Monday, March 22, 2010

Debian squeeze on HP tx1301 au(tx1000 family)(contd 2)

Well, Now I have a complete Debian GNU/Linux setup on my tx1301. Am I pleased? Very much. But this is short lived. A GNU/Linux enthusiast doesnt end at that. Now I wanted to beatify my desktop a bit. Where to start?

1. Wall papers A plethora of wallpapers available with GNU/Linux as theme. Download and apply the wallpaper which identifies your identity(freedom).
2. Login themes These identify you and your notebook to the tee. Choose them very carefully so that they exactly match your persona and your attitude. Many are available over the public network. Go ahead you are "free" to choose and express yourself.
3. Now for a little hard work. Before your login screen your laptop will present itself with the grub screen. Now let us see how to change the grub background.
a. search for "gfxmode" (without qoutes). and replace the line with "set gfxmode=1280x800", depending on the capability of your notebook.
b. search for "gfxpayload"(previously vga= in grub1). and replace the line with "set gfxpayload=1024x768". This setting will be used for the framebuffer or this will determine the resolution in your console mode when you switch to virtual consoles. To find out the max resolution supported by your framebuffer run "vbeinfo" from grub console(press esc key when presented with the grub menu)
c. Take your favorite background and scale it to the resolution of "gfxmode" and save it in png format, using what? ofcourse The GIMP.
d. search for " if background_image ...." and replace it with "if background_image=/path/to/backgroundfile.png
e. If you want to save as jpeg format add insmod jpeg before the line mentioned in point 3.d

More in the coming days.... By the way If you have a multicore processor under the hood then install mplayer-mt from debian.multimedia.org. This is a multithreaded mplayer wherein decoding is carried out by all the processor cores.

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Nobody can deter me away from "free as in freedom" concept seeded by Sri RMS. See to it that u dont make fun of my belief. If u think otherwise, no need to comment.