Wednesday, November 12, 2008

TinyMe/PClos on the EeePC as a VM

I really like this minituarized version of PClos as a VM. It doesn't take up much space (just 1.5 GB), uses Openbox as WM which is fast, has a fast NAT wireless internet connection, can easily handle flash video and sound and looks very good (in VirtualBox).
The only really serious problem I've seen up to now is that I just can't get the 1024x600 screen resolution. This means that, because of the very small size of the EeePC screen, at times you get a window where you just can't get to the bottom of it and sometimes this is a problem if there are actions buttons down there.
Wireless just suddenly started working and I can't explain why. But, I'm not complaining.
I thought I had a sound problem until I realized I hadn't enabled sound in the VM so that was easily fixed (set the driver to Alsa)
I installed yakuake from Synaptic but it errored out. So, I foound I had to install kdebase to get it to work (installed konsole-kdebase too). Now it works perfectly.
Interestingly, if I press F12 with TinyMe VM running, the Yakuake in Ubuntu opens. So, therefore I had to change the shortcut for the TinyMe yakuake to F10. Now both work fine.
To get yakuake to autostart, I had to go to ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh and add the line
yakuake &
as well as commenting out the line for Conky which was not of much use to me as I had added CPU load indicator to the panel and nothing much else worked in Conky.
I got a lot of useful comments and suggestions from the Bagside guy, although as of yet they haven't helped to get the 1024x600 resolution that I need to really make TinyMe a very useful VM, particularly on the EeePC. Details are in the emails I exchanged with him of todays date.
I tried TinyMe again in VMS today and, yes, it does boot slowly. Plus, although it initially gives an error and refuses to go to fullscreen mode, after trying for some time to reduce the screen resolution and being unable to because I couldn't get to the bottom of the window to click OK, when I tried again it went without error to fullscreen (with 1024x768 res).
Although it looked well, I didn't do a whole lot while in there but still found that the mouse pointer froze with annoying regularity, apparently even without the CPU usage being high.
Perhaps this is because I'm using VMware Server -- I'll check out VMware Player soon.

2 comments:

  1. Try here: http://www.eeepclinuxos.com/distribution/

    Tips for eeepc and pclinuxos. Maybe they can help with your resolution problem :)

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  2. Thanks. I wasn't aware of that site -- looks very useful. Problem is though, my resolution difficulties refer to a virtual machine on a EeePC but I'm not using the EeePC version of PClos.

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