OpenMamba, cont.
Actuallly, Konsole is a very competent terminal emulator, but I prefer the flexibility of Terminology, so I'll install that along with the other stuff I need, and switch to it when I get a chance. That's if it's available, of course, but I'm hoping it will be.
What? I could swear that I noticed that OpenMamba uses apt before I installed it, and with its being an independent distro, that didn't surprise me. Maybe they just haven't updated the documentation. Anyway, this isn't really a setback. I speak dnf, and I even have a bashrcAddins-dnf file of macros I can use. So, first I'll do a full update, then install Terminology, the micro editor, and either nfs-utils or nfs-common, as available. And after I've done some more basic configuration, I'll install more software, depending on what all's available. Some of you might want to use KMail and Firefox, and if so, you'll find those already installed. I prefer Thunderbird and Vivaldi, so those are what I'll look for.
Now I have dnf doing the update, and it looks like it's using two tin cans and a string to connect with Italy. The update notification now correctly indicates that there are 51 packages to upgrade. Fortunately there aren't very many upgrades to install, and most of them seem to be small libraries. It's not taking as long as I thought it might. But the Linux firmware is taking a long time to upgrade, as you might imagine (at about 315 KB/s), so that's going to be a while yet. Finally, I'm going to reboot, and then install the other necessities.
The OpenMamba window also automatically resizes itself when the VM is in the host window's client area. That's a trememdous feature that not all distros offer. Doing that makes it particularly easy to work with both OSs at the same time, as the bottom panel of the VM is available right above the bottom panel of the host machine. It's very easy for me to continue the configuration this way, and there are no scroll bars on the VM window for me to be constantly clicking on.
Awww, fsck. I guess I can use nano to edit files in the terminal, but as I said, I really prefer Terminology to any other terminal. On some systems (like Solus, for example), nfs-utils takes the place of nfs-common, so maybe that will be available here. This is still a pretty big disappointment, though. It's the first one I've encountered since I started all this, so I'm still pretty happy with OpenMamba. I'll move on now, and hope things don't get any worse.
It turns out that neither nano nor pico is available in the repo, so as a last resort I try Kate. I'm not used to having that available inside a terminal (without a lot of complaints), but as long as I use it with without root privileges, it works just fine. So I'm able to add a source statement that makes my macros in bashrcAdditions-dnf available to any terminal using BASH. I'll do the same in .bashrc in the /root folder, too, in case I want to use a terminal as that user. I'm pretty sure Kate will allow me to save my changes in /root, if I provide an appropriate password. Micro and Kate (and Gedit, for that matter) use the same shortcuts, so it's not much of an inconvenience at all. After CTRL+S to save, and CTRL+Q to quit Kate, I'm on my way again.
The last edit I need to do is to add my NAS shares to the bottom of /etc/fstab. It turns out that nfs-utils is installed by default (just as in Solus), so I should now be ready to create the folders I need in /mnt to be mount points for these shares. When I've done that, a mount -a
command mounts them using systemd, the same way that Solus does. Also, my home directory doesn't have any folders in it by default except Desktop, so I won't need to remove any of those local folders that other distros provide by default (including Solus). I'll use a few symlinks to provide access to some useful NAS shares instead.
Mounting those shares makes them immediately available in Dolphin, and to my delight, they and their contents are all fully available to me, with none of the arguments I get from many distros about permissions. If it sounds like I'm really enjoying OpenMamba, you've been paying attention. I'll create the symlinks next, and I won't take any pictures of that process, but in case anyone reading this would like to know how I do that, here are some examples.
ln -s /mnt/Documents
Since I've changed to my home directory, I don't need to provide a destination for that command. But here, I want to make sure that I just include the Linux set of downloads from my NAS's Downloads share, I need to provide that.
ln -s /mnt/Downloads/Linux Downloads
The result looks like this in my home directory.
What a delightfull theme that openmamba dark turns out to be! These pretty much duplicate the folders that other distros put in the home directory, but they actually connect to so much more. Next, I would normally install aisleriot, kshisen, and gnome-mahjongg, but unfortunately none of those are available via dnf. Sometimes a distro's software center has access to repositories that aren't availabe with the CLI package manager, and Discover is here by default, so I'll try to find them there. If they're simply not available at all, I'll need to see if there are any suitable substitutes that are already installed.
Yes! Aisleriot (for Spider solitaire) is available from Discover. I'll try using it to install all the packages that I want, and can't find with dnf. Maybe I can also find micro and the rest of it. I see that Discover handles flatpaks transparently, as I've heard that Sol also will, when it becomes a thing. I'm fine with flatpaks, so I'll gladly settle for those.
I was able to install nearly everything I could want from Discover, exept Vivaldi. I'll have to settle for Firefox, but things could be a whole lot worse. That Discover is certainly a sweet little software center.
I'm going to do the rest of my usual configuration now, except for sync'ing Vivaldi, of course, and I'll continue this examination in the next message. Before I leave for real, I want to look up that dialog that said it would provide lots more software when I first launched OpenMamba. I've already found nearly everything I need, but I'm curious to find out what else it makes available. Considering the horrible download speeds from this distro in Italy, I can understand why they're not installed automatically. My son currently lives in Sicily, and he complains a lot about his available Internet connection there, so I'm guessing that's what the problem is.