Linux.com

I got fed up with Damn Small Linux. No drag and drop. Only the most basic of file managers. It did run REALLY fast on my computer, but after trying out Feather Linux, (which never booted after install, regardless of the many options I tried), DSL would not reinstall. I stumbled upon Vector Linux. NICE. After a lengthly (but really easy to understand) install process, I was looking at a desktop far nicer than any XP or Windows version. It ran a bit slow. Evidently xfce is for computers faster than my 166MHz pentium MMX laptop with only 95MB of RAM. But it DID run at least. Vector Linux had JWM and Fluxbox, both of which I was familiar with from using DSL. These window managers ran MUCH faster. And the file manager was far more high tech. Drag and Drop was standard. Nice pretty folder icons instead of a text only tree. There was even a nice viewer program for pictures. Then I tried the thing that no linux distro seemed to do for me yet: set a background image. The default was this really busy (though pretty) "rockface", a mountain side with pretty green fields in front. I wanted to put an abstract image on the background instead so I hooked up my USB external hard drive and downloaded some images from it to a folder I made in my home directory. I opened the images in the viewer program and used the EDIT drop-down menu to select 'set to wallpaper'. Nice. It changed the wallpaper. Easy. Then came the test I challenge every lightweight distro with: restart the window manager. The window manager (JWM) restarted and poof! My nice abstract image was gone and I was stuck looking at rockface again. I then decided to just change my image name to rockface and the original rockface image to rockface1. Then I put my image in the same folder as the rockface original. Restarted the window manager an bingo! I was looking at my background. Lame method, but at least it worked. The process evidently carried over to all the window managers on the computer. Now I had my abstract image everywhere! I switched to fluxbox. Somewhere I read that to change the image you edit the startup file in the Fluxbox folder. Tried that. Still, no switch on restart WM or reboot. I finally figured out that there are THREE text files you have to edit to change the background image. Luckily, Vector Linux supports Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V copy paste so it was pretty easy to do this. Still I am left wondering why the heck doesn't the prety gui viewer program do it for you? Does it do anything at all? Nonetheless, Vector Linux was a great find. Though Abiword is slow as hell on my laptop, I do the majority of my typing in plain text anyway and use a basic editor. When it comes time to font and format my work I upload it to the external HD and plug it into a Windows Machine. Still, Vector Linux has done a great job in breathing life back into my ancient Digital HiNote VP laptop. If anyone has any ideas on how to get the viewer program to change the backgrounds permanently, let me know!!