Things are finally shaping up on several fronts. Despite the grub madness I mentioned earlier, the HTPC box is coming along. I’ve also been messing around with the Enlightenment window manager, which I must say is quite different… but I like it. It’s a been a little harder to get used to, and to figure things out… There are no icons, and instead of a taskbar, there’s this advanced pager thing. It took a while to get used to it at first, but now that I have, I actually like it much better than a taskbar.
Last night I went to visit my friend John LeMasney to discuss what we wanted to do about icons for the forthcoming LUG/IP GNU/Linux ISO. I think we came up with some quality ideas. John had some major concerns that I didn’t think about straight away. We wanted to create something nice… very clean and simple. Most of all original. But there are already so many really great icons out there. John thought it was important that we don’t take anything and make it look worse. I certainly agree. But we played around and I think we figured out a good way to make original icons that look nice and don’t ruin anything already established.
And also last night I updated the bios on the HTPC. Since I don’t have a floppy drive, I thought I was in for trouble. I surfed around, and it turns out that you can make a bootable CD to do this. First, you get a bootable floppy image… maybe an old Dr. Dos disk or something. Then you mount it to a loop device in Linux. Add your motherboard’s bios and bios loading program, and then burn it to a bootable CD. Worked like a charm. I was afraid I was going to have to trash my gentoo install and put windows on the machine just to get the bios updated.
