A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

xelados · 2007-06-04 07:49:47

Hi! I'm a relatively new person to Arch Linux. I come from Debian/Ubuntu and was looking for a distro that was simple to use, but still very powerful. Customization is another thing that I value; Debian and Ubuntu didn't quite give me that sort of functionality without a server installation, which still ended up just feeling weird. I also found that Ubuntu's package updating wasn't as fast as I'd like. Arch has so far met and exceeded my expectations, but like any newbie I have a few quirks with my system that I'd like to figure out. Before I begin, though, I'd like to quickly explain my goals with my Arch installation:

* I'd like to get a better grasp of Linux.
* Instead of relying on large packages and suites like GNOME and KDE, I'd prefer to focus on small, lightweight applications to do my bidding. For example, I use Fluxbox as my window manager and mpd (with Sonata) as my music player.
* As another software "requirement", I'd like suggestions for software to be very customizable so I can tweak it to how I want/need it. This is Linux though, so most software fits the bill.

Setting up the Compose and media Key
One of my favorites features in Linux is the Compose key, and obviously GNOME set that up for me in Ubuntu. I have a very loose understanding of how things work with the Xmodmap, and I've tried to use the method before in order to make my compose key, but it ended up reacting very weirdly. If someone could help me understand the process behind enabling the compose key and setting up my media keys from the inside, I'd be very grateful. It's an aspect of the system that I think is powerful and useful.
SOLVED: .Xmodmap works well, but you have to put 'xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap' in your .xinitrc if you want your settings to stick. If someone could point me in the direction of a cheatsheet for compose key characters, I'd appreciate it.

A File Manager and Desktop Environment
Currently, I use an .xinitrc in order to go straight into Fluxbox. I haven't installed any file managers or desktop managers yet because I'm unsure of what's out there. I've used nautilus with GNOME and Thunar with XFCE in the past, but they belong to their respective suites. I've heard some pretty good things about rox(-filer), but nobody's been able to give me a pro/con list. I'd love to hear some suggestions for a lightweight and easy-to-use file manager and an equally light desktop manager. If I could get two for the price of one, that'd be even better. Again, I value customizability. One pet peeve I have is scaling wallpapers. Fluxbox can use Eterm, feh, etc to set the background, but I haven't found a wallpaper setter that can support the '-a' flag from fbsetbg (setting a wallpaper while preserving aspect ratio) _and_ a background color for the parts that the wallpaper doesn't cover. If what I'm asking for is too unreasonable then I'm willing to listen to some suggestions that don't quite fit the bill. In this department, I'm looking for more exposure.
SOLVED: rox suits my needs very well! With a little tweaking it works just as nicely, or even better than Thunar.

Wacom Tablets
I have a Wacom Graphire 4 and was able to set it up in Ubuntu with only a few problems. If I recall correctly, the wacom module is a part of the Linux kernel or something similar, so the process to get it to work in Arch would be similar, no? If someone could give me a quick crash course/refresher on it, I'd be grateful.
SOLVED: Thanks for the xorg.conf snippet!

GTK theming/skinning, icons, etc
Which packages do I need in order to start changing the look of GTK and install icon packs? I'm unfamiliar with installing either type of theme... unfortunately the transparency of GNOME ended up hindering my understanding. Any guides that could offer insight to creating themes/icon and cursor packs, etc would be great, too.

Databasing
When I was still using Ubuntu, I used MySQL to store various sorts of data. Since my Arch installation is focusing on lightweight and effective, are there any database packages that are lean and still support .sql files? I have a MySQL backup in such a file and would rather my data not be made obsolete. If MySQL ends up being the best option, then that's fine. Again, my ignorance plays a lot in my questioning.
ANSWERED: MySQL will be my database, just as before.

Despite being a newbie, I'm more than willing to learn about anything outlined above, or any other concern that comes my way. Any good reads or resources/references that you could offer would be much appreciated. I believe Arch may end up becoming my distro of choice. Thanks for reading through this mess of a big "hi I'm new" post.

Last edited by xelados (2007-06-05 13:21:46)

kano · 2007-06-04 08:15:34

File Manager:
Thunar is light-weight itself. Doesn't use any xfce packages (as far I can tell from the pacman -Qi output...)

GTK themes/icons:
You can just put your gtk themes in ~/.themes and your icon themes in ~/.icons.
To set theme without using gnome or xfce utilties, make or edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0

# GTK2 Theme
include "/home/username/.themes/MurrinaBW/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

# Icon Theme
gtk-icon-theme-name = "Neu"

My theme is MurrinaBW and my icon theme is Neu. Edit for your themes

Database:
You can just install mysql via pacman, it's a good database server.

I'm sure other's can answer the things I'm not too sure about. Welcome to Arch!

Last edited by kano (2007-06-04 08:19:00)

whompus · 2007-06-04 09:04:51

This is my setup for a graphire 3 tablet which may get you started, don't know the
differences between a graphire 3 & 4. I'm not using the latest driver as I was getting some
cursor movement issues which I never managed to correct.

