Danny's Space

I am back on my Arch Linux side of the hard drive because ... wait. My plan tonight is to use Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot for the rest of the night maybe until tomorrow but after I updated my packages with the latest updates there are several problems. Firefox' cpu usage is spiking to beyond 100% and Banshee is also showing beyond 100% cpu usage. Good news for Gwibber. It's fast now seemed to be working the way it should. I killed both Firefox and Banshee and restarted them both. The events for both applications are reproducible therefore it is a bug. No apport window prompts appeared. They might have disable it. Might not be working to their liking. In any case I switched back to here, my Arch Linux OS. Unity shell seems to me stable so why these two applications. Let me show some screenshots of my upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot. After careful calculation Ubuntu up...

Updated (October 22, 2011): Ubuntu One client is now back in the Ayatana repository. I recommend adding the Ayatana repository to your package source and installing it using Pacman. If you already have Ubuntu one client (via AUR) and wish to get it from Ayatana but getting error messages when installing it, please post to Arch Linux forum for support. Ubuntu One is a very good alternative to Dropbox . It comes with Ubuntu and if you created an account you need not leave it if you are using another distro. Ubuntu One developers will work with you in installing Ubuntu One on your distro. I use Arch Linux. It is available in AUR (Arch User Repository). The ubuntuone-client is available to Arch users here. Arch users should be familiar with installing packages from AUR. If you need to get some background on how to do that, please read this. There are several dependencies that you also get from AUR, so install those first. In any case,...

I don't believe in global warming. street.art by imaginerin

A growing trend in UI these days is minimalism. From Google+ to the new Facebook UI. The drakfire dream theme for GNOME 3 desktop is no exception. No more title bars? No more titles? I just updated Banshee to 2.2.x. It automatically refreshed metadata by scanning my directory. It came out fine for me. I just don't like not being told before it does that.

I've been using networking in Arch by default. It is quite sufficient since I have a wired network and this is a residential desktop. But since the whole point of using Arch is to learn I have decided to use Networkmanager to simulate what ordinary laptop users will have to do to get connections from mobile sources for example. So to download the necessary packages, I did: $ pacman -S networkmanager network-manager-applet as well as: $ pacman -S dhclient modemmanager dnsmasq There's still a little tweak that must be done first to make this work. First open /etc/rc.conf and go to Daemons to edit the array. Make sure to remove networking and add networkmanager. Place it after dbus to enable applications which will need internet connection to get information from network manager. So I have mine like so: Daemons={...dbus networkmanager ...} This will ensure that network manager will work at every boot. I did open GNOME network connection gui too. I made sure it is using opendns. Cl...

Screen shot of the dash in GNOME Drakfire theme with Faenza dark icons.

The default theme for the GNOME desktop is Adwaita. I changed mine to Drakfire complete theme plus a change from the default GNOME icons to Faenza [dark].

Since I started to dual boot Ubuntu 11.04 and Arch Linux, I haven't found a good solution to my various partitions failing to mount at boot. It works in Ubuntu fstab but when it comes to the Arch fstab, one or two partitions fail to mount at boot. I have a partition that mounts on another partition. Or should I say a partition within a partition, to be clearer. I should have the various partitions listed in the order that I want them mounted. Ok so it's a newbie mistake but I was blinded by the Ubuntu fstab that works. After checking the list of partitions, "/", root first then "/home". After these two partitions come "/home/user/Directory". Then comes the "/home/user/Directory/sub-directory". Strictly in this order. Saved fstab. Reboot.

My apologies to Arch for the statements I made regarding the slow updates. I recently read about the security breach at kernel.org and more likely the reason for the slow speed of my updates. I have changed my /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and yes the updates have gone faster.

I finally got my printers working. I got cups (and cupsd in the /etc/rc.conf) I installed hpoj and a group of printer drivers. So to get my Arch linux to recognize there's a usb printer connected to my system I have to run a daemon (ptal-init setup) and include it in /etc/rc.conf. That finally enabled (after a reboot) my GNOME control center to acknowledge that there is indeed an HP-3900 at the end of my usb port. The real personal story behind my saga with a printer is pacman. It is now throwing 'network not reachable' everytime I start it. Every download and sync. I ran --debug and ping ip addresses and so far I will conclude that it's a really really slow ftp server. The server is so slow pacman is timing out connections. It's unusable guys. My first rolling release distro and I've decided that Arch rises and falls with the performance of their package manager. Great distro for the DIY community. But sorry I can't recommend Arch linux to my mother who jus...

The new Software Center UI.

Started the upgrade process at 1:45 am and finished with a reboot at 4:05 am today. It's faster to download at the early morning hours. Or perhaps I am a real geek for spending a Friday night infront of my computer. But this image is nice though.

Here's the download page for the beta . Not recommended for those who want a stable system. Can you name another linux distro whose beta generates this kind of buzz?

I have a previous post about my efforts at dual booting Ubuntu 11.04 and Arch Linux. My goal is to continue using and learning Linux. Switching between the two distros will give me the familiarity of Ubuntu and the 'forced' minimalism of Arch. Minimalism here just means using the command line and modifying config files for various customizations. Things which Ubuntu doesn't conveniently reveal to general users.   Previous post here will explain the start of this journey. Now where am I in this little walk. I'm using GNOME 3 in Arch because it's the latest. I'm still using the old GNOME with the Unity shell when I'm in Ubuntu 11.04. This will not last very long now because I plan to upgrade to Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot Beta tomorrow. I heard a lot of good things during the alpha. Drooling now... An aside to the post here:      I'm using a brand new UI for Blogger right now and there's this quirky cursor behavior. When I hit [enter] the cursor jump...

I caught the news in Mashable while fast reading my Google Reader. They finally released the new Blogger. Yay! I'll say that the UI is very clean and non-distracting. It integrates very well with Google+ and with Google Reader. I think I'll be using Blogger more now than before. I like what they did here.