aspire one a0532h and LXDE linux

By basd on May 18, 2010 | In linux, opensuse, lxde

This project is going well and I created an extended entry in my Executive Technical Manual. I replaced the 1 gb of memory with 2 gb and now I am satisfied with the performance. This netbook is working great and the only thing that continues to annoy me is the 1024 x 600 screen. I much prefer the larger 1366x768 resolution on the now defective Gateway.

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However, what I have done is maximize my useable space by changing all of my panels to autohide. This doesn't bother me at all -- I used to do it in the past but I started leaving them visible when screen size/resolution started providing alot of real estate.

I researched whether it would be possible to swap out the screen, but i don't think that is a realistic option. It appears that HP and Dell offer a custom built netbook with that option, so I may end up going that direction the next time around. (But, I try to keep "next time arounds" as far apart as possible.

I've been obsessing on another concern -- and that is the bit-by-bit disappearance of KDE 3.5. I don't specifically care about 3.5 per se, but as noted I like to use kicker to display the Kima applet, to display temp. and other cpu info.

The oddity I have been noticing is that when I install kicker, the panel settings menu / kcm module is available and works just fine. But, somewhere in the KDE/OpenSUSE update process, the module for panel settings disappears. Very inconvenient should it be necessary to edit the panel settings. But more significant, I figure that if I am going to lose the editing capability, sooner or later I'm going to lose the ability to use Kima altogether.

So, in KDE 4 one can use plasma applets. But what do I do in LXDE? After wasting some time trying to figure out how to fix the KDE 3.5 problem, I gave up and looked for other options.

I came up with two pretty neat sensor monitor programs -- conky and gkrellm. Gkrellm creates a desktop widget -- I used to use similar karamba ones before kde4 plasma widgets -- and conky allows embedding in the desktop.

What I wanted was to emulate kicker with kima -- so, I ended up with conky, using a sample conkyrc that allowed a horizontal text line. With some modification, I had it as a small single line at the top of the monitor. The remaining problem was that my apps. cover it.

Much as I'm trying to retrieve real estate, I like to have the temperature readout visible. This was, for instance, how I discovered the fan was burned out in the Gateway. A trend toward high temps. says something has changed in the system. Overly active cpus clue me in that some program is running in the background that should have exited or the like.

Conky has a "panel" mode, which should have worked, but didn't. When I tried it, "full screen" for windows ended up being the left half of the screen. What?

Then it occurred to me I could create an LXDE panel, but just put nothing on it. This would preserve the space at the top of the screen for the conky readout. I started by making it 1 pixel wide and 16 pixels high (minimum settings) at the upper left corner.

Then I realized I could put the conky readout on top of the panel, so I made it full width of the screen. Next I realized that the psuedo-transparent display of conky made most of the placeholding lxde panel disappear altogether, so I shortened it up until it was fully covered by the conky readout. So, I have a one-line conky at the top of the screen telling me date/temps/cpu speed/cpu %/battery charge. And, it's just floating on top of the wallpaper.

Very satisfactory. Will I now say "goodby kicker?" Don't know yet, it's hard to part with good friends...