yet another de/wm thread asking for help

wahi · 2010-11-02 16:29:30

greetings fellow archers,

i have been an archer for over two years and i have used a huge variety of desktop envs and wms. the notable ones that i have not tried are lxde and those manual tiling managers that one needs to recompile every time you change the border color or something.

currently i am using i3 and so far it has been a revelation to me, as it does what i think a wm is supposed to do i.e, draw and manage windows while i can concentrate on my work. however, previously when i was using to kde4.x and e-17 i got addicted to certain bells and whistles which i sorely crave for. i know that most of the things i desire can be had pretty easily, if only by searching the forums, but therein lies part of the problem.

i recently had a few issues with i3 and they were almost resolved by reading the relevant forum topic on i3. i say almost resolved, because the staggering wealth of information on that particular thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=99064 is overwhelming to say the least.

so basically. currently i have a dell xps m1530 which has a geforce 8600gt and a 2.4GHz core 2 duo and 4 gigs of ram. i am using the x86_64 flavor of arch. i had for sometime been using chakra, which has since become a rather independent distro rather than being just arch+kdemod.

so last month i reinstalled arch. while using chakra, there usually was hardly any need of looking under the hood and its gui tools did most of the configuring without me having to go around poking. however, this time around i have to do quite a lot of programming work(mostly in c and python), so i decided that rather that removing the unnecessary packages and potentially breaking my chakra system, it is better to install a fresh copy of arch.

as always i followed the beginner's guide to the letter(which is something i always do, better safe than sorry)
however i realized, the world has changed a lot.

instead of a xorg.conf there was a xorg.conf.d
instead of manually adding devices, udev was hotplugging.
modules were blacklisted by a simple !
and so on. i don't mean to imply that these features have somehow broken arch or anything. seeing my alps touchpad work out of the box was a joy that i had never previously experienced.

so far so good. at first i decided to become extremely leet and installed screen + vs. for a short while it seemed to go quite well. i installed the nouveau driver and words CANNOT express how much i love kms(though i don't really understand how it works much less WHY is it not a standard feature). i would watch videos with mplayer listen to music with ncmpcpp, code with vim and browse with links.

however the configs of screen slowly but surely had started to turn me mad i decided that i miss /r/f7u12 a lot so i installed links-g. this is where my problems really began.

links-g was slow as hell. i read that there is an option of using a driver called directfb(if my memory serves me well), so i installed that, but to no avail. i scoured the internets and couldn't find a good enough explaination of what i was supposed to do. nor could i understand why links -g could not directly use nouveau?

it was then i decided to install a wm. now to me it seems like a great thing that there are wm like monad and awesome that allow you to recompile them, however i am not good enough of a programmer to be able to make use of that, as simply copying and pasting code could easily break a system, i anyways have to simply write computational code for mathematical problems and the like. thus a wm like i3 makes a good fit as its configurable on the fly.

the ONE thing that i really really wanted was, to get xcompmgr to work with i3. i did read everything on the wiki atleast on both the i3 and the xcompmgr pages, but not luck. so i compromised by installing terminator and enabling transparency in that.

oh this has become a pretty long rant, but i hope that is serves as a background for what follows.

what i want to have is a simple to use wm(i don't mind continuing use of i3) which has the following properties

1) tiling windows.

2) ability to turn transparency on and off.

3) some kind of ability to remember the state in which i log off i.e. say if i have 3 xterms on 1 and 1 midori and 1 irssi on 2 then when i startx again i should be able to resume from that. even better would be some ability to decide if i want to continue session or start a new session.

4) a dock/taskbar and a tray! at least for the love of god a tray.

5)how to run some command say nitrogen --restore as soon as i login? i am using xinit(with exec i3) and startx currently but i am willing to install gdm/kdm if that is what it takes.

6) to adjust the look of gtk-apps i use lxappearance, but that does not seem to affect the font size at all which curiously reverts to Hevetica 8(which i remember setting once) and then if i use gtk-chtheme to change the font and stuff, the icons change back to the default gkt ones.

7) if does not matter what cursor i change to i tried using both obsidian and fedora-inverse(because it is white) but some apps only show the change the other apps render the default xcursor.

8) what does one need to install to automatically detect removable drives?

9) also i have installed acpid laptop-mode-tools-pmutils and their wiki pages give a lot of code to enable and disable various features. i was wondering what are the things that i should do to maximise my battery life. i have a huge 9 cell battery and most of the time the cpu is <10% and i am on a tty so i think i should be getting 6-7 hours easily(i used to get an hour of gaming on windows) but when i was using chakra, the applet would show my battery life as being approx 2.5 to 3 hours, which i feel is a TAD bit unjust.

i know this is a pretty long list(there also is stuff that i cannot recollect atm) and its not like any of this breaks my system, i am pretty much as productive as i would be if all these issues got sorted out, but at the same time i would appreciate if someone could tell me how to fix these issues.

rwd · 2010-11-02 20:17:15

As an XFCE user I can't comment on the tiling stuff (although I love the doubleclick-to-fill feature of xf4wm). but these I can answer:

2) if you use a separate compositing solution like cairo-compmgr or xcompmgr it's just a matter of killing/restarting it

4) there are lots of stand-alone docks/systemtray apps. A nice tray app is Trayer for example. Check the arch wiki for alternatives,

5) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nitrogen. There is no need for a desktop manager like GDM/KDM/Slim other than having a graphical login screen.

8) udev rule or thunar (check wiki for udev)

9) See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop , hdparm, acpi,

Also a tool to find out which processes drain the battery is 'powertop' .

As you can see most answers are in the Arch wiki. Please search it. Also split questions into separate topics next time if you want more response. windowmanager choice has nothing to to with powermagement or cursor theme.

Last edited by rwd (2010-11-02 21:16:27)

heleos · 2010-11-02 21:18:09

1) Awesome seems to be a good mix of tiling/floating management. I use kde on my desktop, but my xps m1330 (pretty similar to your 1530) uses awesome. There is a built-in systray, which I find very handy, as I don't like to live without one.

7) There is at least a command to change the default pointer using .xinitrc. I used this in fvwm because I didn't like the default cursor.

xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr &

wahi · 2010-11-04 11:52:22

@rwd i have been spending even more hours on the wiki, but i also have to get a lot of other things done and i was just getting impatient. so much to do so little time.

@heleos i checked out awesome today and it seems quite awesome. thank you for pointing it out,

rwd · 2010-11-04 12:32:21

wahi wrote:

@rwd i have been spending even more hours on the wiki, but i also have to get a lot of other things done and i was just getting impatient. so much to do so little time.

I don't want to sound rude, but Arch Linux may be not for you if you want other people to do the search the wiki/Google for you.

Allan · 2010-11-04 12:34:58

Please use a better subject line too. This one tells us nothing about the thread...

Arch Linux

#1 2010-11-02 16:29:30

yet another de/wm thread asking for help

#2 2010-11-02 20:17:15

Re: yet another de/wm thread asking for help

#3 2010-11-02 21:18:09

Re: yet another de/wm thread asking for help

#4 2010-11-04 11:52:22

Re: yet another de/wm thread asking for help

#5 2010-11-04 12:32:21

Re: yet another de/wm thread asking for help

#6 2010-11-04 12:34:58

Re: yet another de/wm thread asking for help

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