The [Linux] Thread - Turn your three yard elf into a powerhouse!

Weretaco

Snagged an old desktop from work to mess around with linux on. Linux works so well when you have supported hardware

Running it right now on my lcd with my laptop (win7) next to it and using synergy. So happy to have a working linux install finally (laptop has wifi issues with linux)

Fodder

Instead of awesome you could just use xmonad and have really similar functionality without all the fun of redoing your config file every time they have a new release!

On a related note, is there a program I could use to get the key codes for my media buttons? xev isn't giving me any useful output. Neither the media-esque keys nor the laptop specific fn keys on the f keys are giving me key codes. Any ideas?

Weretaco

Other bonus to an always on linux desktop.

sshd + certificate only auth + putty at work == socks5 proxy so i can avoid the work network snooping/blocking anything I do. mmmmm encryption.

Visti

dexo wrote: »

Long time lurker, first time poster. I started using awesome and arch linux mainly due to this forum and tended to lurk this thread. As I see, Visti had some trouble with the named tags in Awesome 3.3.4, so I decided it might be a good idea to offer my setup of that part.

From my rc.lua:

$ tail -n+97 .config/awesome/rc.lua | head -25
-- {{{ Tags
-- Define tags table.
tagging =
{
    --       Name              Layout          Additional
    { name = "irc",   layout = layouts[3], mwfact = 0.725 },
    { name = "2",     layout = layouts[1], mwfact = 0.5 },
    { name = "3",     layout = layouts[1], mwfact = 0.5 },
    { name = "4",     layout = layouts[1], mwfact = 0.5 },
    { name = "float", layout = layouts[10], mwfact = 0.5 },
    { name = "bg_proc", layout = layouts[10], mwfact = 0.5 }
}

tags = {}

for s = 1, screen.count() do
    tags[s] = {}
    for i, v in ipairs(tagging) do
        tags[s][i] = tag(v.name)
	tags[s][i].screen = s
	awful.layout.set(v.layout, tags[s][i])
        awful.tag.setmwfact(v.mwfact,tags[s][i])
    end
    tags[s][1].selected = true
end

Also, remember that things change a lot between Awesome updates. I personally had a problem wherein the theme file changed names and the entire Awesome wouldn't start (rc.lua processing error, probably). The solution was to look at the 'skeleton' rc.lua file in (I think) /etc/xdg/awesome/ and check what was really different. If your rc.lua is for a really old version, I wouldn't be surprised if it were easier to just cp that default file and apply desired changes all over again.

Also, are you sure the other's configuration files you're using are for the recent version? If they're for an older version, they're almost guaranteed to crash something.

Well, back to lurking...

The help is much appreciated, however, as it turns out, the people I was stealing configs from were running release candidate versions and not the stable ones. I upgraded and everything is working great now. The new syntax seems a lot easier for me to wrap my head around.

Dranyth

Impersonator wrote: »

And that's why I refuse to buy ATI cards.

Anyway, concerning netbooks.

Eeebuntu is so much better than the last time I tried it. It's crazy. Extremely snappy even with Compiz, which basically means functionality + eye candy = one happy user.

Thanks, Improvolone!

Also, Firefly Linux is really cool. Extremely lightweight thanks to LXDE and everything just works. I was baffled using it but then I hit a pretty serious bug. I couldn't install it because the installer is broken.

So basically the distro works fantastically well but you can't really install it. That's the definition of hilarious right there. :P

Though according to the Download page, it's a known issue and they give a fix for it. It is still pretty funny, granted.

dexo

Visti wrote: »

The help is much appreciated, however, as it turns out, the people I was stealing configs from were running release candidate versions and not the stable ones. I upgraded and everything is working great now. The new syntax seems a lot easier for me to wrap my head around.

Alright. Glad you got it working .

Joe Chemo

Stability is for suckers.

Seeks

Zilla360 wrote: »

Seeks wrote: »

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugggh.

So it looks like the wifi card I bought is a fucking broadcom card.

NDISwrapper? (Is a pain and doesn't always work, but it's better than it not working at all.)

Nah, no such luck. Getting fw-cutter and ndiswrapper installed was the easy part. None of the drivers I download for my card work... I keep getting this "invalid driver!" shit when I try to use them. The link from the ndiswiki page is broken, too.

Man, this sucks. If I hadn't spent every last dime on my hardware, I could just go exchange this for a non-shitty wifi card.

