Arch Challenge

[bugman]

Is anybody else still using Arch? I made my first contribution to the AUR and I'm pretty excited about it!

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rstudio-desktop-preview-bin/

Yep, still using it. This is helpful nice job.

 

[Dason]

Yep, still using it. This is helpful nice job.

Thanks. There are a bunch of different options for Rstudio on the AUR - the main one is rstudio-desktop-bin which grabs the .deb file from here: http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/desktop which is the current release. The package I put up provides the preview release: http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/preview and with how fast development goes on Rstudio the preview release can have a bunch of new cool features. The rstudio-desktop-git package is just something to build the package from the sources on their github page but that hasn't been building properly for me and it's a little too unstable for my liking. The preview release is a nice middle ground for me.

\begin{shameless_self_plug}If you have an account at the AUR I wouldn't mind if you would vote for my package either \end{shameless_self_plug}

 

[Dason]

I assume there's a point at which you can set up LVM and an encrypted drive in Arch. Is it as straight-forward as in Debian (just one of the partitioning options)? I'm still debating if I want a whole encrypted drive or simply an encrypted space (that would be be shared with Dropbox, as a lot of my home directory is synced).

It's certainly not quite as easy as Debian - you have to do more work than just click a checkbox. There aren't any checkboxes to speak of when install arch! But it looks relatively easy to install LVM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LVM#Installing_Arch_Linux_on_LVM and encryption isn't too bad either.

 

[bugman]

\begin{shameless_self_plug}If you have an account at the AUR I wouldn't mind if you would vote for my package either \end{shameless_self_plug}

I will next time I log on.


On another note.

I tried upgrading my system this morning, only to find that I couldn't.

I get a bunch of error messages after running:

sudo pacman -Syyu

core, extra, community and arch linuxfr are allup to date. But then I get promted to replace grub-bios with core/grub and a few others.

This is ok,until I get asked to replace libusbx with core/libusb - I hit yes and them get the follwoing error:

error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/linux-firmware-20103725-1/desc
No such file or directory.



recolving dependancies...

warning: dependancy cycle detected:
warning: freetype2 will be installed before its harfbuzz dependancy

looking for inter-conflicts...

error: failed to prepare transaction(could not satisfy dependancies)

:wtorrernt-svn requires php-curl

The upshot is that this is the first time I have tried and upgrade in a few months, and it doesn't work.

Have you seen this before? and what steps do I need to take to fix it

 

[Dason]

The upshot is that this is the first time I have tried and upgrade in a few months, and it doesn't work.

Have you seen this before? and what steps do I need to take to fix it

Going that long between updates can cause some headaches with Arch. As always before updates you should check the main arch page for anything that could cause something to break: https://www.archlinux.org/

In your case you might want to post on the Arch forums directly. You might be able to fix this by forcing pacman to update but that is pretty much always a bad move and can lead to even more headaches.

 

[bugman]

I was hoping you wouldnt say any of that.

I have looked that the arch forums and the issue has been poted already, but I dont understand the fix. (Those guys are always so surley on that forum).

I heard that a force update is a bad idea, but Im kinda leaning towards a fresh install, so I might as well try it anyway.

 

[bugman]

EDIT - Im installing arch bang. Looks pretty good.

 

[bugman]

Installed. Quite like it. Though Im not sure about openbox just yet.

Default conky is a bit shabby.

 

[Dason]

Installed. Quite like it. Though Im not sure about openbox just yet.

Default conky is a bit shabby.

You can customize conky a lot though. The bare-bones conky that comes with archbang is simple and clean (like the OS) but you can spice it up quite a bit. I keep mine fairly simple too but maybe you'll like it more than the archbang default. So here is my .conkyrc file:

# Conky file
alignment bottom_right
update_interval 5.0
#update_interval_on_battery 10.0
background yes
double_buffer yes
gap_x 5 
gap_y 30

own_window yes
own_window_colour black
own_window_class Conky
own_window_argb_visual yes
own_window_transparent yes 
own_window_type normal 
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_argb_value 175 # 0 - 255: 0 is completely transparent

