i make the summit farther away, it takes me higher.

so, here i am, linuxxing, doing various linuxy things...
playing around casually with my xmonad configuration adding new keyboard shortcuts to launch applications, drawing up spreadsheets to work out my personal optimised keyboard layouts, reading up on various distros, particularly...

gentoo and sabayon...

i'm thinking somethin like....
"it'd b nice to have a distro on my pendrive set up just as i like for both openbox and xmonad, and work happily out of the box* on both my laptop, and my triple monitor desktop."
*in this context, if i have to roll my own, thats ok (even prefered that i can do that easily).

sabayon is still to this day the best of the bunch in my experience, for getting me leaning back on my seat smiling at my triple desktop fastest and easiest.

but as lush and convenient as sabayon is, i still kinda want to move this process on, the reason i went with sabayon in the first place before i even found out it was the sweetest set up distro out of the box... it's gentoo underneath.

i'm not at all sure how easy it is to "roll your own" with sabayon and gentoo, having never yet even searched for the feature (since sabayon comes so conveniently configured out of the box, and gentoo you configure so completely and tightly to your needs).

for rolling my own, i'd be more confident with slitaz, slax, ubuntu or even (ew) suse studio, having done so at least once with each of these. i know pclinuxos bigs itself up as being another distro with an easy roll your own distro feature.


but for now... seems i'm having a more thorough poke and investigation of both sabayon and gentoo, having actually burned dvds of both sabayon 5 and gentoo 10.

it's 10.1 actually, but since its the same just with a couple bug fixes, and more so, since i wanted to finish that sentence of looking neat, i just left it as a nice round figure, to compliment the nice round 5 there. hehe. aaaaaanyways....

since i've had all those empty partitions sat eagerly waiting for some data or something to fill them up, it's about time i got out of the mere virtualbox and gave a distro a propper whirl natively for once.

yipes, just realised, thats the first time this year! all other times it's been either virtualbox or usb installs. oh how my distro surfing has changed.

so why a hd install if i'm dreaming up a distro setup for use on a usb stick on both laptop and desktop machines?
...
*shrug*
idk...
it'd b nice to have it on the hd here too?
this is an always-on kinda box, so i cant run both from the same usb pendrive at the same time, and there are plenty times when i need both on at the same time.
ok...
99% of the time it's probably an unecessary luxury...
but it is those 1% of times when it's needed that make it a necessity.


and thats kinda how i feel on having the os i use on my pendrive with my laptop be able to work with my workstation...
the rare times i've come across it, it's a real nuissance that the pendrive os i use on mylaptop wont work with my workstation. i think the triple monitor scares them, and they end up incompetently showing nothing. so this isnt just some missed luxury, this is missing even the most basic functionality.

so anyways... after my time with crunchbang, which has really opened my eyes to openbox, and revolutionized my thinking, and the cause for me returning to my xmonad configuration wanting to implement what i have learned... i'm now thinking it's time to spruce up my desktop again.

i know i do so much like having a "everything installed" environment to work in so there's rarely a tool missing that you'll need, but like i say, crunchbang has been a revolution in my mind.

so maybe i'll find i cant sluff off the need to have "everything installed", but i've certainly learned that most of my use is centered around a dozen or so apps.... handy that huh? leaves me enough room for window manager keyboard controls as well as start apps, and with minimal overlap and complex button combinations that get hard to remember... or so you would think.


to get all the buttons to fit is not the issue of course. it's to have them be intuitive, even for the stuff you might not need to use for ages.

f is a particularly troublesome key.

you say f and probably are thinking firefox? haha, foolish surely no? what about all the file management stuff? find? there are only a couple of all the potential modifier combinations left on my crunchbang for the f key. from the differing modifier key combinations, my mere f key can start up two file managers, a file manager in super user mode, two search engines, and a disk space usage analyser. f is definately not for firefox. as is default in openbox's default configuration in crunchbang, w is for web browser, and the web browser happens to be firefox.... however...

when setting this up for my xmonad configuration, i still have the default keys mapped for the window manager and as such, w is taken up for my screens 1, 2 and 3. w, e and r.

so... it's time to get really smart and come up with a merger of my xmonad and openbox keys, where each allows for the other.

since i'm going to be remapping loads of keys i may as well make it more artist friendly, rather than programmer friendly.

by that i mean, the keyboard shortcuts should nearly all be one handed friendly as the default position for the artist is one hand on the mouse/pen and one hand on the keyboard.


it does seem xmonad's keys are likely to get shunted off the main face entirely lest i come up with a strong system whereby there's a different modifier combination for application starting than there is for window manager... thus all apps could b started still using intuitive keys, more often using the first letter of the type of application (web, editor, etc), but this does cause some small constriction on the number of applications that can be started from the same key, even if there are no window management uses getting in the way.
however... this does overlook the one handed remapping and that xmonad's default keys are far from intuitive. a far more obvious system of window management is for the most part staring us in the face on the keyboard. windows, shift, -> for example could easily be the obvious choice for a first timers guess as to what might make the window move to the right... so thats what i'll make it. that gives an example of the type of intuitive control system i'm talking about. retaining some level of meaning to the key modifiers.... shift actually shifts things, control controls them, alt alternates or some alternate control, and the windows key is for modifying the window environment. simple huh?

well enough talk, more action...