Edit: Is there a reason something might work in ndiswrapper 0.11 but not in 0.19?

Joe Chemo

Seeks what type of broadcom card is it?

and what OS?

joshgotro

CrunchBang isn't doing it for me and I have no idea where to go from here.

Seeks

Joe Chemo wrote: »

Seeks what type of broadcom card is it?

and what OS?

It's a Linksys WMP54GS, and I'm trying to get it running on Ubuntu (and Kubuntu, but vanilla Ubuntu is my main concern here) 9.04 32-bit.

It's frustrating. I've gotten as far as installing the driver, I think. I navigate to the folder with the .inf and the .sys in a terminal, type "ndiswrapper -i <driver>". After that it says "Installing <driver>...", and then it's done.

I can do the same thing with the Gui thing (Windows Wireless drivers under the admin menu) as long as I've also got the .sys in the same folder. Doesn't tell me anything, except that it can't detect the device status or something. Beats "Invalid Driver!", I guess.

I'm pretty stumped. It seems like it detects something on wlan0 when I do iwconfig. Doesn't do much for me, though.

zeeny

joshgotro wrote: »

CrunchBang isn't doing it for me and I have no idea where to go from here.

Therapy is the only option! It must be you, it can't be #!!

Barrakketh

Seeks wrote: »

Joe Chemo wrote: »

Seeks what type of broadcom card is it?

and what OS?

It's a Linksys WMP54GS, and I'm trying to get it running on Ubuntu (and Kubuntu, but vanilla Ubuntu is my main concern here) 9.04 32-bit.

You were supposed to get the one without a S at the end :P

Seeks

I wonder what Newegg's return policy is.

Edit: Eck. 5-8 business days after they receive the package. Screw it, I'll just save up the cash.

Also, it looks like it has problems with Vista 64, judging from a customer review, which doesn't bode well for my W7-64 partition. Dammit.

Impersonator

Dranyth wrote: »

Impersonator wrote: »

And that's why I refuse to buy ATI cards.

Anyway, concerning netbooks.

Eeebuntu is so much better than the last time I tried it. It's crazy. Extremely snappy even with Compiz, which basically means functionality + eye candy = one happy user.

Thanks, Improvolone!

Also, Firefly Linux is really cool. Extremely lightweight thanks to LXDE and everything just works. I was baffled using it but then I hit a pretty serious bug. I couldn't install it because the installer is broken.

So basically the distro works fantastically well but you can't really install it. That's the definition of hilarious right there. :P

Though according to the Download page, it's a known issue and they give a fix for it. It is still pretty funny, granted.

That fix didn't do anything for me, pacman just tries to search for packages but the connection always times out so I eventually just close it (after +1h running). Not sure if you're supposed to wait that long. Anyway, even though it was really snappy I use Dropbox, which can only be installed with PCManFM following very strict and confusing guidelines.

I'm just using Eeebuntu 3.0 Standard w/ GNOME.

Also, GNOME Do is awesome.

Visti

Man, my .bashrc is sort of getting out of hand.

#!/bin/bash
#

---

////
# Colors:
#

---

////
black='\e[0;30m'
blue='\e[0;34m'
green='\e[0;32m'
cyan='\e[0;36m'
red='\e[0;31m'
purple='\e[0;35m'
brown='\e[0;33m'
lightgray='\e[0;37m'
darkgray='\e[1;30m'
lightblue='\e[1;34m'
lightgreen='\e[1;32m'
lightcyan='\e[1;36m'
lightred='\e[1;31m'
lightpurple='\e[1;35m'
yellow='\e[1;33m'
white='\e[1;37m'
nc='\e[0m'

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' # begin blinking
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' # begin bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' # end mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' # end standout-mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' # begin standout-mode - info box
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' # end underline
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m' # begin underline

#

---

////
# Proxy:
#

---

////
#http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
#HTTP_PROXY=$http_proxy
#export http_proxy HTTP_PROXY

#

---

////
# Aliases:
#

---

////
## make ls list by size
##alias ls='du -s */* | sort -n'
alias findbig='find . -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n -r | head -5'
alias music='mocp'
alias ports='netstat -nape --inet'
alias ping='ping -c 4'
alias ns='netstat -alnp --protocol=inet'
alias search='aptitude search'
alias show='aptitude show'
alias ls='ls --color=always'
alias la='ls -Al'
alias lx='ls -lXB'
alias lk='ls -lSr'
alias lc='ls -lcr'
alias lu='ls -lur'
alias lr='ls -lR'
alias lt='ls -ltr'
alias lm='ls -al |more'
alias py='python'
alias lr='ls -R' # using ls recursively - Handy with grep