# Colors:
# file:///usr/share/X11/rgb.txt
default_color DarkSlateGray # Horizontal lines
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white

cpu_avg_samples 2
draw_borders no
#border_width 1
#draw_graph_borders yes
#draw_outline no
draw_shades no
use_xft yes
xftfont Courier New:size=10

net_avg_samples 2
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
out_to_stderr no
#extra_newline no
#stippled_borders 0
uppercase no
#use_spacer none
#show_graph_scale no
#show_graph_range no

##########################

TEXT
${color white}$nodename - $sysname $kernel${font}
#####################
### General Stats ###
#####################
${color}${hr 1}
${color palegreen}${alignc}${font Courier New:size=16:italic:bold}General Stats${font}
${font Courier New:size=10:italic:bold}Uptime:${font}    $uptime
${font Courier New:size=10:italic:bold}Processes:${font} $processes  ${alignr}${font Courier New:size=10:italic:bold}Running:${font} $running_processes  
##################
### Networking ###
##################
${color}${hr 1}
${color Tan2}${alignc}${font Courier New:size=16:italic:bold}Networking${font}
wlan0 ${alignr}wlp3s0
Up:   ${upspeed   wlan0} ${alignr} ${upspeed   wlp3s0}
Down: ${downspeed wlan0} ${alignr} ${downspeed wlp3s0}
####################
### File Systems ###
####################
${color}${hr 1}
${color IndianRed1}${alignc}${font Courier New:size=16:italic:bold}File systems${font}
 /     : ${fs_used_perc /}% ${alignr} ${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
${fs_bar 6 /}
# /home : ${fs_used_perc /home}% ${alignr} ${fs_used /home}/${fs_size /home}
#${fs_bar 6 /home}
#################
### Resources ### 
#################
${color}${hr 1}
${color aquamarine2}${alignc}${font Courier New:size=16:italic:bold}Resources${font}
${font Courier New:size=14:italic:bold}CPU: ${font}${cpu}%
${cpubar 6}
Top Processes:      CPU%   MEM%    ${alignr}PID${font}
 ${top name 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1} ${alignr}${top pid 1}
 ${top name 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2} ${alignr}${top pid 2}
 ${top name 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3} ${alignr}${top pid 3}
${font Courier New:size=14:italic:bold}RAM: ${font}${memperc}% ${font}${alignr}${mem}/${memmax}
${membar}
Top Processes:      MEM%   MRes    ${alignr}PID${font}
 ${top_mem name 1} ${top_mem mem 1}   ${top_mem mem_res 1} ${alignr}${top_mem pid 1}
 ${top_mem name 2} ${top_mem mem 2}   ${top_mem mem_res 2} ${alignr}${top_mem pid 2}
 ${top_mem name 3} ${top_mem mem 3}   ${top_mem mem_res 3} ${alignr}${top_mem pid 3}
${font Courier New:size=14:italic:bold}Swap: ${font}${swapperc}%  ${alignr}${swap}/${swapmax}
${swapbar}
#############
### Power ###
#############
${color}${hr 1}
${color white}${alignc}${font Courier New:size=16:italic:bold}Power${font}
#Source: ${exec acpi | sed 's/\([^:]*\):.*/\1/'}
${execi 60 acpi | sed 's/Battery 0: //'} 
${execibar 60 acpi | sed 's/.*, \([0-9]*\)%/\1/'}

I use acpi to grab the battery state so if you don't have acpi that won't work and I'm assuming that the wireless is wlp3s0.

 

[bugman]

Thansk Dason.

Im pretty familar with conkys - I run several on my desktop os. Your's is pretty neat. I'm struggling a bit with open box is all. (i.e. I can't seem to figure out how to set up multiple conkys on start up). It was pretty straight forward with xfce4.

 

[Dason]

I think I might distro hop too much. I always come back to Arch. But I just installed Arch and got it all configured to my liking... in 50 minutes.

 

[bugman]

...I just installed Arch and got it all configured to my liking... in 50 minutes.

What?! Are you some kind of freak?! That took me days of trial and error.

Anyway, back to me. I am still trying to installing Gentoo.

And will give up tonight if it fails again.

