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Here I am trying to get E17 Enlightenment desktop environment on an old averatec 3200. Why did i choose enlightenment this time when I am such a die hard KDE user? Even though E17 is mostly featureless from productivity stand point, it is very lightweight with marvelous graphics work making it perfect when you need your computer up in few seconds to simply browse web or watch a video while looking cool in front of your friends. E17 can be installed from their SVN trunk but everytime its a gamble whether the current revision is stable enough. There are also missing or incomplete features here and there that make it very akward.
OpenGEU is an Ubuntu derivative that utilizes E17. Whats special is that they have taken great care into making currently unstable E17 into a very much usable and complete desktop. Telling about the benefits of the choice is worth a separate entry but for a quick summary, they made it reasonably stable, added their own utilities where E17 was lacking and made desktop fully functional by giving a good set of lightweight applications from gnome and xfce.

OpenGEU can be installed either as a package from any existing ubuntu derivative or from a live CD. Installing from a package is straight forward without any caveats and is explained very well here so i will not waste space re-describing it. However, whichever way you do it, getting any ubuntu derivative on Averatec 3200 will require some work. (Can follow the full experience in my twitter between 3:36 PM Mar 16th and 9:25 AM Mar 17th).

Problem is, since Ubuntu 8.04, X server does not generate a valid xorg.conf file for the via chrome video chipset thats in there so it will just drop you to a terminal and any attempts of executing startx will fail. I don't know what it is that versions >7.10 don't have or have too much of but you will somehow have to get correct version of xorg.conf file. (BTW Fedora also seems to be suffering from this).

First method: changing manually

This is not guaranteed to work. Upon close inspection of differences between xorg.conf in versions before and after 8, i noticed that version< 8 has an extra line

BusID "PCI:1:0:0"

after the usual driver line. There is also a more accurate Monitor section:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 30-70
VertRefresh 50-160
EndSection

You can change that on the live CD after it drops to the terminal and then try graphic mode again with startx. Don't forget to do the same after the installation on the destination drive.

Second method: use a full file from earlier live CD version

You will need a 7.10 live CD of any ubuntu derivative. Once booted into 7.10, make a copy of the xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) generated by the live CD and upload it somewhere away from the computer (remember, that its just a live CD so don't save it since its only in memory).

Now you are ready to install latest version of your ubuntu derivative. Boot up from the latest live CD and go through install process. After its done installing, get back the copy of xorg.conf you made earlier and put it in the installation destination. If you are an experienced linux user, you know what I mean. For benefit of the doubt of less experienced you first have to mount installation destination somewhere. During partitioning part of the installation, it would have told you the device ID of your root partition; something like /dev/hda1. So then you can do

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

This will make your destination root partition available at /mnt . You can replace the bad xorg.conf with the correct one using a file manager in root mode. In Kubuntu you can use

kdesu konqueror

but if you are sure then find the location, from the virtual CD's point of view, of where you saved the correct xorg.conf and do

sudo cp /correct/xorg/conf/location/xorg.conf /mnt/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now you should be able to reboot into a working latest version of your favorite ubuntu derivative.

Third method: upgrade

Need a 7.10 live CD for this one too. Just install it and go through two upgrade processes to get it up to 8.10 or whatever is the latest now. Guaranteed to work.

Just in case, here is my version of xorg.conf, less commented lines, that works for me.

 

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