Hungry for more screenies?

Well I now have put KDE3 alongside KDE4 on another box so I might post some screenies of them soon… lately I’ve been caught up chatting too much in plurk! (http://www.plurk.com) but beware, its addictive!

See told you I wasn’t gone :)… least not completely… oh and did I mention how much I love andLinux? (if you don’t know what it is go to andlinux.org … (essentially its a windows program that embeds linux on a hardfile using xming transparently to paint windows on your standard Windows desktop :)… nice and painless way of learning Linux, much like Virtualization with VMware or VirtualBox without needing to install the OS (its preinstalled in the hardfile)  Theres also flavours, not sure why theres no gnome one but there IS XFCE (small) and a great KDE version (that I luuuuurve)…

I guess All that’s left to say is… Enjoy!

Except for one more site I’m on lately that’s also taking up very much time: http://www.thewrestlinggame.com but beware it takes weeks to get to a point where you get to roleplay and it also steeply increases the time to earn stat points each level, currently I’m around 37hrs for each one! and they’re only going to get worse!…  but you can write your own custom finishers, and earn signature moves…

You can do the impossible…. well maybe the not so impossible, but it is unintended :)

OK first post, here goes…

Well to begin with I named this blog (not just this post the title of the blog itself) after a now defunct website all about the Street Fighter videogame series by Capcom, (ie Gouki’s page of whatever)

Now the introductions are over with: the instructions about AndLinux and how I achieved x-nesting a KDE (essentially much like an embedded Kubuntu… or “KDE in a window” on Windows) …

A little bit of background for those that don’t already know this bit : AndLinux is based on colinux which basically “embeds”? a linux kernel in windows, it uses a hardfile (base.drv) – to store an ext3 ubuntu partition (and yes theres even a swapfile (swap.drv) to go with it!

I don’t know how flexible the distro and filesystem are, you might even be able to reformat it (or convert) to an xfs or ufs partition but since at least part of the kernel itself is external from base.drv it does have to be a linux kernel (ie it’d need a different file/config to use say a BSD, Solaris or Mach, etc, etc. kernel instead) so your bound to what filesystems that kernel lets you boot from, and/or if theres any custom packages in ubuntu that the other distro doesn’t have (possibly like the cofs – colinux filesystem?)

Anyway on andlinux.org it says it doesn’t provide you with a desktop, but I found that I can make it, so that it runs much like a virtual machine (somewhat analogous to running something like kubuntu in VMware) but different… (the overall effect is also similar but different 🙂 hehe)Firstly you need the Xephyr program it comes in a package called: xserver-xephyr, along with the base x-server fonts (in the package: xfonts-base, I think), and possibly more…

Then you simply need to sh (or your favourite other shell, bash, zsh, pdksh, tcsh, psh, the list goes on oh yeah even ssh and/or rsh) to start up a separate environment, then in that environment run Xephyr :1 & export DISPLAY=:1 ; and start your windowmanager (in my case it was startkde, but I guess Fluxbox, Enlightenment, WindowMaker/GNUstep, Gnome and so on would work similarly)

So put all together in my case I made a simple script (just a text file with shell commands) in /usr/bin and called it startnest that has in it:

sh -c ‘Xephyr :1 & export DISPLAY=:1; xrandr 1152×864; startkde’

note: Unfortunately it was my experience that I couldn’t put an & on the end of all that to return control back to the command line, because curiously (and I don’t know why yet) I needed to press enter during the startup process for itParts of this that can be altered: well basically all of itfor the two instances of :1 of course they need to match, and generally they’re a format like :#.#I guess the #.# at the end is mostly for multi-monitor support or something? Although, I thought that was done by extending a virtual desktop in the x-server or something, anyhow I’m going off-track…feel free to use something like :2.2 or if your adventurous enough and know if there’s an IP’s you can use for it something like 11.11.5.3:3.1 may work for you… in place of the simple :1of course in the same way this possibly also allows you to send to a connected remote IP’s display too, I guess…

Also the xrandr res was comfortable for my screensize (I run at 1360×1024 by default) but if you run at something like 1024×768 for example something like 640×400 or 800×600 might be more comfortable, a general rule I’d use would be to drop down one or two res sizes to fit the window comforably on your desktop… but you may have other purposes for other screen sizes, of course its up to you…Well I guess thats about the end of my little explaination, hope you liked it 🙂 possibly more to come later (I’m using Interix 3.5 also)

 Note: for those that don’t want to go to this much trouble, theres several other options – 1 theres an official native KDE4Win (techbase.kde.org) now (at the time of writing I think its still in beta tho), so you can get that which makes it simple, comes with an installer/mini package manager that lets you download the bitsor – 2 you can use VMware (or VirtualBox or qemu) and install Linux, I’d suggest if you want it quick and easily from a LiveCD’s .iso file… 

Heres a Screen of what AndLinux can normally do with Windows: (note the transparent window decorators are courtesy of a utility called TrueTransparency, and for Vista-like freaks theres also a breadcrumbs address bar called QT-address bar available)

Heres a Screenshot of what AndLinux X-Nested by this method:

here’s another X-Nested KDE Desktop Screenshot

 

and here (close your eyes if you don’t want to know) is an odd screenshot of ie6 (via ies4linux) in AndLinux! Of course I understand if you don’t believe me it looks *almost* native!  (Yes Yes I know, I’m crazy why use Wine when I’m already in Windows? I don’t have a good enough answer for you… )