# Changing ethernet settings through scripts
alias xbox='sudo sh ~/.config/openbox/xboxscript.sh && sh ~/scripts/isxboxup'
alias stofa='sudo cp /etc/network/stofa /etc/network/interfaces && sh ~/scripts/isxboxup'

#alias rm='rm -i'
#

---

////
# Functions and Scripts:
#

---

////
localnet ()
{
/sbin/ifconfig | awk /'inet addr/ {print $2}'
echo ""
/sbin/ifconfig | awk /'Bcast/ {print $3}'
echo ""
}
myip ()
{
elinks -dump http://checkip.dyndns.org:8245/ | grep "Current IP Address" | cut -d":" -f2 | cut -d" " -f2
}
upinfo ()
{
echo -ne "${green}$HOSTNAME ${red}uptime is ${cyan} \t ";uptime | awk /'up/ {print $3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10}'
}
cd()
{
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
builtin cd "[email protected]" && ls
else
builtin cd ~ && ls
fi
}
weather ()
{
declare -a WEATHERARRAY
WEATHERARRAY=( `lynx -dump "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp; … tnG=Search" | grep -A 5 -m 1 "Weather for" | sed 's;\[26\]Add to iGoogle\[27\]IMG;;g'`)
echo ${WEATHERARRAY[@]}
}

encrypt ()
{
gpg -ac --no-options "$1"
}

decrypt ()
{
gpg --no-options "$1"
}

thumbdir ()
{
for i; do
command dir *."$i" | xargs -l thumbnail
done
}

isomount()
{
for i ; do
command sudo mount -v -o loop -t iso9660 "$i" /mnt/image
done
}

extract()
{
if [ -f "$1" ] ; then
case "$1" in
*.7z) p7zip -d "$1" ;;
*.tar.bz2) tar xjf "$1" ;;
*.tar.gz) tar xzf "$1" ;;
*.tar.Z) tar xzf "$1" ;;
*.bz2) bunzip2 "$1" ;;
*.rar) unrar x "$1" ;;
*.r*) unrar x "$1" ;;
*.gz) gunzip "$1" ;;
*.jar) unzip "$1" ;;
*.tar) tar xf "$1" ;;
*.tbz2) tar xjf "$1" ;;
*.tgz) tar xzf "$1" ;;
*.zip) unzip "$1" ;;
*.Z) uncompress "$1" ;;
*) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted." ;;
esac
else
echo "'$1' is not a file."
fi
}
#

---

////
# Some original .bashrc contents:
#

---

////
# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return
# don't put duplicate lines in the history. See bash(1) for more options
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
# update the values of LINES and COLUMNS.
shopt -s checkwinsize
# make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1)
[ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(lesspipe)"
# set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below)
if [ -z "$debian_chroot" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then
debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot)
fi
#PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\[email protected]\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
#

---

////
# Prompt:
#

---

////

PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u\[\033[01;34m\]@\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[00;34m\]{\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00;34m\]}\[\033[01;32m\]:\[\033[00m\]'

#

---

////
# System Information:
#

---

////
clear
echo -e "${LIGHTGRAY}";figlet "Laptop Term";
echo ""
echo -ne "${red}Today is:\t\t${cyan}" `date`; echo ""
echo -e "${red}Kernel Information: \t${cyan}" `uname -smr`
echo -ne "${cyan}";upinfo;echo ""
echo -e "${cyan}"; cal -3
echo ""

Impersonator

Why do I feel strangely attracted to anything Arch-based?

I so want to try out Chakra even though Eeebuntu is the best distro, apart from Jolicloud which so far only works well in theory, for my EeePC.

Joe Chemo

I think it's the sheer simplicity.

One thing I've noticed is my laptop runs quite hot with arch. Need to see if I have any heat-management packages that could help.

Impersonator

Hmm, pretty annoying, I need to have a tab always open in the browser in order to have internet access as it will reload from time to time. The thing is that Arora can't reload the page properly and says "Data corrupted".

Other than that it's extremely lightweight. Arch appears snappy enough even though sometimes KDE drags a bit but I like it a lot, specially being able to see the content of any given folder in the desktop.

edit: Hmm, Shaman doesn't appear to be working properly at all.

