let the folks at Vectorlinux know what you think.

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This tutorial is not going to be for everybody, but if you have an interest in packaging you may soon find this tool priceless.   A chroot jail is a method by which you can safegaurd you current root filesystem from any changes that may occur during packaging as well as ensure a clean system on which to build your packages everytime.

To use this tutorial you are going to need a couple of packages to get started.

You can find them here, mkchroot and here, ro-chroot2

If the link does not work (just renders the text file) Try this..

wget http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/Uelsk8s/mkchroot

wget http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/Uelsk8s/ro-chroot2

Ok, so now the video…

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Google Talk is a popular to connect with others in a variety of ways.  You can call landlines, Video/voice chat, and text chat.  Google has Linux downloads available for dep and rpm packaging systems, but what of Slackware an by extension Vectorlinux.  Well that’s were this tutorial comes in.  Turns out it’s not that hard.

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Vectorlinux 7.0 Gold is known as one of the better XFCE4 distributions, but it doesn’t end there.  Other desktop environments are available in the repository. This tutorial if pretty simple but if you don’t know it’ there you may never try it.
In this video I demonstrate the easy with which you can install kde 4.7.2.  Keep in mind that this is a heavy distro so newer machines with a roomy harddrive is recommended.

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This tutorial shows how to switch between desktop sessions in Vectorlinux, but in the process I thought I’d show how you can tweak the Fluxbox desktop session with a file manager called Rodent.

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Vectorlinux 7.0 release on Nov. 29th, 2011 and along with the traditional install disk, this time the dev’s at VL also made a live-cd available for download.  It’s a great way to try Vectorlinux out on your system without installing.
But what if you do want to install, well you can right from the live-cd.  The video below will show you how.

Note…it is still my position that the best way to install is to use the GUI installer available on the install CD.   However, I did try to show a few steps in this video that make up for some of the short falls of the live cd install.  i.e., Installing kernel-stripped sources, adding cups to the services started at run-time and installing opera from the repo to name a few.

Another note on installing from the live-cd.  After installing it will start with the num-lock on.

This is fine if you have a number keypad, but if you have a normal keypad with some keys that serve as a number pad as a secondary function then you may be puzzled why your ‘K’ is a ‘6′ and your ‘L’ is a 3.  The fix is simple, just hit the key combination that deactivates the num-lock.  On my acer netbook it’s the Function key + F11,  yours will differ, but it will be there.

Previously only Vectorlinux light was offered as a live-cd.  You can see the video created on that subject back in January of 2010, below.

Related Video.

Vectorlinux light is the only VL version to offer a live cd.  This cd will boot and run VL right from the optical drive.  This is a great way to test VL’s detection of your hardware and give it’s functionality a try.  If light works you will also know that the other VL’s will work as they share the same base.  If you find you like VL light, then here is how to install it.

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No video for this blog as of yet, but you can be assured there will be.  I got an email on my youtube channel asking how to go about changing the time in Vectorlinux and I have to agree it is not the most intuitive thing.  So I though I’d quickly ad this blog post to share it with everybody.

Changing the date and time is a function of vasm.

From the menu go to System –> vasm –> super –> (enter root password) –> Hardware –> Dateset

From there you can go about the business of changing the time.

Alternatively, become root in the terminal and type vdateset

Wait for me to add video to this blog post in the future and explore the other features of vasm.  As vasm is on it’s way out and soon to be replaced by a new Administrative Center (written by our own Moe-lnx) I’ll explain how to use what works and how to work around what does not.

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