Manjaro build server progress!

Yesterday on my day off I went and had breakfast and coffee. I brought my chromebook with me to do some work or at least some research on getting a working Manjaro build server that ran on another Linux distribution. At first I was a little confused at what was required.

Originally I was advised that all I needed was pacman. Great I thought, pacman is in my repositories, I’ll get pacman installed and this will be done in no time!

I proceed to take a look into manjaroiso thinking I am going to be building this in the native environment, It became apparent quite quickly that it will be a large task in order to get everything installed that I required to do the build. Things were certainly looking bleak, It certainly seemed like I was venturing forth into dependency hell at this time. I was told that if the system has pacman it will work so I kept my head high and continued brainstorming.

Well if I cannot get this stuff going via the host system maybe a chroot is more appropriate! Trying to create a chroot I ended up destroying the host system. Chroot scripts I usually use/create clean up after themselves, This one did not and I rm -rf $CHROOT_DIR without even thinking about it. That was enough with /proc /sys and /dev mounted to kill the install enough that SSH would not allow me in anymore…

I reinstalled the Host and got it up and running yesterday/tonight. Tested the Chroot again and everything ‘almost’ worked. Everything seemed to install but I got errors when trying to install things with pacman saying it did not know where /var/cache/pacman/pkg was located. Usually this means the directory does not exist, I investigated with ls /var/cache/pacman/ and the pkg directory was shown. I also ended up with an error stating that the disk was full directly after the first error. The df -h command said the disk had 23 Gigabytes free.

I scratched my head, Founding this behavior sort of perplexing. I knew something must be missing but I was not sure what. I am still not sure what I am missing but I believe if I use pacstrap to set up the chroot that it may work correctly. The pacstrap command is not within the pacman package. I had to do my research into what Arch package contained pacstrap, Finally I found that it was the arch_install_scripts package that contained pacstrap. This was one of the packages that I had assumed I may have to build while getting overwhelmed by the dependency hell scenario stated above.

Everything required by this package was in the repositories so I decided to toss them onto my system. It appears that rather than having to build 10ish ebuilds that I would only require 1 in order to have pacstrap bootstrap the build directory correctly.

I still need to learn how to create a ebuild for this package, The dependencies are building as I type this and I am gearing up for learning how to create an ebuild!

If I am correct then this process is about 100x easier than I had originally calculated.

BONUS!

manjaro crouton renamed celce

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!

XFCE + KWIN howto.

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.

KVM Server will be Gentoo – install in progress :)

The host I am using for my VPS mounted an image of Gentoo for me to use. Anyone that has done a Gentoo install before knows that it can take some time to get everything just right. I started the install yesterday and did not finish it before I needed to go to sleep.

I am going through the gentoo handbook a second time to double check everything since the first time around I got lost in the handbook and ended up further than I should have been and had to go back. Thus a double check is certainly needed.

Just rebuilding the kernel with genkernel at the moment to make sure it was not a kernel flag that I missed.

To be honest I am not sure what I am going to do with this server ‘yet’, we will see how things line up. I am planning on also switching the host of this site over to the host that runs my VPS. This would allow me to expand the site a lot using easier tools and end up with a wiki, pastebin, etc etc.

crouton Manjaro celme target changes coming down the pipe

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. 🙂

crouton Manjaro – Default desktop environment.

I’ve done it before on my desktop spin of Manjaro… thats right xfce+kwin+cairo-dock. This will be the primary and official desktop environment of my crouton spin.

I took the work I did on the Manjaro Cutting Edge Linux remix, pulled the configs out of it and stuck them on github. Now it should be extremely easy to port them over to being installed by default. This is not exactly the same as the desktop mix I just used it as a starting point since the vast majority of the work had already been completed.

With the majority of the configs out of the way and ready to go I will be setting up a target(or multiple) to install it all. This will come highly customized and ready to use, it really is looking pretty cool right now. I find the functionality to be very good on the chromebook, the small screen and touchpad lend itself well to how I have this setup.

You have dragging to the sides to resize to that side of the screen, you have showing all windows when mousing to the top left, showing the desktop on top right and grid mode when you mouse to the top so you can organize your windows! I would not like this setup on a desktop but for some reason it works very well on something smaller with a touchpad.

 

crouton Manjaro – Seeing if I can get gnome working.

It’s not really that I even like gnome because I dont really like using it. It’s just that I want all the Desktop Environments available to be supported. The first test I did complained that twm, xterm and xclock were not found. So I set those as install targets, I removed using gnome-extra by default because it is huge and we will see on the build that is running right now!

 

crouton Manjaro X works!