Install linuxwacom from community pacman -S linuxwacom

Add wacom to the MODULES section of rc.conf

To prevent devices getting reordered on bootup create a udev rule called
10-wacom.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ with the following line

KERNEL=="event*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="056a", NAME="input/%k", SYMLINK="input/wacom"

Add these to the appropiate parts of xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
InputDevice "mouse" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "wacom"
EndSection

Create these sections in xorg.conf

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
Option "InputFashion" "Tablet"
Option "Mode" "Relative"
Option "Name" "Graphire / Intuos (USB)
Option "SendCoreEvents" "on"
Option "Tilt" "on"
Option "Type" "cursor"
Option "USB" "on"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Speed" "1.0"
Option "WACOM"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "cursor"
Option "AlwaysCore" "on"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
Option "InputFashion" "Tablet"
Option "Mode" "Absolute"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "on"
Option "Tilt" "on"
Option "Type" "cursor"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "stylus"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
Option "InputFashion" "Pen"
Option "Mode" "Absolute"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "on"
Option "Tilt" "on"
Option "Type" "stylus"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "wacom"
Identifier "eraser"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom"
Option "InputFashion" "Eraser"
Option "Mode" "Absolute"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "on"
Option "Tilt" "on"
Option "Type" "eraser"
Option "USB" "on"
EndSection

Hope this helps:)

xelados · 2007-06-04 10:04:14

whompus: Thanks a lot! Things are working great with the tablet now. However, I can't seem to get my mouse to play nicely with GIMP for scrolling in (Shift+scroll) or even scrolling using the wheel normally. It's probably something I messed up in xorg or something... It's a standard USB mouse with left and right click, and a middle scrollwheel that doubles as a button. It has 3-button emulation turned on, however.. does that have something to do with it? If so, is there an option in xorg.conf that will enable me to disable it?
Solved, see my next post

Last edited by xelados (2007-06-05 08:36:12)

Sigi · 2007-06-04 10:50:28

xelados:
put this line into the "Section" of your mouse device of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

  Option    "ZAxisMapping"    "4 5"

Cheers Sigi

xelados · 2007-06-04 21:13:17

Strange.. I tried that and GIMP still doesn't like my middle mouse button or Shift+scrolling. I made sure to check GIMP's event handlers to make sure I had shift+scrolling set to zooming, too! Scrolling works perfect in Firefox and practically every other app I've tried so far. Why would GIMP be acting weird? I can even scroll through its options... it's only the image that I can't scroll or move around with the middle click.
SOLVED: It turns out that my Input Device settings from Ubuntu were messing with Arch's, so I reset GIMP's device settings to the default. From there, I just had to enable the eraser and stylus devices to work with the Screen option. Using this method, the stylus, eraser, and USB mouse all worked perfectly.

Last edited by xelados (2007-06-05 04:30:56)

ataraxia · 2007-06-04 21:45:20

I like Thunar. It has support for automounting removable media with hal, which is really nice. It does require fam to get good results from (Thunar in general, I mean), which several people have missed recently, so be careful with that.

emelfm is another favorite around here, though I don't really know it myself.

ataraxia · 2007-06-05 00:59:58

The Desktop and Trash items are native to XFCE (and Thunar) also. I think they're actually an freedesktop.org/XDG standard. In any case, they're not a left over Ubuntu/GNOME thing.

shazeal · 2007-06-05 01:02:06

For icons yes just untar in ~/.icons, cursor themes also go in ~/.icons afaik. Dir structure for icons should be ~/.icons/<theme-name>/<size/type> so if u looked in ~/.icons you might see something like ~/.icons/OSX-Icons/48x48/apps (or something to that effect).

If you want a light themed login manager I would suggest Slim, doesnt depend on KDE/Gnome etc, pretty sure there is something in the Arch wiki for it. It just grabs your ~/.xinitrc after login so not much to change
With thunar if you want it to use the system icon them you need to add xfce4-iconbox to your startup somewhere after thunar has loaded iirc. I stopped using Fluxbox sometime ago so sorry if Im a little vague.

For Desktop stuff I think you can just delete ~/Desktop both XFCE and gnome (ubuntu) use it, good idea to just mv it first incase

xelados · 2007-06-05 01:29:58

I just downloaded and tried out Rox. Seems to be a nice file manager so far! It seems that the version of gphoto2 here in Arch is the same as the one I had problems with in Ubuntu (and I ended up having to downgrade), so I decided to go with my SD card reader to handle that stuff. It'll cut down on the amount of packages I have anyway, and rox seems to suit my needs pretty well. I think I'll stick with it since it's so simple to use.

Thanks for the help on the .icons thing. I'll keep that in mind. What's a good icon theme to start with that's fairly generic but still looks good? Are there any icon packs I can download with pacman?
SELF SOLVED: Turns out that I can find both GTK themes and icon-packs with pacman.

Also, I regularly use my SD card reader and my mp3 player. When I was setting up my tablet, I noticed that it used a ruleset to define where it's mounted/detected every time it's plugged in. Can I do something similar with my mp3 player and SD card reader without having to consult 'dmesg' everytime I want to mount them?

Last edited by xelados (2007-06-05 03:29:12)

Arch Linux

#1 2007-06-04 07:49:47

A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#2 2007-06-04 08:15:34

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#3 2007-06-04 09:04:51

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#4 2007-06-04 10:04:14

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#5 2007-06-04 10:50:28

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#6 2007-06-04 21:13:17

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#7 2007-06-04 21:45:20

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#8 2007-06-05 00:59:58

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#9 2007-06-05 01:02:06

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

#10 2007-06-05 01:29:58

Re: A (hopefully) short list of things I'm looking to get to working.

Board footer