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!
I am in a position where most things have caught up pretty nicely on the Manjaro branch and seem to be stable for me. Although I have not been making posts it does not mean I am sitting idle. I am doing some research on the progression to take next.
I’ve been researching lxc, docker and systemd encapsulation so a better experience can be provided within crouton. If I am correct it will be possible to setup the lxc stuff in a target and have it install correctly that way.
I may take a break from the crouton stuff and do some work on the cutting edge Linux spin of Manjaro. I have had a lot of people interested in when the next image is going to be released and I do not blame them. The old one is… well old, It might not update correctly and people want a known working version instead of having me say… you can try it but it might break, the risk is yours.
Working on the image should not take too much of my time because the majority of the time consuming work has already been done. So for now I am doing research and may speed push out an image in the near future.
I am researching LXC containers and docker as a resource to get manjaro working properly with systemd. This changes the paradigm from just a chroot into something more secure and contained which sounds really neat 🙂
I am going to be doing some research into these tools and how they work in order to get the Manjaro crouton install working better! I do not have a timeframe on getting this working and may start a sub-branch of the manjaro branch to test this out.
Here is a video of the crouton Manjaro Cutting Edge Linux distribution. I’ve currently got it to install to nearly what you see on the screen there. What is running is XFCE, KWIN and cairo-dock.
It runs very well with no lag to be noticed on my chromebook. I hope you enjoy!
The configs for the celme target is working however they do need some work still. It is currently a work in progress however it seems to be working. Everything is starting to work very well.
I’ve now got it setup so kwin and cairo-dock load automatically when upon first launch. The session information needs to be reloaded because firefox is being loaded on first launch which is not supposed to happen.
The terminal when launched through cairo-dock now correctly launches the fish shell. A terminal launched from the main menu use the default bash shell.
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 got found the correct setup for a mixer on this particular hardware. It works quite well. I removed pnmixer which did not work well on this hardware. I have been updating configs a lot. The fixes will come through a little later because I want to do a big chunk of things before I push it up. I test local and then move it up to github.
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.
Re-upped the configs that I had modified and I am preforming another test install of the celme target. This target includes xfce, kwin throught he kdebase-workspace package and cairo-dock including cairo-dock-plugins.
I expect there to be two possible results with these configs. It will either work and load kwin –replace and cairo-dock or it will bomb and load xfwm4 instead. We will see once the install is finished. As long as it does not error out then it should be something that can be resolved.
So when I install with the celme target it attempts to load xfce and fails. I am sure it is in the config but why did it not happen in the previous test install I do not know. I am looking into the solution at this very moment. I know it has something to do with the xfce4-session.xml file but I am not sure what. I may attempt to get this working another way by deleting the file.
I made some modifications to the core, audio and a few other targets. I created a couple of targets. I made the celme target to stick everything together and update the configs.
Just running through a test run to see how well the install works 🙂
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.
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.
Cutting Edge Linux 