Arch & Stuff

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

21 Oct 2015, 20:51

I have wiped on my home PC the SSD, and installed Linux, namely Arch - not on a second HDD, and not in a VM but like real men do on the first drive. So far I have the i3 window manager up and running, a nice font in the URXvt terminal, after years of using Chrome typing this post in the Firefox browser, and a slightly customized information bar on the top of the screen.

Next is file syncing: using and having a 1TB Google Drive account I have installed now insync - which seems to be a good choice? Read that the other packages are somewhat buggy, and if OK abandoned.

Abandonment is another thing of which I am afraid of: reading the Arch Wiki (=world heritage) is great, but later I always check if the thing I am interested in is OK to use, or its developers are not interested in it anymore and all people are using alternatives meanwhile. Or is this just silly thinking?

To do list:

- file manager
- image viewer
- what is Udisks and how to auto mount in an elegant way
- maybe change the font rendering of Firefox somehow (currently I quite like that strange 1996 feeling)
- install Steam

Maybe some of you have some tips and tricks for a newbie like!

One important part I am going to do will be to ... install VMWare Player or Workstation Pro to startup a recently made Windows vmdk and later Lightroom. I can't live without, and running it in Wine is not as good fast as starting up a virtual machine? Dont't need GPU acceleration, just CPU power, RAM and a fast drive. Again: I need that program!

Image

andrewjoy

21 Oct 2015, 21:41

i like pcmanfm if you want a nice simple windows style file manager , if not just do it via the command line or use one of the many norton commander clones.

As for image viewer feh is nice and lightweight

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

21 Oct 2015, 21:56

andrewjoy wrote: As for image viewer feh is nice and lightweight
Thanks, installed right now - looks good. Have to go now through the options. What is instantly great is when being in a directory and starting feh I can dig through the images. Fast and easy! Just changing the sort order and that is everything I actually need!

User avatar
flabbergast

21 Oct 2015, 21:57

So far - good choices ;)

Yes, abandonment is going to be present, if not necessarily too disruptive. Really good pieces of software will survive even abandonment, there's usually someone who picks them back up. But (depending on the programs you need) there most likely will be program-shifting from time to time.

For the file manager, the norton commander clone I like most is midnight commander. Things like this are always nicer in terminal :)

I haven't used Arch in a while, but I remember that updating was sometimes quite "fun" - it was necessary to keep up at least with the frontpage news, since updates necessarily break things sometimes, especially because Arch was (and probably still is) using mostly vanilla software.

And for virtualisation, I use VirtualBox and am happy with it.

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

21 Oct 2015, 23:21

Thanks for clarification, flabbergast!

Lots of things to do and learn. For installing a udev rule for a special USB device I just wanted to download the rule and copy it to the proper directory. But I want to copy and paste the URL - so I am installing xclip, adding a perlscript - again in the proper directory - and editing my .Xdefaults file in the end [EDIT] ...after later finding out that the middle mouse button can paste inside. But hopefully the USB device will be recognized now!

User avatar
ramnes
ПБТ НАВСЕГДА

22 Oct 2015, 00:48

Madhias wrote: I have wiped on my home PC the SSD, and installed Linux, namely Arch - not on a second HDD, and not in a VM but like real men do on the first drive. So far I have the i3 window manager up and running, a nice font in the URXvt terminal, after years of using Chrome typing this post in the Firefox browser, and a slightly customized information bar on the top of the screen.
Congratulations! Welcome to the real world. :ugeek:

i3 is a really good WM. Take a look at py3status if you want to have fun with your bar easily.

