My First (Arch)Linux Wallpaper

Previously I had drawn a black and white version of my punk tux (which is somewhat based on a debian wallpaper), but I couldn’t use it yet. So I decided to put it on a wallpaper and it turned out to be okay in my opinion. But decide yourself:

And yes, just as the arch philosophy says, I kept it simple.

For JDownloader users like me and its non-transparent tray icon, I added a special workaround: The whole bottom-area matches its background-color and because of that, it appears to be transparent. Of course this will only work if the panel holding the tray icons is on the bottom of the screen, or if you simply edit the SVG and put the lighter background on the top/wherever you want. It is just a blurred shape and easy to move with Inkscape

If it fits your over-all desktop theme, you might also try to change the color of the blue square. In my experience, almost every color looks good there.

Download:

Scalable Vector Graphic (recommended)

pre-rendered Portable Network Graphic (2560×2480)

License for the archlinux logo and text:

The Arch Linux name and logo are recognized trademarks. Some rights reserved. (taken from archlinux.org)

License for everything else in this wallpaper:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

In case you want to make archlinux related artwork yourself, just install the archlinux-artwork package from the extra repository.

archbbs thread

Archlinux and 64 Megabytes of RAM (Update!)

Recently I decided to get out the old GTA2 Laptop again. Why GTA2? Because that was its killer application, as it only features a 600 Mhz Intel Celeron, some on-board graphics card and 64 MB of RAM. This game runs pretty well while being very much fun, especially the LAN mode is just awesome. If you never played GTA2 yet, here’s a multiplayer gameplay video I just googled up. Also the game became freeware, so if you like it download it!

But let’s get to the point of the article. I have always played with the thought of installing (any) Linux on this notebook, until yesterday it was running a very nlited Windows XP.  So I finally decided to throw that off the about 5 GB harddrive and give arch a shot. Why did I choose Arch and not lets say Debian? The later one compiles x86 packages for i386, but archlinux compiles to i686, which is less backward compatible, but a bit faster. Plus the other reasons why I just love archlinux – simple configuration, pacman and yaourt, aur and so on.

While downloading the lastest snapshot for i686, I browsed a bit around and came across this thread from which I used their suggestions to add lowmem to the kernel line as well as setting ramdisk to 20% (also kernel line in grub). Then /arch/setup worked out pretty good, just like any installation. It was a bit slower of course, but I didn’t expect it to behave different.

Suprisingly WLAN actually worked with ndiswrapper, I was not sure about that at all. This laptop has a T-Com Sinus 154 Card, I took the windows driver from the installation CD. The next not-so-clear-thing was setting up xorg without nvidia (I’m used to do it with that), but after I found hwd, it worked out fine.

lxpanel displays the CPU usage at the bottom right corner

To get decent performance, only lightweight and fast software would work. As WM I chose openbox with the lxpanel. The browser with the best performance after text browsers is propably dillo. But dillo can’t even display common websites like wikipedia and google right, because its CSS implementation has just started. Even worse, javascript does not work at all, so sadly half the web does not work. If you just want to do some quick research, it is enough though, so I kept it installed. Firefox was slow as hell, just the experience I had using it with windows XP. Because of that I tried some alternative browsers. Chromium (the opensource project behind Google Chrome without the spyware) just segfaulted, so I tried the closed source Opera (10). Yaourt -Ss opera lead me to opera-snapshot from the archlinuxfr repository, which was actually pretty fast. In every other case, it would have been Firefox. But as this was just a matter of speed, Opera took the cake.

QMPDClient open

Other software I installed is mpd, mpc and for the first time QMPDClient as GUI. Mpd is very lightweight and can be used without a X server, just like unix tools should behave. I chose the said graphical user interface, because it is not written in script-languages like python or perl, but in c++ which not only has less dependencies, but also brings more speed. In fact, I have nothing python or perl related installed on this machine.

desktop pc: copying music from within amarok to my laptop

Another pick was OpenSSH and SSHFS over nfs and samba. Why? Because nfs did not work at all and samba plus its dependencies was about 100 megabytes. When I mounted my laptop’s music folder on my desktop computer, I was able to fill it from within amarok via drag and drop, just like any mp3 player, which is quite useful

Other applications I installed and tested were pidgin, codeblocks and lbreakout2. For pidgin, I think BitlBee plus something like xchat would be the better choice, but I have not tried that yet. It was usable though, as well as codeblocks and lbreakout2 were. What I did not try yet is GTA2 (with wine), but I will likely do that.