Visti

Chakra is effing awesome. I'm not using the chakra installer, though, but rather a standard Arch system and then the kdemod-minimal on top, but really, it is quite fast and is mindbogglingly fullfeatured for what space / resources it's using.

Keep in mind that I'm not using the kwin window manager, but rather awesome, for tiling and a nice performance-boost.

Impersonator

Wait, so you're using KDE but not kwin? How does that even work?

I'd love to work with tiling but since I have to deal with a 9" screen and a resolution of 1024x600...

Visti

It works like this, I have an awesome fully-featured suite of applications and libraries, but without decorations and with tiling. It looks like this:







And best of all, changing the window manager is integrated into KDE, so it only requires adding one line to a file and you're off.

edit: Now, I've done away with the KDE startmenu, because there's really no need to use that AND awesomewm's, but there's no problem in keeping it either.

Joe Chemo

It looks like you have the dreaded ParasiteRiddenWarthog.exe virus. Might want to get that checked out.

Visti

No worries, this dude took care of it.

Impersonator

Wow, so clean. What browser is that? And the theme?

I need to know!

Visti

The browser is firefox using tinymenu to move the entire menu-line into one button and then just manually moving the navigationbar, search and forward/back/etc up on the same line. Statusbar is removed and hyperlinks are shown in the navigationbar when hovered over using fission.

The widget style is oxygen with a slightly tweaked Zenburn (I think) color scheme, which I can just put up here, if you want. Using Vista fonts for firefox and profont for the awesomewm taskbar. Awesome is using a tweaked Zenburn theme, too.

Improvolone

You still have the reload and stop button up there? Sheesh.
I wish I could push tabs up there somehow too.

Visti

The key thing is to have it only show tabs when needed for a lot of estate, when only browsing one page.

Impersonator

Is Cruncheee + awesome a good idea?

Visti

Mh, does it use Openbox normally? Open is just a wm, as far as I know, so you'd just replace whatever calls openbox with awesome and it should work. I'm not exactly sure where it's called, though. Perhaps in gdm, if you have a login screen. Then it would be no problem at all.

Impersonator

Hmm, let's see how things go.

I really like Eeebuntu but feel that it has too many things that I don't need at all.

Visti

Well, unless those are UI-wise, installing Awesome would just be a different coat of paint on the same software set.


You should jump in the Arch boat and get nothing you don't need and learn how your system is constructed while doing, so. Just prepared to fail the first time(s). What machine was it that you had, this one: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Eee_PC_901 ?

Visti

Improvolone wrote: »

You still have the reload and stop button up there? Sheesh.
I wish I could push tabs up there somehow too.

I might have to try this out:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/12716/

Fodder

Seriously guys, vimperator is where it's at >.>

Visti

So I've heard, but I don't use vim, so learning all that stuff to navigate firefox seems like a pain.

Mr_Rose

Hey guys! Look, more dumb newb questions!
(yay for inheriting a windows domain served by virtual machines hosted on obscure Linux distros)
So, CentOS (AKA RedHat Enterprise - $cashmoney) and SAS:
I have an LSI HBA card and the drives in he form of a zip file which contains a g-zipped tarball which in turn contains a bunch of RPMs and assorted other files.

What's the easiest way to get this sucka installed?

Hardware first then drivers, or the other way around?
And, getting Yum to look inside a local package is done how?

Impersonator

Visti wrote: »

Well, unless those are UI-wise, installing Awesome would just be a different coat of paint on the same software set.


You should jump in the Arch boat and get nothing you don't need and learn how your system is constructed while doing, so. Just prepared to fail the first time(s). What machine was it that you had, this one: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Eee_PC_901 ?

God, so much text. I just took a quick glance but apparently stock Arch runs pretty well on the 901, I just need to tweak some very specific settings, though.

I really want to try it even though I'd prefer to get Firefly working.

Impersonator

Ok, guys, I need help with a very specific type of application.

I'm on Eeebuntu (GNOME) and would like to have some sort of GTD app that would fill my desktop with text. Is there such a thing?

Joe Chemo

Fill your desktop with text? You mean like conky? Or a transparent terminal?

On Vimperator: I didn't know vi and I found it totally worth it to learn those commands. Especially with a tiling Wm.

Impersonator

That's a good idea, a transparent desktop-sized conky-like app would be awesome.