rxvt-unicode is also a very good choice for your terminal. I never took the time to learn and configure it, but it's on my to do list. I'm still using terminator which is also excellent, but kind of bloated.
Madhias wrote: Abandonment is another thing of which I am afraid of: reading the Arch Wiki (=world heritage) is great, but later I always check if the thing I am interested in is OK to use, or its developers are not interested in it anymore and all people are using alternatives meanwhile. Or is this just silly thinking?
Yes, a lot of abandonment, even more since you choose to use a non-traditional desktop environment. But in the end you'll see that the benefit from the few softwares left is much bigger than all the junk you have anywhere else. I couldn't live anymore without a real tiling WM, emacs or bash. The kernel itself is freaking awesome, you should definitely try to recompile it to your needs several times to understand how it works.
Madhias wrote: - file manager
You shouldn't use this. A good shell like bash, zsh, or fish, is the way to go. It will hurt at the beginning, but once you master it and know the good tools to do the good job, anything else will seem tasteless.
Madhias wrote: - image viewer
I use geeqie because it's really light, doesn't depend on anything and even if it's ugly as fuck, have a lot of nice features (renders RAW files, link to common image editors, etc). Thought, if you find something better that doesn't require a full desktop environment like Gnome/KDE to run, I'd be very interested!
Madhias wrote: - what is Udisks and how to auto mount in an elegant way
I really struggled on that one for some time. In the end, my preferred way to automatically mount an USB storage is to use udev. That's really simple, doesn't need any dependency, and works like a charm with in a few script lines. See: https://gist.github.com/ramnes/67899785dbe985c48dca

(Edit: just read your last post, looks like you already found this. Great!)
Madhias wrote: - maybe change the font rendering of Firefox somehow (currently I quite like that strange 1996 feeling)
I can't help on Firefox particularly, but be sure to check your OS font rendering first.
Madhias wrote: - install Steam
Are you really sure that you want to do that? Once it's done, it's hard to go back. Steam is proprietary, closed source, hard/impossible to debug, really badly coded, and needs a lot of dependencies that got me mad multiple times on Gentoo. Maybe it's more straight forward on Arch, but personally I'm not going to do it again anywhere soon. Anyway, playing games is a waste of time (self-persuasion, self-persuasion, self-persuasion). :mrgreen:
Madhias wrote: One important part I am going to do will be to ... install VMWare Player or Workstation Pro to startup a recently made Windows vmdk and later Lightroom. I can't live without, and running it in Wine is not as good fast as starting up a virtual machine? Dont't need GPU acceleration, just CPU power, RAM and a fast drive. Again: I need that program!
I would recommend VirtualBox rather than VMWare.

About Lightroom, I know you don't want to hear that there are alternatives, because I didn't want neither at first, but you really should check RawTherapee. It's really a good piece of software, it's open source, works anywhere, and the developers are really active.

For example, I shot that picture in RAW with a D70, and I used RawTherapee to process it:
Image

And I'm pretty happy with the result. ;)

User avatar
sth
2 girls 1 cuprubber

22 Oct 2015, 10:34

welcome to linux :) arch is probably a good way to get started if you are interested in the guts. i'm not personally a fan of it but lots of people seem to be very happy with it, and the combination of their huge repos and the ABS means you can easily try out a lot of things relatively painlessly.

if you ever feel like getting masochistic, come join us in the void... voidlinux.eu

regarding font rendering, you'll want to look into infinality. should be some info in the arch wiki, there is an arch user who maintains the correct packages and you can just add the repo to pacman to get really nice font rendering 8-)

andrewjoy

22 Oct 2015, 10:42

I also like you have tried i3 its the only tiling window manager i like , dwm is good but i am not clever enough to use it :P. I also am a fan of most of the suckelss apps http://suckless.org/ I only use linux on my older x61s laptop so i need stuff that is super lightweight.