No desktop icons, no wallpaper

Software I did not install on purpose: A program that displays a wallpaper and/or desktop icons and a file manager. These are just too wasteful for that little system.

Update: As expected, GTA2 is not playable at all. The wine-layer is just slowing it down too much, and while epsxe offers more tweaking, it is not faster. On the other hand, I’ve got bitlbee with the otr patch running. Bitlbee is a fake IRC server which displays contacts from other IM networks that all IRC programs can connect to. Since I found out that Opera has an integrated IRC client, I don’t even need another program and so I removed pidgin.

Furthermore I did not mention the usage of the Vorbis audio codec yet, which is better known by its file extension ogg. Because they are so small, you can easily fit much music on such a tiny harddrive. Oh and I compile most aur packages from my arch32 environment on my desktop pc. That saves much time.

So in conclusion there’s pretty much you can do with a low-end machine like this. The most exciting feature for me is ssh and ssh-fs. GTA2 does not work anymore, but I have played the single player mode almost through anyway. LBreakout2 works fine and without making the cooler get very loud, like GTA2 used to. Plus now I just have a fully running linux with all its nice CL tools

New Installation (Update!)

Last time I set up arch on my desktop pc (my laptop’s still broken :-\), I installed the i686 version in order to use it with colinux, too. I’ve figured out that colinux did not really work as good as expected – XServer crashed often (both XMing and Cygwin/X) as well as no Pulseaudio Server working with Windows Vista x86 (bad choice anyway) and it was too slow. The only good way to work with it was via Terminal. In the end I didn’t boot Win6 often and used arch all day. But what is Archlinux i686 on a x86_64 processor? Bullshit! So I did the reinstall.

On the Windows side btw, I decided to use Win7. Why? It is just up to date and not as fucked up as Vista. M$ made a step in the right direction here. I downloaded the build 7232 x86_64 somewhere and installed it. Oh and I haven’t booted it since then yet, because I use it just for games that don’t run with Linux (none installed yet) – and I don’t play these too often anyway.

Windows 7

Now to Archlinux. x86_64 here of course, with arch32 chroot. While the last one is making some trouble with wine and Alsa is not working as wanted yet (no mic), the rest of it runs pretty well. For the design I chose a less colorful one, so it is completely different compared to the Joker one (which I don’t really like anymore).

Archlinux Clean

Archlinux Stuffed

The conky configurations (click!) are inspired by Ghost1227’s Nice and Clean Theme, the wallpapers are from here (Windows) and here (Arch).

Gnomeish Wine Applications

Wine with Gnome-styled controls

Wine is able to somewhat apply Windows XP’s msstyle information to it’s windows (not the OS) in order to make them looking better. I already tried this on my laptop, but wine became really slow when activating such a theme, so I left it as it was. Now either wine got better or it is because of the increased CPU-power my machine has, that application’s don’t get slower anymore. While most Windows-Styles do remind you of Windows and therefore make you not want to have them installed (at least I think so), I found a website with really nice Gnome-msstyles. Note that the window-borders are drawn by Gnome anyway, so they are not important. Just focus on the controls and how good they match your current gnome theme. On the Screenshot I used Clearlooks Gummy.

Libnotify and Amarok 1.4.x -> LibnotifymaroK

Today I googled for libnotify and amarok in order to find a script that displays information from the OSD with libnotify (this is the gnome notification library mumble for example uses), so that it fits my gnome desktop better. There are a few scripts out there, the closest one to what I wanted here. But as soon as I installed it, I found a bug: The „body“ part of the message is empty, if there is a „&“ sign somewhere. So I fixed that bug (along with translating < and > ) and modified it a lot. A few hours later the script looks really nice:

LibnotifymaroK - displays English and German language

I decided to rename the script, because there are already so many „amarok libnotify“ scripts out there and put it at kde-apps.org – (thats right, here’s the download!). Enjoy!

New wallpaper on my desktop…

…and as usual I like to change the gtk theme and some other stuff (in this case especially conky!) to match it. So i choose green, because of joker’s hair.

clean:

stuffed:

About the wallpaper itself (SPOILER!):

I like „The Dark Knight“ very much. Even if James Rolfe says it is not soo good, its still one of my favorite movies (propably because I have never heared of „Two-Face“ before and didn’t expect that guy with the coin to become him, so I was really like WTF )