New to arch - questions (many)

pedepy · 2007-02-27 21:44:48

Hello .. I am a relative new guy to this linux thing (about 6 months now). I have been using pclinuxos, because its very fool proof and has a neat little livecd that just installs itself. However as I have grown acustomed to linux and reading about it more and more, and due to the fact that I still own a somewhat low end machine (p3, 733, 128mb, 15 gig, tnt2 nv card), I wanted to try a distro that might give me more bang for my buck. So until I can pony the dough to buy me that cute little laptop down at the corner store, I have decided to venture into Arch linux.

My impressions so far have been quite positive: it's no way as hard to install as it might first seem. Without hacking around at all with the configuration files I got my system to install and boot up flawlessly. I must admit I have very little clue as to which packages I shouldve installed for what I wanted to do with arch (mainly run a quick, lean desktop), and I kinda went "by feel" ...

Anyway - before I go any further, I think I should stress out that I have no internet connection on that machine, back home. I am doing all of my "interneting" at the internet cafe - with my trusty USB key to help me take things back and forth. To help me somewhat in that, I have created a /pkg directory right on my hard drive where all packages, needed or not, have been copied, just in case.

Ok so in the spare time I have away from the restaurant I work 60 hours a week at, I got my X system running (i have cheated a little here, coping the xorg.conf file from pclinuxos's partition and modifying the little bits that arch didnt like or recognize), have managed to download and install all of XFCE's packages and a few simple office apps.

That leads me to problem number one: after installing XFCE4 as my DE, and loading it up, I tried the window compositing option only to find it incredebly slow. Now, I know my system is not top notch, and compositing in KDE under pclos has proven tough on my GPU to say the least. But what got me thinking something else that just performance was amiss was that when I ran GLXGEARS, I could only get around 80 to 120 fps ! .... Under pclos and kde, I got 550 to 700 depending on the conditions.. now thats not EXTREME, but its respectable, I think.. 80 fps is not, however. I have all of the proprietary nvidia 7184 legacy drivers installed, configured and loaded ... glxinfo doesnt seem to output anything odd ... so what could the problem be here ?? I think ill try glxgears running only X with XTERM and see if its maybe XFCE that's sucking up all the juice, but that seems unlikely. (By the way, that's 80fps with compositing turned OFF, and NOTHING ELSE running in case you might wonder).

Second problem I ran into was trying to install the gensplash utils to get that neat bootsplash with the new arch logo (which I strongly push should become the official logo - nothing wrong with the current one, its just the other one is just so damn purty IMO).. Anyway, after downloading all packages, and depencies. .. the 2.6.19 beyond kernel, installing it, mkinitcpio and klibc and geninitcpio and all that, after downloading and installing the gensplashutils, when I run "mkinitcpio" it says that:

fbsplash hook wasnt properly configured... :( .......

How do I go about doing that ?? I have checked and everything seems to be in working order. My mkinitcpio.conf contains both the fbsplash hook right between autodetect and ide (which is where I have seen it placed on some other forum). The utils are in usr/bin, I have the themes in etc/splash, so on and so forth.

But like I said, when I run mkinitcpio, it doesnt like fbsplash ... If it means anything, "fbsplash" is not in /etc/initcpio/hooks .. Is that where my problem is ? If so, how do I fix that ?

Lastly, I have no sound in xfce .. and that, I have no idea how to go about. Im pretty sure I had the alsa stuff checked on while selecting packages.. (help?)

Well thats pretty much all I can think of for now ... I have an unexpected 3 days off this week as I double-shifted last Thursday, plus theres a hockey game on tonight so I think ill make me some nice baby back ribs while installing the 0.8 voodoo beta. Oh - If I may say, I dont understand why the installer insists on creating a new file system over the already present partition on install. Why can't I just use the one I already have ? What would happen to all of my installed software and documents when I decide to reinstall ??

Its a great distro this arch thing, and yes, a great way to learn about the under workings of linux. It'll look pretty good on that laptop I might buy next summer ..

ndlarsen · 2007-02-27 22:24:10

Hey there and welcome to arch.

Firstly, we got an excelent source of information at wiki.archlinux.org, what is not there is usually available in the forums. It's generally a good idea to post the relevant parts of your config files, thus making it easier for us to help you out.

pedepy wrote:

That leads me to problem number one: after installing XFCE4 as my DE, and loading it up, I tried the window compositing option only to find it incredebly slow. Now, I know my system is not top notch, and compositing in KDE under pclos has proven tough on my GPU to say the least. But what got me thinking something else that just performance was amiss was that when I ran GLXGEARS, I could only get around 80 to 120 fps ! .... Under pclos and kde, I got 550 to 700 depending on the conditions.. now thats not EXTREME, but its respectable, I think.. 80 fps is not, however. I have all of the proprietary nvidia 7184 legacy drivers installed, configured and loaded ... glxinfo doesnt seem to output anything odd ... so what could the problem be here ?? I think ill try glxgears running only X with XTERM and see if its maybe XFCE that's sucking up all the juice, but that seems unlikely. (By the way, that's 80fps with compositing turned OFF, and NOTHING ELSE running in case you might wonder).

Have a go at it in another wm, just plain X or eg. fluxbox or openbox. If the results are about the same it's probably an issue with you X configuration or the driver. Please post your xorg.conf if so.

pedepy wrote:

But like I said, when I run mkinitcpio, it doesnt like fbsplash ... If it means anything, "fbsplash" is not in /etc/initcpio/hooks .. Is that where my problem is ? If so, how do I fix that ?

Did you read this wiki page on gensplash? Try posting your relevant config files if you're still having problems.

pedepy wrote:

Lastly, I have no sound in xfce .. and that, I have no idea how to go about. Im pretty sure I had the alsa stuff checked on while selecting packages.. (help?)

Just no sound in xfce or no sound at all? What's the output of pacman -Q alsa-lib or pacman -Q alsa-utils? If you're getting no output alsa is not installed. You might find help here

pedepy wrote:

so I think ill make me some nice baby back ribs while installing the 0.8 voodoo beta. Oh - If I may say, I dont understand why the installer insists on creating a new file system over the already present partition on install. Why can't I just use the one I already have ? What would happen to all of my installed software and documents when I decide to reinstall ??

If you have got a current iso, there's no reason to reinstall, you can simply mount and add the iso as a repository in pacman.conf and do a pacman -Syu with that repository active. Here is a helpful wiki page.

Enjoy.

Last edited by ndlarsen (2007-02-28 00:17:45)

Arch Linux

#1 2007-02-27 21:44:48

New to arch - questions (many)

#2 2007-02-27 22:24:10

Re: New to arch - questions (many)

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