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

22 Oct 2015, 11:39

ramnes wrote: Take a look at py3status if you want to have fun with your bar easily.
The short wiki overview reads great, I am going to try it out, thanks for the tip!
ramnes wrote:
Madhias wrote: - file manager
You shouldn't use this. A good shell like bash, zsh, or fish, is the way to go. It will hurt at the beginning, but once you master it and know the good tools to do the good job, anything else will seem tasteless.
Currently I can do simple tasks like copying files, creating files or folders, a little bit of sorting files in a directory, and similar basics. But what I am missing is a thumbnail preview of images for example. Maybe it is possible with a feh thumbnail mode (http://feh.finalrewind.org/examples/).
sth wrote: regarding font rendering, you'll want to look into infinality. should be some info in the arch wiki, there is an arch user who maintains the correct packages and you can just add the repo to pacman to get really nice font rendering 8-)
Ok, maybe I'll install it - but lets see if I really need it then or not. At my first Arch attempt some months ago I installed so many things that in the end I did not know anymore what caused which problem - and so I thought to be as vanilla as possible is great! Currently it is only Firefox which looks like as I said a browser from the 90s. But therefor it has some flair!
ramnes wrote:
Madhias wrote: - install Steam
Are you really sure that you want to do that? Once it's done, it's hard to go back. Steam is proprietary, closed source, hard/impossible to debug, really badly coded, and needs a lot of dependencies that got me mad multiple times on Gentoo. Maybe it's more straight forward on Arch, but personally I'm not going to do it again anywhere soon. Anyway, playing games is a waste of time (self-persuasion, self-persuasion, self-persuasion). :mrgreen:
Ok, that sounds feasible, I'll rethink that. Maybe a separate Steam installation on another boot device. It is not like I would play games all the time, but I quite like Steam and all its nice little games!
ramnes wrote: About Lightroom, I know you don't want to hear that there are alternatives, because I didn't want neither at first, but you really should check RawTherapee. It's really a good piece of software, it's open source, works anywhere, and the developers are really active.
That's true, I always tried and try all alternatives to Lightroom. Maybe RawTherapee sometimes - it is as you said really good, but I do think I will stay for a while with LR because of small things I love there: the database, a single file which can be copied everywhere and used (on the Mac, on the PC); using virtual copies of files (a feature which I use heavily); and all its organization features. As photography is important for me, and I 'live' with an huge pile of pictures, I'll bite in the dust and use my paid software - but with an eye to RawTherapee and using it lightly! Another topic would be that I hate Adobes new license models (I buy the LR updates in a normal way and not an abo).

User avatar
ramnes
ПБТ НАВСЕГДА

22 Oct 2015, 11:55

Madhias wrote: Ok, that sounds feasible, I'll rethink that. Maybe a separate Steam installation on another boot device. It is not like I would play games all the time, but I quite like Steam and all its nice little games!
chroot is what you're looking for!

JBert

22 Oct 2015, 14:10

ramnes wrote:
Madhias wrote: I have wiped on my home PC the SSD, and installed Linux, namely Arch - not on a second HDD, and not in a VM but like real men do on the first drive. So far I have the i3 window manager up and running, a nice font in the URXvt terminal, after years of using Chrome typing this post in the Firefox browser, and a slightly customized information bar on the top of the screen.
Congratulations! Welcome to the real world. :ugeek:

i3 is a really good WM. Take a look at py3status if you want to have fun with your bar easily.

rxvt-unicode is also a very good choice for your terminal. I never took the time to learn and configure it, but it's on my to do list. I'm still using terminator which is also excellent, but kind of bloated.
Madhias wrote: - file manager
You shouldn't use this. A good shell like bash, zsh, or fish, is the way to go. It will hurt at the beginning, but once you master it and know the good tools to do the good job, anything else will seem tasteless.
I always wonder why consoles and tiling window managers are such a necessity. Sure, I love zsh for its configurability, I turn on Vim-mode in every app I can and I can perfectly find my way using nothing but cd and find but that doesn't mean it's the only way to live.

What's wrong with using a desktop environment where you can maximize windows, where you can see what's running without switching between different panes? I find that Xfce 4.12 and Thunar do what I want, which is why I said farewell to my old Gentoo install after they just kept complicating things by making everything optional. Arch at least bundles up things and immediately proposes a list of related packages once you install them.

User avatar
zuglufttier

22 Oct 2015, 15:26

Go ahead and use infinality!!! https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality
For my eyes, it provides the best font rendering among all operating systems.

I use spectrwm as tiling window manager, it works like dwm but has a standard config file that standard humans can edit.

There's also a package for steam on arch linux which works pretty well. Regarding automount, I really never found an easy way to accomplish that using a minimal desktop. I mostly ended up using thunar and its plugins and some dark magic I had to put in .xinitrc in order to get the sufficient rights...

PS: Don't use lightroom, use darktable! I like that software much more than lightroom since I find it more capable and once you've got opencl running it's pretty quick, too. In fact, I need darktable to edit my photos because I don't feel at home with other software anymore. It's the killer app, that doesn't let me get back to windows completely.

User avatar
7bit

22 Oct 2015, 17:24

Madhias wrote: I have wiped on my home PC the SSD, and installed Linux, namely Arch - not on a second HDD, and not in a VM but like real men do on the first drive. So far I have the i3 window manager up and running, a nice font in the URXvt terminal, after years of using Chrome typing this post in the Firefox browser, and a slightly customized information bar on the top of the screen.

