~pvital Blog

About one week ago, I bought a new desktop machine for me. It’s a Intel® Core™2 Duo E4500 with 1Gb of RAM, DVD-RW and 160Gb SATA. The motherboard is a GigaByte™ one with all on-board.

But, the most important thing is that I could install the 64bits (AMD64 port) testing version of Debian, and once the processor has two cores, I can start to learn more about OpenMP and multithreaded programming. I’m writing the steps I used to install the Debian in this machine (AMD64+boot by USB), and it will be available soon.

Other important thing, was about the default operating system that the computer’s shop wanted install in this machine. Here in Brazil, it’s common the computer’s shops installs not original versions of Windows when you buy a new machine. But, in this case, the shop I bought the machine installs by default a version of Ubuntu (I don’t know which one) in all new machines if the customer didn’t buy a Windows license. I thought this a great initiative from them.

First of all, I’d like to say that I am a happy Debian user, and I will not change it for any other distro – I have my reasons.

At work I use Debian testing (lenny) in a ThinkPad T42 as my official operating system. Additional to Debian I installed the LTC internal Linux distro, based on Ubuntu Gutsy, that I use as a “security system”, if some IBM application decides not work on Debian. At home, I have a desktop with Debian stable (etch).

After read a VentureCake post about “Using Avant without Gnome panel“, I decided to look closer this new window manager (new for me, because I’ve never heard about it before). As my first step, I looked the Avant window Manger official site to learn more. There, I saw that there are not official and stable (at least for me) packages of avant for Debian. So, my unique option was try it in Ubuntu.

Once Ubuntu is a son of Debian, it was very easy install avant (I love apt ). First, I added the following lines in my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

Then, I had to download the repository key:

After that, it was time to install the packages:

OK. The avant was installed!!! Once installed, I gone to Applications → Accessories → Avant Window Navigator, and the little dock bar was running. I did some modifications on its default configurations (System → Preferences → Awn manager).

So, my screen now have a nice dock bar: