Since I need something that is current in order to fix my crouton build (which I am considering doing soon.) I need to have access to a working install with merge tools and such.
Thus I have decided to rename my crouton fork celce. For lack of a better name it stands for Cutting Edge Linux Crouton Edition. I need to get some better platforms working though. ChromeOS does what I need at this time as a thin client but I miss having access to the Linux stuff!
This is going to be a general how to that does not go into extreme detail. I am writing this because I mentioned running XFCE + KWIN in a thread a friend posted about the KDE framework being upgraded to use QT5. He showed interest in this setup and desired to know a bit more about it.
I will be explaining which packages are needed and some of the challenges of running cross-de software like this. Particularily because KWIN currently comes with some redundant software that can conflict when used with XFCE. The specifics of packages are based on Manjaro, customize them to what works with your chosen distribution.
In Manjaro there are 2 some what applicable packages. A KWIN stand-alone and kdebase-workspace which comes with KWIN and a bunch of extra stuff. If you think the stand-alone version is what you want then you are wrong, normally I am all for less bloat if it does not interfere with functionality. Which sadly using the more appropriate package does, The KWIN stand-alone module has no configuration tools at all. So you need kdebase-workspace which comes with the bloat of the activities stuff.
Now installing KWIN is only part of the decision in running KWIN within XFCE. You need to decide what to do with xfwm4. Do you keep it or remove it? I choose to remove it because it meant less bugs within my .xinitrc file used to launch the system through my DM.
Choice of DM’s. Well this is one of the most important parts of running a cross-de system. You want a DM that is easy to configure for custom use, The flashy fancy dynamic stuff may be nice when you run a ‘pure’ DE but when you are crossing the technologies it is a little different. I believe the other DM’s use .desktop files in order to perform their launchers. If you know how to modify these DM’s to work properly then go ahead. I opted for something a little more hacker friendly, Slim.
There are a variety of ways to launch KWIN which will yield differing results. You can load it in the DE itself and have it work its session magic. This is by far the most buggy method of launching KWIN. Why? Lack of control, You do not get to choose when things are run so they could be run in mismatched order and often times are. If you use sessioning accomplish this task then you will invariably end up booting into the system to have the sessioning kick in, retardedly load all your programs before your window manager and end up with all windows having their top borders under the xfce panel requiring you to use the ALT+LMB in order to move the windows. This is not the only reason I dislike sessioning, It directly causes many bugs when working with a cross-de system, eg. Every time I rebooted I ended up with Sessioning conflicting with a load-on-boot directive causing me to have an extra cairo-dock at every reboot. This bug was happening on my mothers box and I would go to use her computer, it would be slow as a dog and I would wonder why until I went to launch something in cairo-dock and she would have 7-8 sessions of it loading… Be aware that there is a bug in the XFCE sessioning set, the only way to eliminate this was to rm -rf the xfce sessioning directory before loading the environment.
The method that worked best for me was using slim + .xinitrc and loading kwin –replace and then xfce, this way ‘if’ the sessioning stuff does not bother you it will load your sessioned windows properly, not bugged as described above which happens because everything else is loaded before kwin is… If you choose not to remove xfwm4 you would need to load xfce and then kwin –replace.
There are also menu considerations when you mix technologies like this, Do you need to old WM settings, Theme/pointer stuff, etc, etc. Since kdebase-workspace is essentially a minimal KDE install this requires some modifications if you do not want redundancy that makes little to no sense. Two places to set start up programs… Which one do I use?
It is also possible to add the kde settings into the xfce settings manager.
Well I am sort of getting a little tired of explaining this at this time so I will leave you with an example profile I have created.
I do not know what happened but for some reason the audio target is broken. It is going to take a little work for me to be able to fix it. Mainly I need to make some diffs on some files from upstream and merge them together in an operational manner. I am not able to do it at this time due to crouton being broken! I need to do it on my desktop. I will work on it in the next couple days and get it fixed back up again!
It appears google has created a way to do containers within Chrome OS. This is totally awesome because I believe it will be less complex than doing a docker setup. I think the docker setup required you to do a few tricky things to get it working.
Since Chrome OS does not have docker by default and would require some modifications that I would prefer not to do, To even get docker working it looks like the workflow would have been this:
A) create a basic chroot with nearly no tools. Only CLI.
B) Have docker installed on that chroot and start the container from the chroot.
C) you are now in the container.
With minijail this can be accomplished in one step! I find the new stuff I am looking into extremely awesome! I know we can run a really slick setup moving forward and I am really excited to be a part of this advancement!
I like the fish shell and as such I am going to use it in the celme target through cli-extra. It is not set as the default shell however the terminal you launch from cairo-dock will use fish. The terminal you launch from the menu will use bash.