Next is file syncing: using and having a 1TB Google Drive account I have installed now insync - which seems to be a good choice? Read that the other packages are somewhat buggy, and if OK abandoned.

Abandonment is another thing of which I am afraid of: reading the Arch Wiki (=world heritage) is great, but later I always check if the thing I am interested in is OK to use, or its developers are not interested in it anymore and all people are using alternatives meanwhile. Or is this just silly thinking?
No, this is not silly thinking!
:ugeek:
Madhias wrote: To do list:

- file manager
- image viewer
- what is Udisks and how to auto mount in an elegant way
- maybe change the font rendering of Firefox somehow (currently I quite like that strange 1996 feeling)
- install Steam
You don't need a file manager, ie ls, cd, rm and rename are all you ever need in file management!
:cool:

I use my own image viewer. It still lackes anti-aliasing and comes with a very primitive image preview:
xiv.

I did not write it from scratch, the original can be downloaded here:
http://xiv.sourceforge.net/

If you want some odd improvements, I can send you my own version.
:-)

Auto mount is the single most stupid idea for any Unix-like systems ever!
:mad:

I had a hard time to figure out to get rid of it in some SuSE version. Debian does not install such stupidness by default!

What is Steam?
:?
Madhias wrote: Maybe some of you have some tips and tricks for a newbie like!

One important part I am going to do will be to ... install VMWare Player or Workstation Pro to startup a recently made Windows vmdk and later Lightroom. I can't live without, and running it in Wine is not as good fast as starting up a virtual machine? Dont't need GPU acceleration, just CPU power, RAM and a fast drive. Again: I need that program!

Image
:roll:

User avatar
Linkert

22 Oct 2015, 20:41

Sorta new to Arch and life at the command line. So far this is how I go about my computing and what works for me.

dwm - Window manager
ranger - File manager
luakit - Web browser, keeps my fingers at the keyboard where they belong
feh - Image viewer and also for setting my wallpaper
termite - Terminal emulator (love it, we're getting along real good)
mupdf - PDF viewer
vim - Text editor (Or, perhaps it's a huge mountain to climb? Not too sure..)
moc - Audio player
vlc/mplayer - Video playback

yaourt - Straight and quick access to the AUR, no fuzz.
Infinality bundle - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality - Makes text a joy to read and type.

Haven't gotten around to install steam, wish there were a steam-cli client available. Fell back into Diablo II instead, stuck like a mothf.. :twisted:

User avatar
iAmAhab

23 Oct 2015, 01:30

Steam has not given me any headaches yet, just follow the wiki. VMware on the other hand gave me massive ones as it broke every time I updated my system because of incompatibles with the newer kernels. This was some years ago though, ended up switching to virtualbox.

User avatar
zuglufttier

23 Oct 2015, 10:08

Instead of yaourt, I prefer pacaur for reasons written down here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=119473

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

23 Oct 2015, 20:48

7bit wrote: Auto mount is the single most stupid idea for any Unix-like systems ever!
:mad:
Bbbut why! You should have seen my face when I made a nice udev rule, added a mount dir to /etc/fstab and after 2 errors when booting because of typing mistakes my external USB HDDs are correctly mounted at /media!

BTW, the Arch wiki is really good, of course everybody knows that, but I have to mention it again.
zuglufttier wrote: PS: Don't use lightroom, use darktable! I like that software much more than lightroom since I find it more capable and once you've got opencl running it's pretty quick, too. In fact, I need darktable to edit my photos because I don't feel at home with other software anymore. It's the killer app, that doesn't let me get back to windows completely.
I'll definitely give it a try again! As said there are some small things (not speed) that really bother me, but maybe some things have changed meanwhile (for example virtual copies). And not to have a single file database which can be copied and used on another device for example. It is mostly organization things which are really good in LR, but developing etc. I don't use heavily developing options since I auto develop, auto align, etc. Lazy me :)

User avatar
Ray

24 Oct 2015, 10:12

I am also an arch user for quite some time, after ubuntu screwed me on a dist-upgrade back in the day.
I instantly fell in love with the rolling release system and human readable text-configfiles for almost anything (I still don't like the newer style config-directories)

I still use a graphical file manager unless I use git or am doing stuff as root.

my packages compared to others here in this thread
Window manager - fvwn
File manager - SpaceFM
Webbrowser - Firefox and luakit. Wanted to switch away from firefox after years and years, but luakit has memory problems for me when I got a lot of tabs open. Tried Chromium and instantly hated it.
Image viewer - mirage
terminal emulator - urxvt
PDF viewer - zathura
Text editor - (g)vim, but I didn't master it.
Audio player - ncmpcpp
definately Infinality. Made the looks so much better. If you want to look oldschool use a font that does; that way it can look oldschool and good.

