CrunchBang Linux

First, my motivation for changing to wicd:

I run a home network using static ip addresses. My networking working well when I was running Kubuntu. I switched to #! on most of my PCs in the past year. The networking runs ok, except when I have a power outage. If any of the #! machines go down, they restart, but do not connect to the network properly. For some reason, network manager restarts with the auto wired connection. The auto-wired connection is configured wrong because it somehow detects the wrong router on the network and gets the IP addresses wrong. Each time this happens, I have to manually kill the connection and start up my 'homeNetwork' connection that was created by me using network manager. 

I decided today was the day to automate the restart process. I did some reading and from what I found, wicd can be automated more easily than using network manager.

So, I installed wicd and wicd-client using get-apt. When installing wicd, everything went fine except now when wicd starts up, it is also detected the wrong IP address for my gateway router. I have two routers on my network. I have a wireless router at IP address 192.168.2.1 and I have an ethernet router at IP address 192.168.0.1. When I reboot the ethernet connected PCs on the network, they should all detect 192.168.0.1. My problem is that the PC I am working on right now, is picking up the wireless routers.

Here is the output of the route command:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.2.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
default         192.168.2.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

And here is the output of 'ifconfig, when I first started up wicd.

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1a:a0:0a:da:6c
          inet6 addr: fe80::21a:a0ff:fe0a:da6c/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:103 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:156 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:8582 (8.3 KiB)  TX bytes:20446 (19.9 KiB)
          Interrupt:19

And here is the output of ifconfig after rebooting:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1a:a0:0a:da:6c 
          inet addr:192.168.2.100  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21a:a0ff:fe0a:da6c/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:132 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:154 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:10614 (10.3 KiB)  TX bytes:17778 (17.3 KiB)
          Interrupt:19

1) Why would the ifconfig output change after rebooting?
2) Interesting that the IP address after the reboot is 192.168.2.100, not 192.168.2.1.
3) How do I get the networking software to detect the correct IP address?

I'm running iceweasel and it is working find except the top menu part has a dark gray background and an even darker gray or black font color. The colors are close enough that when I first brought up iceweasel, I thought the menu bar was missing.

Is iceweasel an X-based window which can be controlled by setting Xresourses? If so, does anyone know the name of the resource for the menu bar?

If it is not an X-window, is there a way to control the font color on the menu bar?

Jim A.

I have been using Kubuntu for several years now and I'm starting to move over to #!. One of the things that I really liked on Kubuntu was the package managemet. There were a lot of packages to choose from, including several package managers.

I have some questions about package management.

1) How can I get a list of packages in the Squeeze repository. I have gotten a list via google, but I would like to get a complete list. When I bring up Synaptic Package Manager, I get a list, but in the past when I worked with Synaptic on Kubuntu, it never provided a full list as Adept did.

2) I prefer to use Firefox for a browser and Thunderbird for email. Are these applications available as part of the Debian 'Squeeze' release or as part of Statler?

Thanks for any comments.

Jim Anderson

I'm a fairly experience programmer and have been working on UNIX/Linux for about 40 years. Currently, I usually work on Kubuntu and I'm more or less happy with the product and the support of the community. Definitely, I give a thumbs up for Kubuntu!!

About 12 years ago I was given an IBM Thinkpad 600e as my traveling laptop. It was a nice laptop for it's time and I used it until it died around 2006. Last year, I saw a local ad on Craigslist for a Thinkpad 600e, a mouse and a flatscreen for $40 and I could not resist buying it, figuring I would try loading Kubuntu up. I have a Pentium II PC in my basement that I used as print server and it runs Kubuntu, so I figured Kubuntu would load up and work (slowly) on the Thinkpad. Wrong!! I could not even load the OS on the Thinkpad. I then did a search on other version of Linux and found a number of 'small versions', e.g Linux Puppy, Lubuntu, just to name a couple. I tried installing 5 or 6 differend 'small' distribution on the Thinkpad and none of them  worked.

Then I tried #!. It worked the first time!

Reason #1 - It works on my Thinkpad. Great job guys!

I have used my laptop some, but not a lot. Most of my work is on my desktops. But I have used #! some. I'm getting ready to start using it more and my expectation is that I will start using it a lot more. I'm still a novice, but so far I have been able to do everything that I want to do on it. What if really like is that it is so compact and yet seems to do all I want with out a lot of the other junk that I have to put up with in Kubuntu/KDE. I will evaluate long and hard before I make the final decision to move away from Kubuntu.

Reason #2 - 'minimal' design philosophy without giving up really functionality.

As I said, great job guys. Keep up the good work!

Jim Anderson