the friday blog

One of my many New Year’s Resolutions has been to rebuild my writing PC and get down to some serious writing again.

Because the PC is rather old and not very high powered this has restricted the options available to me.

None the less, I was confident that I could build a working machine from an 11 year old 600MHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM.

I started by downloading the latest Debian Squeeze Beta from here.

I should say here that even though it’s officially a Testing release, it is , I have found, more stable than many final distributions.

The objective was to build a machine that would allow me to write efficiently but not offer any distractions to the writing process.

Thus, I decided just to install the base version of Squeeze and add then only those components that I needed.

Installing the Operating System…

I started off by inserting the CD and rebooting.

From the Installer boot menu I chose the Install option (I find this less complicated than the Graphical Install.)

After choosing the language, the location and  the keyboard language the installation kicked off with the hardware scan.

I let it chug away.

When it got to the point of asking me for a hostname (about 30 seconds into the install) I clicked on the Go Back link so that I could configure the network manually.

I set a fixed IP address of 192.168.1.5 and let the installed set the Netmask, the Gateway and the Name Server Address.

Back at the Hostname option I called the machine Elgar (all of my machines are named after classical music composers) and then set a domain name of mydomain.

I set the root password (and re-entered it to verify) and then set up a default user.

The installation then asked me to partition the hard drive.

I chose to use Guided – use the whole disk as it is sufficient for the purposes of this machine.

I chose the internal hard drive (I have an external USB drive connected to Elgar – I’ll talk about this later) and selected the All files in one partition option.

I then clicked on the Finish partitioning and write changes to disk option and verified this.

The partitions and file systems were created.

The installation chugged away for a few minutes and then I was asked to select an FTP mirror.  I chose United Kingdom.

I then chose the FTP mirror at the top of the list and left the HTTP Proxy field blank.

The installation started to download files.

After about 20 minutes, I was asked if I wanted to participate in the Usage Survey.  I declined.

Then the Software Selection screen appeared.

I deselected all options and pressed Continue.

The installation started downloading retrieving files.

Finally, the machine rebooted and I was at the login prompt.

I logged in as the default user I had created earlier and became root by typing su and entering the root password.

Installing the Desktop…

Now it was time to install a graphical desktop.

I had chosen LXDE as the preferred desktop as I’d used it before and knew that it wouldn’t be too heavy for my poor old PC.

To install all I had to do was type apt-get install lxde and hit Enter.

A little while later the machine was back at the prompt and a simple startx brought up the desktop.

So far so good.  Now it was time to configure the machine prior to installing any applications.

I installed Synaptic.  Now, this might not be the proper way to do things bit it is what I’m used to on my main machine, so in it goes.

I then decided to install Gparted.  The external USB hard drive that is going to be my backup drive came out of an old laptop that I upgraded; it was formated as NTFS and I wanted to wipe it and start again from scratch.  It is going to be my backup drive and I can’t afford anything to go wrong!

I deleted the old partition (very carefully checking that I was performing the operation on the right drive – and, alas, I’m speaking from experience there!) and then created a new ext4 partition.

So far, so good.

Open Office

The next task was to install Open Office.  I only use this for the final part of the writing process and, to be honest, Open Office Writer is probably too heavy for my needs but, as I have many documents in that format, it made sense to stay with what I know.

Abiword and PyRoom

I then installed Abiword and PyRoom via Synaptic.

I used to love Abiword but I’ve found that it’s not as good at the final formatting as Open Office Writer.

Still, I do have many files in Abiword format so it makes sense to install it.

PyRoom is another matter.

This is my fundamental word processor.

Everything I write using pen and paper gets put onto the computer using Pyroom.

On the rare occasions I write directly on the computer, It’s always PyRoom that I’ll use to perform that task.

Connecting to the network

In order to get onto my server I installed smbfs using the command apt-get install smbfs

I tested this by creating a directory in /mnt using the command mkdir /mnt/mozart

I then typed in the command mount -t smbfs //192.168.1.2/data /mnt/mozart and, lo and behold, I had access to the data share on Mozart.

I then edited the /etc/fstab to make this mount permanent….

I added the following line (the password isn’t the real one, by the way …

//192.168.1.2  /mnt/mozart smbfs username-keckstein,password=password 0 0

And a quick reboot later I found that I had a permanent mount for my network share.

Tidying up

From synaptic I completely removed Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox.)

This is my writing machine and the last thing I want is the temptation to check out what’s happening on Facebook etc.

I deleted all the applets from the panel and added the applications that I would be using most often to the panel.

These are file manager, terminal, leafpad (editor), abiword, open office calc, open office writer, PyRoom and music player.

Finally I set up a directory structure that makes sense to me.

Backup Systems

I dived into Synaptic and installed sendemail, rsync and gnome-schedule.

I wrote a quick and dirty script to run my backups.  I tested it a few times and then used gnome-schedule to automatically run it at 2 am every morning.

The script that I am using is….

#!/bin/sh

I have written about this sort of backup script in far more detail in Backing up to Gmail on my IT blog at  www.kmeckstein.com

Preseeded installation

Although it’s outside the scope of today’s blog post, I intend to setup a pre-seeded installation of all of the above.

With that you’ll just need to download the Debian Squeeze image, burn it to a disk, boot up and type in one command and then most, if not all, of the above will be done for you.

Please let me know if you’d like to try this out (in other words, be a guinea pig) and I’ll get right back to you.

Conclusion

I’ve now got a dedicated writing machine running on a PC you couldn’t actually buy today!

I’ve got to say, I’m really impressed with the speed and response of that 11 year old 600 MHz Celeron with only 256 MB of RAM.

Could I use it as my day to day machine?

To be honest, it’s a bit of a shock to me how good LXDE is on top of plain Debian.

As a writing machine, it’s perfect!

In fact, I thinking of rebuilding my main machine in exactly the same way!

All the best

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