1. Auto-Mounting
2. Desktop Icons
3. Multimedia Files
4. Networking (internet)
5. Screen Size, Refresh Rate and Fonts
6. Software Instalation and System Configuration
7. Creating User Accounts

Auto-mounting Auto-mounting is ON by default. If you have an older machine (Pentium Classic and/or less than 64MB of RAM), this really should not be used. To turn this feature off you can open the Run-Services menu item and choose to disable auto-mounting. -- then reboot. Or for purists: /etc/rc.d/rc.hal stop /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus stop chmod a-x /etc/rc.d/rc.hal chmod a-x /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus On restarting X the MyLinux folder will appear on the desktop in place of DevTray, which normally appears UNDER the taskbar. Run-Services appears in the Configuration Menu when running as root: And the item in question looks like:

Using Auto-Mounting HAL and Dbus enable the feature, but there has to be an additional application to notify the user, create links, present desktop icons (if set in preferences.) To this end Absolute uses a customized version of ROX DevTray. DevTray is a panel applet, meaning it appears on a ROX panel -- in the case of Absolute this panel appears UNDER the tasktray. By clicking the arrow at the far right of the taskbar, the bar will slide off to the right (leaving just the arrow) to reveal the panel that hosts DevTray. See below: Above, you can see the blue "wheel" that is the icon for the DevTray options menu. Right-click on that to choose your preferences. (The defaults usually suffice.) The other icons are devices attached to the system. In this case there is one for the USB printer and one for a music CD that was in the CD player. A single left-click will perform the default operation for devices. A right-click on those icons will show a menu of choices. (play, rip, open, eject, etc...) The Home folder is just a shortcut to your home folder which opens with ROX-Filer. It has no association with DevTray. ADVANCED NOTE for those accustomed to ROX panels: normally you can throw other folders (as shortcuts) and applets onto the panel. You can in Absolute also -- but they will disappear when you restart X or reboot. That is because newbies (or the careless) can screw up the panel or eliminate it, and ROX would normally remember this and leave it dysfunctional when next they reboot. (ROX assumes that the way you left it is the way you want it.... To keep this from happenning, I have build Absolute to regenerate the default panel settings on each restart. It copies /etc/skel/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/ROX-Filer/pan_MyPanel to /root/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/ROX-Filer/pan_MyPanel You can disable this feature by removing the line that starts: cp -f /etc/skel/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/... from the script: /Your_Home_Dir/.icewm/startup If you mistakenly quit DevTray but want it back without restarting, make sure you can see the panel (the taskbar is off to the right), Open /HOME/apps with the left mouse button drag the DevTray folder over the panel DevTray will restart. Desktop Icons Lots of folks want music CDs to play automatically or desktop icons to appear when disks are inserted or devices are plugged in. To make this happen you merely have to set the appropriate preferences in DevTray. I personally don't like thigs popping up or applications starting without my say-so. I like the system to stay out of my way. So I set up DevTray's defaults to simply present the devices on the panel with menus and default actions. Unlike the panel itself, DevTray's options are changeable and persistent (after restarts) for any users.

Multimedia (MP3s, DVDs and Online Videos) Lots of media files can be played out-of-the-box, but playing DVDs and videos online that use patent-encumbered codecs cannot. Some audio conversions will not work either if MP3s are involved. To make these things work: You must be root to see/use the utility. (In businesses and schools this is usually only the IT person.) -- Look for the Install Multimedia Files menu item. Click on Install Multimedia Files and subsequently click "Yes" to the following prompt if you are both: connected to the internet confident that installing the software is legal for you. If you choose to continue the install, the installer will download, unpack and install the packages for lame, ffmpeg, libdvdcss and the mplayer video codecs. It does this without any more user interaction, unless you have no internet connection -- in which case it will ask you if you wish to continue installing lame and ffmpeg, without libdvdcss and the codecs, or simply skip the install for the time being. If something is installed that you don't want, simply uninstall it by choosing the package in xpkgtool (START > SYSTEM TOOLS > CONFIGURATION > PACKAGE TOOL). If you want to make sure the installer is not run at a later time, simply delete the folder /usr/src/restricted