I spent a lot of time on the system itself when setting it up (6? years ago) nowadays I -Syu about once in two months...

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

29 Oct 2015, 20:50

So far it is slowly going forward. I had to solve my first segfault error, which was solved just by installing another package. I have disabled right now core dumps, and try to find out why ACPI massages spam the journalctl.

Sometimes it is not easy to find an answer to really simple questions, which answer could be for example a simple post between lots of other posts in the Arch discussion board. Reading is the most important part! It is great, because now I can actually do computer stuff without even using a PC (OK, OK, I need to read on a digital device...), but maybe someone knows what I am talking about :)

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

31 Oct 2015, 22:01

I am a fan of udev rules, but unfortunately fail almost all the time. In total it worked for two devices, for all other drives, sticks, etc. where I tried to make a udev rule it just does not work. I don't really know why, what works for external disk 1 does not work for external disk 2. Where can I check what's wrong? Probably not in the journalctl, since it is - HORAY - without entries (everytime I read -- No entries -- a smile comes to my face). So I am just adding mount points as usual, and hope everything stays on the same location - which is no problem so far.

User avatar
sth
2 girls 1 cuprubber

02 Nov 2015, 16:04

Madhias, can't help you much with udev/systemd stuff, but if you use UUIDs for your /etc/fstab, you should be all right when trying to mount things in the right place.

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

02 Nov 2015, 21:50

That's what I did then, UUIDs in fstab and it works.

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

05 Nov 2015, 16:25

as far as I understand automounting with udev (even though completely feasible) is considered "wrong" if not harmful. Personally I use a combination of pcmanfm+udisks2+gvfs, might not be elegant but works.

User avatar
pr0ximity

17 Dec 2015, 22:17

Very cool, been meaning to start a Linux project from scratch. I had Gentoo on my laptop at university for a while but never tried Arch. The documentation looks great. Installing Linux from scratch is always a great opportunity to do some more typing :P

User avatar
SL89

17 Dec 2015, 22:27

Just get Ratpoison and you will never use a mouse! :P

User avatar
Parjánya

17 Dec 2015, 22:34

I'm using Arch also, for four years or so now. I try to have an easy way to do what I need, besides the terminal way. So:

Window manager - awesome
File manager - nemo
Webbrowser - firefox (+tabkit, noscript, adblock plus) / uzbl-browser
Image viewer - geeqie
terminal emulator - xterm
PDF viewer - evince / okular (this only because you can select and save as an image file)
Text editor - gedit when lazy / vim when not
Audio player - mocp / vlc

User avatar
Laser
emacs -nw

17 Dec 2015, 23:08

(Arch user here)

Only recently I discovered Awesome, and it's quite awesome! Imagine I have a wallpaper that depicts a clock tower, and using Lua and some analog clock code from the Internet, I could actually make that tower clock show the right time! :)

User avatar
vivalarevolución
formerly prdlm2009

18 Dec 2015, 01:22

This will be me in a few months. But right now I'm just using a desktop environment and lots of mouse and taking it easy.

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

16 Jan 2016, 13:21

I am using since a while now vi editor, instead of nano, which I used to use also on the Mac, where I also switched to vi just to learn it. But somehow I don't like vi, I have to admit I hate it right now. What editor should I learn? Emacs? Or vim instead of vi? Or just stay with vi/vim? Is Stallman cooler than Bill Joy?

User avatar
Laser
emacs -nw

16 Jan 2016, 13:23

As a Vim user, that tried to move to Emacs (with "evil" bindings), after reading about elisp and even learning some of it, then going back to Vim ... you know already what my advice is :D

Vim and these webcasts http://vimcasts.org/ (also his book) are totally worth it.

Post Reply

Return to “Off-topic”