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NimbleX User Guide
Table of contents:
Who should read this guide?
What is NimbleX?
What can you do with NimbleX
Minimum system requirements
The first steps in Linux:
- A little history
- The Linux CLI (Command Line Interface)
- The Linux GUI (Graphical User Interface)
Getting started with NimbleX:
- How-to start it
- How-to access your files
- How-to surf the web
- The NimbleX software
- Best practices with NimbleX
A Great feature – Modularity
Credits
Who should read this guide?
This guide was written for people who never had previous experience with Linux. It is important that those people read it. Others would probably get very bored!
What is NimbleX?
NimbleX is a nice Linux distribution which can be run from a cool 8cm CD or a USB Flash drive, without having to install it. You don’t even need a hard disk!
What can you do with NimbleX?
With the very portable NimbleX CD, you can do a lot more than you can do with other OS, just after installing them. After inserting the disk and wait for the boot to complete you can:
- surf the web
- chat with friends
- listen to Mp3s
- watch movies
- read PDFs
- edit documents
- edit spreadsheets
- make presentations
- play some build-in games
- use it as a recovery disk
- use built in HTTP & FTP servers
- ... and many more!
The best thing is that all this is free, works out of the box and if you copy it to RAM it will be very fast!
Minimum system requirements:
To be honest with you, I haven’t found a PC that old so NimbleX can’t run on it. I think that the most important requirement is the RAM! Although NimbleX worked perfect for me on 64MB RAM and 400MHz PII Server I recommend that you have at least 256MB RAM or a SWAP partition. This being said I think that it should work almost on every computer.
The first steps in Linux:
A little history
Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
The Linux CLI (Command Line Interface)
I wanted to write a short Tutorial about the Linux console, but I found an excellent one here and I strongly recommend that you read it!
The Linux GUI(Graphical User Interface)
There are many GUI in the Linux world. The most important are KDE and Gnome. NimbleX has more than one GUI. It has KDE, Fluxbox and The primary NimbleX GUI is KDE. KDE is a powerful Free Software graphical desktop environment for Linux and Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality, and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system. The ease of use is outstanding and even a complete newbie would accommodate very fast. To start KDE in NimbleX just type startx in console! The Second GUI, Fluxbox is a fast compact window manager based on the Blackbox, but offering more features. This was implemented mainly for very slow computers with less than 128MB RAM. To start Fluxbox you just have to type fluxbox in the command line.
Getting started with NimbleX:
1. How-to start it
First of all, you have a bootable CD. If you do not have one you can burn it with a software similar to Nero. Now you have to make sure that the BIOS is setup to boot from the CD. Then you put the CD in the CD-ROM and restart the computer. If your BIOS can’t boot from CD you can also use a DOS boot disk and start it manually, running nimblex.bat from the DOS folder. Now you will see a screen and a prompt which says boot: If you don’t know what you are doing it is recommended to wait four seconds. This will automatically start NimbleX in the KDE graphical interface. Other useful boot commands are:
nimblex copy2ram – this copies all the CD to RAM. This will improve the speed greatly and will leave the CD free for other uses. Requires al least 256MB RAM.
nimblex nohotplug – this disables almost all hardware autodetection and it would be useful is the system hangs and doesn’t get you to the login prompt. After this you should manually enable the hardware you want to use.
nimblex nopcmcia – useful when the system hangs when is trying to enable the pcmcia support.
nimblex noagp – disables the AGP support
linux gui – this one is the most important! As I said before it starts the KDE GUI withought having to take intermediate steps.
linux guifast – the same as before, except that it starts the Fluxbox interface, suitable for old PCs.
You can also make a combination of two or more commands:
Example:
linux gui copy2ram
This one starts the gui automatically and copies the CD to RAM, ejecting the CD-ROM. Highly recommended! If you just wait, you will see a login prompt. Here you should type the user root and the password toor. The prompt that will appear is like root@nimblex:~# You are now in the command line that we have described in the general chapter about Linux. Some commands are linux specific and other are only available for NimbleX. The basic ones on how to get around the CLI are available on the website I presented before.
Now you should know the following ones:
startx – loads KDE. Now you should know what kde is.
flux – starts a light and resources friendly GUI
Other commands that will not get you in a GUI are:
mc – loads a program similar to Norton Commander
ctetris – starts an oldschool tetris game.
htop – is a utility that shows information about the processes that are running in that moment.
lynx – this is a text mode browser; I like to call it oldschool
mp3blaster – with this you can play mp3 directly from CLI.
There are many more but this is not the purpose of this guide and I don’t want to bore you to much.
2. How-to access your files
All your drives are automatically detected by NimbleX. You can find all your drives in the /mnt directory. Then you can just enter in a directory from there and you will find the files that are stored there.
3. How-to surf the web
If you want to surf the web it is very likely that you will need to set the IP address. In the Home directory from the desktop it is a utility that helps you do just that. If you don’t have to set the IP just skip this step because maybe a DHCP server is present. The webbrowser is called Konqueror and it can be started from the panel. It is the one with the globe icon.
4. The NimbleX software
Even if NimbleX is max 200MB, it packs a lot of free and cool software.
Most of this software can be located by clicking the K icon in the panel. I will let you discover it by yourself.
5. Best practices with NimbleX
Those should be different from one user to another. My best guess it that you would like to boot with:
nimblex copy2ram parameter if your computer has at least 256MB RAM.
You should save the modifications you make by typing configsave followed by path in the console. All the configurations can then be restored using the configrestore command. This is a pretty neat feature! You should take your time to discover all the features and you’ll see that this is a very powerful OS. If you have some requests or some thoughts e-mail me at bogdan.radulescu99 @ gmail.com and maybe that will be available.
A Great feature – Modules
NimbleX is a modular distribution of linux!
This means that you can add software and other stuff very easily. You should just download the module that you want and then just add it using uselivemod command. If you can’t find a specific module you can always convert it from a slackware package using the tgz2mo command.
If it don’t know how to do this things just ask the community (in the case it will be one ).
Credits:
The creator of this distribution is Bogdan Radulescu. I live in Romania. I am a student at the Material Science faculty, which has nothing to do with computers and this distro appeared with no planning. This is the first guide I have ever wrote so please be indulgent.
If you can do a better one I will consider improving this one. You can contact me at bogdan.radulescu99 @ gmail.com. At the moment I am writing this I can’t afford a hosting place so I can’t really release it!
NimbleX wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t Tomas Matejicek who created Linux-Live Scripts and Slax.
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