Networking (Wireless and Wired) For a WIRED cable connection this is straight forward. Usually folks set this up when Absolute is installed, but the utility used, netconfig can be run anytime when logged in as root. There is also a menu item for it so you can avoid the console or an xterm. Start > System Tools > Configuration > Network > Configure Network Netconfig is simple. The first two screens are not even meaningful for a typical internet connection, although they would be if you were setting up an internal network. For the sake of this quick introduction, I will limit the discussion to what needs doing for a cable connection -- The screen above is the first dialog for netconfig. Put in any hostname (machine name) you'd like -- Darkstar, Joe, whatever...  The next screen is the domain, and for the cable connection, this too could be almost anything. I put "sherman.org" -- but of course there is no such thing in my household :) And finnally we get to one that really matters: If you are connecting right to a cable modem or a typical router, you leave the default at "DHCP" and you are done. Netconfig will ask for confiration, but that is about all there is to it. If you don't feel like rebooting just enter the following in an xterm: /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart For a WIRELESS connection Absolute strarted using WICD with 12.1 beta2. This was done for ease of use and to make it work you have to be running the WICD DAEMON. There is an option to run this with the installer, but you can also set it to run on system startup from the SERVICES menu. If you run the daemon and boot into icewm, you'll see the tray icon for WICD. Right-click and choose "Connect" from the menu, and you will be given the opportunity to set things up. (I am hoping someone with a wireless connection can write us up a how-to to connect to this getting started page.) Below is a screenshot of what appears when I open the application while running on a wired connection: I don't, however, use or need the application for wired cable -- I just use netconfig.

Tweaking Screen Size and Fonts Sometimes the screen size is not what you would like it to be -- everything too tiny or not enough real estate. If such is the case you can use the Set Screen Size utility in the Configuration menu. The possible settings are what is returned from the Xorg xrandr utility, so if they are listed they should work. As a precaution, if you do not "OK" a setting you try, it will return to the original setting. The utility should look like below: After resizing the screen, the fonts are often "whack" -- so you might want to set the font explicitely with the Set System Font utility: DejaVu Sans is a safe bet, but go ahead and play . . . If you somehow manage to really mess things up, as root you can, from the console, run absx to get back to what would be the original probed settings. If THESE do not work, or if you lose X altogether, run safex, and you will get a low-res safe setting that should almost always work.

Software installation and system cofiguration Is meant to be done only as root user. Sure, many folks don't like it -- but Absolute is rolled-out by many admins and some schools and system-tweaking and installing software is "out of sight, out of mind" -- not to make it inately more secure, but more secure because there are less password-locked doors visible to try to "jimmy" open :) Technically not a big benefit, but functionally often effective. 'Nuff said. For those running as root, slapt-get is available in the the configuration portion of the menu, as is my personal upper-limit for automation, Xpkgtool. For those with a development bent, the usual Slackware tools of installpkg and removepkg are there for commandline control, as well as a customized version of checkinstall, for making packages from compiled source code.

Making Users Absolute starts up as root user. You have to create any new user accounts you need, and you need at least one -- as it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that you don't get into the habit of running as root user. [Big security risk, and easy to mess up the system with one sloppy command . . .] Absolute has a utility to accomplish this quite painlessly. The Create New User utility. It appears in the menu when running as root under the Configuration menu item -- 4 items above the Run Services Menu item -- (see top screenshot.) This utility will prompt you for a new user name and password (and confirm password), setting up the proper permissions and putting the user into the proper, necessary groups for normal running on the machine. If you want to tweak things by hand for special permissions, home directories, group adding, etc, -- the usual Slackware commandline utilities are available. (useradd and adduser) Below is a screenshot of the little utility to create a new user account: