so, uh... i wanna go back to linux

[johnny]

Originally Posted by raublekick

johnny, do you post on ubuntuforums, or just browse? i should post on there more, but it's kinda overwhelming to actually help people sometimes.

i post on occassion. not much though, 'cause it can be hard to follow. but i decided to try using vb's thread subscriptions, and they make it alot easier to find the threads i'm following again.

i didn't find too many gaps in e17 though. everything seemed to work pretty smoothly.. (unfortunately though, the version of engage which is in the edevelop.org repositories doesn't seem to work out-of-the-box. i think i'll try to make it work some other time..)

[johnny]

i guess i got bored with *buntu, so i decided to give arch linux a try.. i've installed the base system (and updated it, which caused a kernel panic which i then had to fix :x), xorg, and openbox. i looked at the font preferences dialog in leafpad, and there are about.. 9 different fonts installed right now. everything looks pretty ugly.
but it works!:


as you can see in the screen.. the locale settings are buggered up. (who knew cowsay accessed them anyways..? i learned something new tonight, i guess)

[raublekick]

haha wow that IS ugly!

i graped creeper's bandwidth yesterday and installed arch as well. i have gnome up and running pretty basically. there's some things here and there that i need to fix up but i haven't had the time. i like arch, but it's kinda weird to get some things working. i don't mind doing things the long way, but ever since they switched to the mkinitcpio stuff, the old wiki's seem out of date or just confusing weather that is the way it should be done now. the hooks are really cool, but i have no idea what the hooks actually pick up and when.

do you know where i can find this sort of info?


i also want to install opensuse sometime soon. it seems like it has some really cool stuff, but i've heard nothing but bad things about using the opensuse repos.

i see i'm not the only one that names computers after videogame characters. my old desktop was named mario, my laptop luigi, my sister's computer is peach, and my new testing box will be bowser.

[johnny]

vid names are the best.

i'm thinking if things go bad between arch and i sometime soon, i'll just wipe my machine out again and do some testing of the feisty herd 2 disc.

[raublekick]

how big is your hard drive? mine is only 80GB and i have it set up to triple boot, and that is with a 45GB home partition for Ubuntu.

[raublekick]

oh boy... i just fucking borked my arch setup...

[johnny]

my hard drive is 80gb too, but i never seem to keep things installed for very long. i've just gotten used to starting fresh every so often. (i don't have much data to move around anyways..)

how'd you bugger up yer arch system?? are you getting that stupid kernel panic? (kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to....) 'cause if you follow the install guide instructions (1. do a install with just base packages 2. do a --sysupgrade 3. then install everything else) it's likely to happen.. and easy to fix.

[raublekick]

nah, i have dealt with that problem before though, and now i deal with it by FTP installing

my problem was trying to get X set up correctly. the hwd -x didn't set up a good xorg.conf, because it didn't get the right resolutions. i figured i could just pretty much use my ubuntu xorg.conf, except for a few things here and there. well, that didn't work out cus i guess the nv driver isn't installed in arch (no idea how to install it either). then things just kinda snowballed from there. even xorg-config wouldn't give me the option to do 1920x1200, only up to 1280x1024.

basically, what turned into a simple xorg,conf issue turned into ,xinitrc issues because it was trying to load wmaker?? then i couldn't get gdm to run. awesome.

[johnny]

ah, i ran into the exact same problem! here's how i solved the nv issue:
typed "nv" into the package search box on archlinux.org, and among the results found:

Current  	x11-drivers  	xf86-video-nv  	1.2.0-1  	X.org nv video driver  	2006-09-09

so pacman --sync xf86-video-nv, and then a run-through of the xorgconfig command got me an xorg.conf that worked just fine. nb: the nv driver is #18 in the big driver list in xorgconfig.

also.. i've got alsa configured, some gtk-engines installed so firefox doesn't look shitty, the tango icons installed, and bitstream vera and dejavu fonts.. things are looking good. screen -> http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~jrmatth.../newscreen.png

i'm still short on some fonts i think, though.. or at least, i have fucked up some kind of important font configuration. lots of websites still have super tiny text. though the fonts in gtk2 are good (like the fonts used in program menus, etc.)

edit: solved that annoyed locale warning... had to uncomment the right locale in /etc/locale.gen and then run /usr/sbin/locale-gen

[raublekick]

check in the firefox prefs to make sure that it is actually using a good size. for me, it is set at 16.

thank you for that info, i'm gonna give it a shot right now!

[raublekick]

ok so i got my xorg issue pretty much squared away. i have the nv driver working, but not the nvidia driver. my god, xorgconfig has the WORST formatted output ever. i like ubuntu's xorg.conf.

now i just need to get sound working (see's my card and my internal, both are unmuted, doesn't work)

[johnny]

have you added the alsa daemon to rc.conf and done alsactl store to save yer sound settings?

[raublekick]

derrrr! thanks man. i get so confused on what needs to be in rc.conf and what doesn't. i guess any daemon needs to be, but modules actually don't unless you need to load them in a certain order or some other special need.

[johnny]

when i tried using the nvidia package, x seemed to work.. but it was painfully slow and there would be ugly artifacts left all over my screen when opened up the openbox menu and windows and stuff. so i'll just stick with the generic nv driver, 'cause it does the job considerably better.

and i've never actually changed font preferences in firefox before (under any sort of installation). normally in ubuntu, windows, suse, whatever else.. the fonts would just be a touch bigger. though i have found, from my web design class days back in college, that the definition of a point can differ from computer to computer, depending on what is installed.. so it might just be that some of the sites i'm browsing don't do a good job of setting up their style? (go ems!! points iz bad)

[raublekick]

i installed this today:

http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/?p=53

it is REALLY nice for such a new project. not quite as refined as SLAB, but it's more what i want. made by the developers of Tomboy apparently.

[johnny]

Originally Posted by raublekick

nah, i have dealt with that problem before though, and now i deal with it by FTP installing

i'm curious.. when you did the ftp install, did you manually have to load some modules to get yer net connection working, or did it detect everything..? i wasn't really sure, and it didn't seem to work for me. you'd think they would have the sense to include some of that stuff automatically.. the cd has room for it--it's only a ~500mb iso. and my connection is cable, so it's pretty damn simple for linux to configure eth0..

[raublekick]

Originally Posted by johnny

i'm curious.. when you did the ftp install, did you manually have to load some modules to get yer net connection working, or did it detect everything..? i wasn't really sure, and it didn't seem to work for me. you'd think they would have the sense to include some of that stuff automatically.. the cd has room for it--it's only a ~500mb iso. and my connection is cable, so it's pretty damn simple for linux to configure eth0..

i can't do it wirelessly, because i use the ipw2200 module, and Ubuntu is the only distro i have found that includes the firmware for it by default. using wired ethernet just requires me to have the installer detect my card and all that jazz.

[johnny]

i guess the installer just could detect my card then.. maybe the 0.8 installer is a bit better.. oh well, everything is all set up now anyways, so it's no matter.

i ended up installing gnome and gdm, and i'm getting it setup to my liking.

[raublekick]

yeah i need to get on that... my gnome in arch is just a stock gnome and it's not really pretty

[johnny]

i really haven't changed mine drastically, 'cause i actually like the stock gnome look (i guess that's pretty vanilla of me..). i got rid of those pesky desktop icons.. changed the background image.. kept the nice blue clearlooks theme
i fired up gnome-screensaver. now i need to find the pacman screensaver somewhere

i think my next experiment will be mpd. probably with one of the console clients to begin with--the curses one (i think it is ncmpc) looks pretty nifty.