 

[Dason]

I've considered Gentoo but honestly I'm happy with Arch. And clearly I've gotten comfortable with it

The actual install of the base system only takes about 15 minutes if you fly through the steps and have a good internet connection. The first time through clearly it should take longer because you need to read more and figure out what is going on. Once you understand the ideas and which files control what you can get through it pretty quick just doing what you need. After that it's just installing the packages you want.

 

[bryangoodrich]

I got my first Raspberry Pi two days ago (there will be more!). Yesterday I put it together and installed Arch Linux ARM distro on it and configured that. I can now ssh into that bad boy and do whatever I want. The nice thing about a Pi is that it's small, no noise, and low energy consumption. I can slap a few flash drives in the 2 USB ports (or add a hub if I wanted more or connect it to network storage of some sort) and give it more storage space to be a LAMP server or some variation. For me, it'll first be my VPN server. I'd like to be able to tunnel into my network from any public wifi and know I'm secure using that wifi. My service (Sprint) sucks, but wifi is all over the place. Setting up a basic VPN isn't that hard at all. I'll probably go that route, but later I'd like to have something a bit more secure that provides stronger user verification, matches hardware, and could even use two-stage verification by sending a text message or something. I also want to set up my conky on my desktop to consume logs, because I know I'll be paranoid. Will need to figure out what sort of information to pay attention to. This is fun, regardless.

The kit only cost my $80 on Amazon. Provides Pi, case, power supply, wifi card, 8 GB sd card with choices of OS already loaded, hdmi cable, GPIO with breadboard and other goodies. I may save those things for my next build, as there's some fun things I'd like to do (connect a wire and turn your Pi into a radio transmitter; broadcast your own music that way; I'd also like to toy around with basic robotics, motors, sensors, and put this $2 solar charger I got at Goodwill to use for something.

 

[Lazar]

Finally got a chance to set up Arch. I have a kde desktop with caledonia theme and square icons from deviant art. I have also modified the login and splash page but still need to configure grub (thinking of using burg). Also need to configure conky as I just installed conky-lua.


Screen shot:

Spoiler

 

[bugman]

Nice job lazar. Looks pretty sweet.

 

[vinux]

Congrats Lazar. I am not a kde fan (except Kile). I will very soon rejoin the Arch Challenge fun.

 

[Dason]

Looks like you went with KDE4 instead of the newer plasma. The new plasma looks nice but I guess I don't blame you since not everything has been ported yet.

My laptop died a while ago and that was my main work computer. I don't really have rivers of cash right now so I've just been getting by without a laptop. However my desktop was dual booting Windows and Ubuntu. I need to keep Windows on there for various reasons (and even the most linux loving of us all will admit that it's good to have a windows box around for testing purposes). But I decided to switch the Ubuntu boot to an Arch boot. I gave gnome a try for a while and although I actually do like gnome-shell these days (the 3.16 release is actually pretty great - if the initial release of gnome-shell would have been what 3.16 is I don't think there would have been nearly as much backlash) but I don't want to go with gnome. I tried out KDE for a while but it just wasn't for me.

So I went with xfce. The recent release of 4.12 actually makes quite a few things nicer. The built in compositor was giving me some issues though so I opted to disable that and use compton instead. I've missed Arch. It's good to be back.

On a side note it's actually incredible how fast you can get an Arch system set up (especially if you have a fast ethernet connection) even on a new computer once you've gone through the install process a few times. I think it took 15 minutes for the base install and I had everything pretty much how I wanted it in an hour.

 

[Dason]

Bought a "new" (read as: old old old old) laptop recently for VERY cheap. Arch is perfect for it. I was running manjaro for a little bit since it came with all the additional drivers I needed and I just wanted to get something going quick. Decided to do a pure arch installation today. Took a little while to get the internet running (f*** you broadcom drivers) but it's running fine now. Since it's old and I just wanted something for some light coding and internet browsing I went with i3.

Lazar are you still rocking KDE?

 

[Dason]

Bought a "new" (read as: old old old old) laptop recently for VERY cheap. Arch is perfect for it. I was running manjaro for a little bit since it came with all the additional drivers I needed and I just wanted to get something going quick. Decided to do a pure arch installation today. Took a little while to get the internet running (f*** you broadcom drivers) but it's running fine now. Since it's old and I just wanted something for some light coding and internet browsing I went with i3.

Lazar are you still rocking KDE?