I am not entirely sure what I did but the starte17 command now correctly launches enlightenment for Manjaro running within crouton. I think it may have been a fix I put on my crouton last night that I did not sync and rebuild. Because as far as I can tell it worked when I changed all the files back to the default behavior.

crouton Manjaro works with startx – Not ideal but a start

So I got the crouton Manjaro working with startx which is not idea. One of the really cool features of crouton is that it allows switching back and forth between Chrome OS and Linux. Using startx does not do this.

This is not ideal but it is definitely a step forward as I can start building targets that will eventually affect the entire system once bugs are fixed here and there.

 

Manjaro crouton X server issue.

As I said in my last post I have passed the audio target and everything installs correctly. So if you want to help me in troubleshooting or know of a solution you can give me a shout and we can get some collaborative development going on!

Here are some of the things that differed in terms of Arch and Manjaro that may have something to do with the difficulties. In Arch multilib is optional where as in Manjaro it is mandatory. The Repository structures are completely differently which should not have been an issue since everything else is sourcing the correct repositories. Manjaro and Arch do use different GPU initialization processes, I may need to add something in the initialization for this to work by default. I need to find out what is causing the issue and a solution before I start putting a solution into automated practice!

edge226/crouton

I have started modding my crouton fork. I am starting out using Debian Sid and it has been pretty fun. If you want to check out the project and the things I am actively working on the github page is available.  I am unsure of how to screen cast some of the stuff at this time. I will probably have some videos of setup here when I do.

My Chromebook!

I wanted a small notebook as a portable computer. I did my research and found that pretty much all notebooks are pretty expensive for anything with decent hardware specs. This was when I started looking into Chromebooks because they are pretty inexpensive. The Acer C7 was upgradable and came with a respectable 1.5Ghz dual core processor, 2GB of ram and a 16GB SSD.

I added 4 gigs of ram and a 240 GB SSD, This allowed me to be able have a fair amount of both drive space and performance when running many tasks. This is very useful when playing around with many Linux setups.

I put my Chromebook into developer mode and downloaded crouton. The program crouton makes installing and running Debian, Kali and Ubuntu easily installable on a Chromebook side by side with Chrome OS. 

vokoscreen – What I use to make my videos.

Since I started making videos instead of writing articles the amount of time it takes for me to relay information has lessened. It really is a wonderful thing when it makes supporting the Linux community easier. There are many solutions to do screencasting but Vokoscreen happened to A) Do exactly what I wanted. B) Have very simple configuration.

This is one of the reasons that Making videos has decreased the amount of time required to create a post, I accept mistakes that I may make and it takes a few minutes to make a video once the desktop space is configured for the desired content. With no editing and a simple watch over of the video to make sure it is to my liking and its off to you guys.

I am really enjoying making videos and helping people learn how to use Linux, I have been doing IRC support for as long as I have been using Linux, but this has a lasting impression and more people have access to it. I love that these skills will allow me to have a lasting impact on the Linux community and continue to help people more than just once!

Command Line Interface – Save a CD/DVD, Use a USB flash drive and dd

If you use Linux for ethical reasons then that may be a reason to be conscious of our limited and dwindling resources, if you are interested in saving the environment you can refrain from burning a CD or DVD to install your favorite Linux distribution. The majority of Linux distributions come out with newer versions on a pre-scheduled timeframe called a release cycle, The exception being Linux distributions that are semi-rolling or rolling release.

If you are like me you enjoy experiencing all that the Linux world has to offer, Choosing a single distribution as your main distribution but still dabbling in other distributions as well either through a dual/multi boot or via virtualization if your system is powerful enough. If you are using virtualization then you can simply mount the image upon install. However if you are configuring your to boot with multiple operating systems or simply testing one and reinstalling over the previous partition then this can eat up a lot of CD’s or DVD’s and waste a lot of money and resources.

Announcement – Big post coming about PulseAudio

I have had issues with Pulse Audio and my video card for over a year. Some of the releases have made things a lot easier however most Linux distributions still do not detect my ASUS GT440 correctly. I know of a fix to force the use of the video card for HDMI audio however when I do this my onboard audio disappears completely from PA. I have attempted to resolve this issue with the PA developers, After being asked to supply information to find a solution, which I gladly supplied. I then waited for him to let me know whether a solution was available, no reply.

English: A standard HDMI connector for hooking up audio/visual equipment. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This issue of having half working audio is not pleasing to me. I either to choose between the ability to record with the microphone and never hear audio on my system or hear audio and lose access to my  microphone.

This post requires me to install and configure a new Linux system, Possibly multiple distributions to show that this is a PA issue and not a distribution specific issue.