I am now looking at how to set up Fedora on my Toshiba laptop as a web server accessible internally and externally. Let’s see how it goes!

I decided to drop Xubuntu and install Fedora 8 with GNOME as graphical desktop. What a difference!

Fedora is much faster to boot and to use the graphical interface. VNC was easy to install and to set up. Take a look at this great post!

I am now able to access the laptop from my main desktop computer.

Fedora is not peeeerrfect. It did not recognize my wireless card from start so I am using the ethernet card for now and VNC does not work if I don’t login at least once to the machine. After that, I can log out the user and use VNC.

Using the desktop is also very slow on my old Toshiba. I have done some changes in order to make faster (Desktop preferences, Window Manager, User Interface Preferences etc). IT improved a lot!!

I also changed “Sessions and Startup” to remove the option “Launch Gnome services on startup” to load faster.

The root user in Xubuntu has restrictions for security reasons. You should use the sudo command instead.

I wanted to login as root and use “su root” but got authentication failure errors in the login screen and in the terminal.

I had issue “sudo passwd root” from the terminal to set up the root user (it will prompt to create the root password although it asks you that during the installation…) which fix the authentication errors.

I also changed the “login window” settings to allow admin login. Now I am able to login as root!

I am trying to make xubuntu load faster…I removed some of the Autostarted applications (update notifier, restricted drivers manager and print queue applet). The only only one left is the network manager.

I also removed the quiet option from GRUB boot menu.lst so I can see what is going on with the boot.

It seems that the time to load improved.

It took hours to install!!!!! And it takes a while to load….It is kind of frustrating.

One good point it that it recognized my wireless card and downloaded the driver automatically!

Now it is VNC set up time!

I downloaded my Xubuntu (Ubuntu with Xfce graphical desktop) install .iso using BitTorrent, burned the CD and proceed to the installation.

It is taking a looooong time. Debian xFce was really quick to install! My first guess would be the number apps/packages it installs…..

It was time consuming to set up VNC on Debian. I was able to install the VNC server and access from my WinXP computer. I was able to create a shell to start VNC during the boot but it was ignoring the startup parameters.

It is taking to much time with Debian so I will switch to Xubuntu and hope things will be easier…

I am now trying to install and access my laptop using VNC from my main computer through my home network. This post helped me install it from the command line and set some things up. I will also use this post to finish the set up.

Some more references:

How to start xfce session.

Xfce is definitely light so it works fine on my old laptop. I found the menus a little disorganized and incomplete. There some items like “Bc” and “Dc” that would have no meaning for most of the people. I could not find a graphical package manager/installer. I thought about give up Xfce for GNOME or KDE but… I will keep it.

A correction here…the lack of a graphical package manager/installer is not related to  Xfce (graphical desktop) but to Debian itself. Debian documentation has package related information well explained.