briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Arch)

Ker-crash

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:56:52 -0700

I can pretty consistently crash my X server nowadays just by opening too many programs. I think I need a new computer.

Or maybe my idea of "too many programs" has been warped by how well Linux multi-tasks. Let's see. I'm seeding 20 torrents in KTorrent, I have Amarok playing, Konversation has a few IRC channels open, Kopete is doing some Jabber for me, Akregator is fetching feeds every 10 minutes, Gimp has a dozen PNGs open, Emacs is visiting around 20 files (and running SLIME + Clojure obviously), Squirrel SQL is running so I can peek at mysql, I have maybe 5 or 6 Konsole windows open, and I have four browsers running (Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Konq) for testing my websites while I develop (multiple tabs in each obviously). And so on.

In Windows not only would the single, sucky taskbar be full to overflowing, but all of my programs would be slowed to a crawl. In Linux I somehow get away with this level of activity for days at a time, but eventually I do something wrong and something crashes. Just now, it was opening one Konsole window too many. I think it's KDE4 instability, or else my ancient video card can't handle the screen resolution I'm running. But I get crashes in Gentoo and Arch both so I don't know.

Buying a computer is such a pain. I never know what to get. I don't keep up with hardware news. Every time I turn around there are twelve new processor families. I know whatever I buy will suck in a month. My current computer is from way back in 2006 and I haven't upgraded it since. My geek cred is non-existent if judged by the computer I'm using. It's embarrassing.

Way to go, Arch

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:38:23 -0700

KDE 4.3 is available in Arch already. If the Arch MB is to be believed, it was available for install a few hours before KDE even announced it. Good job Arch devs. Arch seems to have pretty fast turnaround on new packages.

The stable release of KDE 4.3 is looking good too. I wiped my KDE profile because I think I've been running the same one since KDE 3.1 and the cruft was becoming noticeable. That helped resolve a lot of things (I can add widgets to the main panel without crashing things now).

One thing that has caused me tons of problems historically is CJK input in KDE. In KDE3 Skim worked OK, but I couldn't get it to work in KDE4. Instead there's UIM which so far has been better than Skim in terms of stability and predictability of interface.

As per a comment by knef on a recent post, you can set per-desktop wallpapers now (as in virtual desktops, workspaces, whatever you call them). You have to:

Zoom out (via the cashew)
Hope it doesn't crash
Go into the Plasma options there
Pray it doesn't crash
Enable the setting to make each desktop have its own "activity"
Yeah you probably crashed right here. In the off chance you didn't crash, once you zoom in you can set per-desktop wallpapers now.

Not just wallpapers, but widgets in general. This is kind of good, kind of bad. If you want to go back to a single wallpaper per desktop, you have to go back and screw with activities. Also I don't think you can "sticky" a widget to span all desktops. It's either everything per-desktop or everything global. I'd bet this will change in future versions.

But I read a suggestion somewhere (probably Slashdot) to set up a different Folder View on each desktop, each pointing to a different folder, and that's actually a great idea. You can set kwin to always open Gimp on a certain desktop and have a folder view of your pictures folder underneath, or something.

Kudos KDE devs, KDE is awesome and keeps getting better.

Trying Arch

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:52:41 -0700

Thanks to all who gave helpful suggestions about running VMs in Gentoo. The main reason I wanted a VM was to play around with some other distros and see what I liked.

But then I got to thinking, and I realized that I have over 250 GB of free hard drive space sitting around. So I made a new little partition and per Noah's suggestion, threw Arch Linux on there.

I'm fairly impressed so far. The install was easy. In contrast to the enormous Gentoo handbook, the whole Arch install guide fits on one page of the official Arch wiki. Why doesn't Gentoo have an official wiki? I know there are concerns over the quality of something anyone can edit, but in practice is it a big a deal? Is it worth the price of sending users elsewhere, to potentially even WORSE places, when the Gentoo docs don't cover everything we need? The quality of the unofficial Gentoo wiki is often very good but sometimes hit-or-miss, and it also sort of crashes and loses all data without backups every once in a while.

The Arch installer is a commandline app using ncurses for basic menus and such, which is more than sufficient and a good compromise between commandline-only and full-blown X-run Gnome bloat. The install itself went fine, other than my own mistakes. I'm sharing /boot and /home between Gentoo and Arch so I can switch between them easily. During the install Arch tried to create some GRUB files, but they already existed care of Gentoo, so the install bombed without much notification and I didn't notice until 3 steps later. No big deal to fix, but I'd have liked a louder error message right away when it happened. The base install took about 45 minutes.

Another nice thing is that the Arch install CD has vi on it. I didn't have to resort to freaking nano or remember to install vim first thing. A mild annoyance to be sure, but it bugged me every time I installed Gentoo.

After boot, installing apps via pacman is simple enough. KDE 4.2 installed in about 15 minutes, as you'd expect from a distro with binary packages. I found a mirror with 1.5 Mb/sec downloads, which is awfully nice. Syncing the package tree takes less than 2 seconds, which is also nice compared to Portage's 5-minute rsync and eix update times. Searching the tree via regex is also somehow instantaneous in Arch.

Oddly, KDE didn't seem to pull in Xorg as a dependency, but other dependencies worked fine so far. Time will tell how well this all holds up. Most package managers do fine on the normal cases but the real test is the funky little obscure apps. pacman -S gvim resulted in a Vim with working rubydo and perldo, which means Arch passed the Ubuntu stink test.

Another nice thing is that KDE4 actually works. My Gentoo install is years old and possibly crufted beyond repair, or something else was wrong, but I have yet to get KDE4 working in Gentoo without massive breakage. Possibly if I wiped Gentoo and tried KDE4 without legacy KDE3 stuff everywhere it'd also be smooth.

Regardless, it all works in Arch. NVidia drivers and Twinview settings were copy/pasted from Gentoo, and compositing all works fine. No performance problems in KDE with resizing or dragging windows, no Plasma crashes (yet), no missing icons or invisible notification area. QtCurve works in Qt3, Qt4 and GTK just fine. My sound card worked without any manual configuration at all. My mouse worked without tweaking, including the thumb buttons. Same with networking, the install prompted me for my IP and gateway etc. and then it worked, no effort.

I've mentioned before, but one nice thing about Linux is that if you have /home in its own partition, it's no big deal at all to share it between distros. With no effort at all I'm now using all my old files and settings in Arch, and I can switch back and forth between this and Gentoo without any troubles.

So we'll see how this goes. So far so good though. Arch seems very streamlined and its goal is minimalism, which is nice. Gentoo has not felt minimalistic to me in a while. Again, may be due to the age of my install, cruft and bit-rot.