I made this decision because fish seems like the easiest shell to set up and I really like using it. I hope you enjoy the changes that are to come. 🙂
I am having some odd locale issues that I am not sure how to fix. I have tried a lot of things to fix it and have not been able to do so. The desktop environment installs correctly and the configs get pushed over and work. Some keyboard shortcuts need to be revamped, it is still a work in progress. Things seem to be working decent. I am having issues with pnmixer and that quite likely is caused by the locale issues that I am having.
I asked dnschneid what the requirements to have Manjaro added to crouton, the reply was not favourable for Manjaro being added upstream. The first requirement was ARM support and that itself ruled Manjaro out. I could potentially use the arch repository and then add stuff to it however the issue is that I do not have any arm hardware to test software ports to make it work more like Manjaro.
It looks like working to get my port added first to drinkcat’s repository and then to dnschneid is pointless, that does not mean I think the creation of this Manjaro spin is pointless. It does however mean that I may stray away from how crouton does things and rebuild parts of the base to remove the Debian stuff. I no longer need to strictly stay within the guidelines upstream uses, I have more freedom to make ‘everything’ work how I would like it to.
For some reason I get a python error when running CCSM after installing compiz-xfce. I posted on the Manjaro forums for an answer. I have not found one on the internet at all. I am going to proceed with setting up xfce-kwin since that is what I use on my desktop. Enlightenment is too buggy for regular usage but would have been optimal.
I messed about with setting up being able to choose the repository you want on install and it did not work well doing it at the early steps of install. It has become obvious that switching the repo branches between stable, testing and unstable is better done at a later stage of the installation.
This is something that can be incorporated later on as an add on to the base system. I think my best course of action is to do a little work on the configs. Get the bash prompt looking nice by default. Do some touch ups on the Synaptics config. Nothing fancy no full DE config set ups yet.
The next step would be to get some targets going so I can choose what is installed prior to hitting the system and having to pacman it all in.
I did play around in an installed system and it was pretty fun, I got Steam installed but the fonts did not work, I figured out which fonts package I needed by trial and error installing one at a time to see what fixed it. This means I can add that font by default to the target for install and Steam will work for other people off the bat!
Installing a branch does not actually change the branch. I am unsure whether the user results with all packages having the proper branch or not.
I ran a pacman-mirrors -g -b testing; pacman -Syyu and it loks as if there were a few upgrades required. I am not really happy with this by I may just leave stable as the default and have the user switch to a different branch at a later time because it is a matter of if something isnt broke do not fix it. Continue reading
The project is operational. I am so happy the entire install > X process is finished.
Here is what I see as being left: Creating a way to choose stable, testing or unstable repository, This is easy to do, It is a case of doing an echo and a read of a variable. Next is doing a test install of each desktop environment on each repository. I could in theory do a mass install of all the environments and see what works. This may be the easier route if nothing breaks anything else.
Then I can start doing what I really enjoy. Designing some neat interfaces to go with it by creating some custom targets.
Unfortunately I only have one machine and when things do not work properly I try to fix the issues. I was going to do some gaming videos as well as Linux tutorial videos. When I attempted to do so I ended up with black bars across my video. I ended up tracing the issue to being a driver issue and when I went to fix it my entire X broke. I usually have multiple working Linux partitions at any given time however when I broke my main distribution the backup distributions did not work correctly, I may have broken them at another time and forgot about it since I rarely have to use them.
As a result it has me looking in different directions and redesigning my partition layout and how I use my computer. I have not really used BSD in the past however I am going to take the jump and learn DragonFly BSD as well as doing Linux stuff. One BSD Install for a super stable system setup just how I like, This will probably be the system I use to create my blog videos with Virtual Box. One Linux distribution setup with the software I need that I do not mess around with too much, This distribution will most likely be the one I use to create my gaming videos. One Linux distribution that I can mess with as much as I want and do bug testing and help improve it.
Doing things in this way will allow me to do all the things I love without having my computer go down causing down time here. I really would like to get as much content as possible out to the users and help them as much as I can. I hope these changes allow me to do better without random downtime.
Thank you for your patience.
While running Chakra GNU/Linux on a desktop system I have been having some system crashes happen. This post will describe the troubleshooting steps taken to find and resolve the issue. Since finding the issue was done mostly in the terminal via log files I am going to describe that process instead of showing it via screenshots, since not every system crash is caused by the same thing, It’s best to use the following information as a reference in how to find a kernel issue and a guide to fixing this specific issue.
After looking in /var/log and scanning the files Xorg.0.log, kernel.log and everything.log for any errors around the time that the system crash occurred. Continue reading
This posting is about a handy little front end to pacman called apper. This is a temporary solution made available by the Chakra developers, They are creating their own graphical front end tool for Chakra Linux because nothing currently available works well enough.
Start off by opening up a konsole terminal and type Continue reading
Chakra uses what are called bundles for programs that are not KDE specific but are popular in the Linux Community. Installing, Removing and Running programs are all quite simple using the Bundle Manager.
From the Kmenu click on Bundle Manager.
Cutting Edge Linux 