Things I did today.

Some things I figured out while setting up Slackware 10.0 today:

• Compiled linux 2.6.9 kernel with support for all I/O scheduling algorithms that came with it. To enable a specific scheduler during system boot, I need to add the kernel parameter "elevator=cfq" or similar. Here, cfq indicates the CFQ I/O scheduler. I could replace it with Anticipator I/O scheduler using the kernel parameter "elevator=as" instead, at the boot: or LILO prompt. Other options available are "elevator=deadline" and "elevator=noop".
• Searched the Internet for a console based audio player with builtin software equalizer. I found just one project called LinuxEyes. Sadly, it never worked on my machine and I could not get access to its sources. There were other good players like mp3blaster, mjc and so on... but none had builtin equalizer. After a while, I gave up, and beautified xmms with eq-xmms plugin, Crystality plugin and WMA support for XMMS. XMMS does look sexy on a Kalak_Amp theme (available from the site 1001 Skins.
• Installed all my "currently" required tools and applications - Ruby, PostgreSQL, MagicPoint, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera, J2SDK 1.4, Flash plugin, and the lot. Everything went like a breeze.

Couple of things I need to get done by tomorrow:

• Setup ROX Session and customize it to be a highly usable environment for my students. KDE, though more responsive right now, still seems to be too resource intensive for my setup.
• Investigate on a good usable light-weight window manager. Eligible candidates are Openbox, WindowMaker, Fvwm2 (with theme setup), Enlightenment and my long time favourite Sawfish. Perhaps, I'd consider Enlightenment itself (which is very light for the features that it offers).
• Setup a text mode multi-protocol chat client with support for IRC, Yahoo and MSN and Jabber protocol. Either centericq, or irssi with bitlbee (for MSN/Yahoo connectivity) should do the job. Need to investigate erc/zenirc on Emacs too ;-)
• Setup a text mode email client (MUA) to replace my current email client which is Mozilla Thunderbird. Perhaps I'll reconsider Cone this time, with fetchmail and postfix setup as the backend. Its been quite a while since I used mutt, and I've forgotten its config file already... and yes, I wish to avoid anything that looks like "vi" right now :-P
• Investigate svncviewer, netstation project and the like, to come up with a lean, fast thin client mechanism that can quickly boot off a CDROM within a couple of seconds.

BTW, I found a nice tiny emacs-clone called
QEmacs well suited as a replacement for pico/nano/vi as a light-weight editor. Its powerful though, with syntax highlighting support for C, C++, HTML, XML and CSS2 rendering (partial WYSIWYG). Good lot of features for an editor which 278 Kilobytes. The author of this editor has created other impressive projects like ffmpeg library and the TinyCC compiler. A great programmer indeed!