Linux General Questions

Malor wrote:
I have no menus, just an appropriately well-developed rc.xml file and bashrun for launching arbitrary applications.

Heh, well, you're so far out into the 'roll my own UI' territory that I don't think anything else is likely to suit, anymore. Hopefully you can get the driver problem sorted.

Is it possible, or better, easy, to disable DEs in *buntu and just run a WM? I know you can substitute WMs, e.g., Openbox for Metacity. I don't know about doing away with all the DE stuff and just taking advantage of dependency-managing package managers and broader availability of ready-made packages. Would be interesting.

X3100 on the 965GM chipset

That's AMD, right? ...

Intel.

There probably aren't very many people still using that laptop in any kind of serious way, so you might literally be the only person running into the bug. They might fix it by accident, fixing something else, but you'll improve your odds if you tell them something's amiss.

Troof.

Is it possible, or better, easy, to disable DEs in *buntu and just run a WM?

No idea. I don't normally directly use WMs, I tend to think of the environments as being 'the desktop', even though that's not really true.

If I wanted to experiment with that, I'd probably start with Debian instead, and do an absolute minimum install. That's the ancestor distro of Ubuntu, and if you uncheck everything, you'll end up with a very tiny image, probably not much different than a minimum Slackware install, and can then add pieces pretty easily with aptitude or apt-get. (I prefer aptitude, personally; I believe it comes on all Debian machines by default.)

I'm not sure, however, how they actually architect their dependencies. I suspect it must be possible to install a window manager without a desktop to go with it, but I've never actually tried. I just don't fiddle much at that level anymore.

I'd definitely try it in a VM, first, just to see if it were possible.

muraii wrote:

Is it possible, or better, easy, to disable DEs in *buntu and just run a WM? I know you can substitute WMs, e.g., Openbox for Metacity. I don't know about doing away with all the DE stuff and just taking advantage of dependency-managing package managers and broader availability of ready-made packages. Would be interesting.

Frankly I don't think Ubuntu is a good choice. If you have a particular environment in mind, there are much better distributions to achieve that by selecting what you want, rather than taking Ubuntu and ripping the things you don't want out.

Ubuntu is good for "plug and play" type scenarios when you don't have a preference and you want things to function. You can certainly bend it to your will if you're willing to invest the effort as with any distribution, but the entire "value add" of Ubuntu versus upstream Debian is basically that Canonical makes a lot of choices for you. If you want to make those choices, I think using Debian proper would be a better option.

[Insert note about Arch being the ideal distribution here ]

muraii wrote:

Is it possible, or better, easy, to disable DEs in *buntu and just run a WM? I know you can substitute WMs, e.g., Openbox for Metacity. I don't know about doing away with all the DE stuff and just taking advantage of dependency-managing package managers and broader availability of ready-made packages. Would be interesting.

Of course! Just install your window manager of choice (Openbox is a fine example), and you should then get an option in your display manager to launch in to a session running just that window manager. I run Openbox in the Debian VM on my Macbook Air that way, since I don't have enough RAM in this thing to dedicate enough to the VM to run GNOME acceptably. I do the same on my Ubuntu 14.04 HTPC to run just Openbox and XBMC.

Hell, you don't even need a display manager -- I'm pretty sure you can still do the old trick of writing up your own .xinitrc and just running startx at the console to start your X session. I haven't tried that for a while, though.

Basically, Debian and Ubuntu aren't tied to specific desktop environments anywhere near as much as it sounds like you think they are. With Debian especially, you can very easily do as Malor suggested, installing a base environment (without X at all, let alone a full desktop environment) and then installing just the packages you want on top of that.

That brings up another question: apt-get vs. aptitude vs. Software Manager vs. Synaptic. I'm always hesitant to mix their use on one system, because I worry that they each manage packages differently enough that I'll foobar something. Are they, metaphorically, all pinging the same API, but just providing different interfaces?

In other words, why would you prefer aptitude over apt-get, then abstracted for the other managers?

pneuman wrote:

Basically, Debian and Ubuntu aren't tied to specific desktop environments anywhere near as much as it sounds like you think they are. With Debian especially, you can very easily do as Malor suggested, installing a base environment (without X at all, let alone a full desktop environment) and then installing just the packages you want on top of that.

Using debian with dwm as my xwindow manager on top.
Really need to make an honest go of xmonad at some point.

You guys are cray cray

In other words, why would you prefer aptitude over apt-get, then abstracted for the other managers?

Well, they're all hitting the same databases, but I prefer aptitude to apt-get because it does better dependency checking: it's smart enough to mark packages as auto-installed, and then to remove them again when nothing needs them anymore. The last time I looked into this, apt-get didn't do that; it just installed dependencies like you'd specifically asked for them. Anything installed by apt-get would stick around until you manually removed it.

I've never used Synaptic much. It seems to work fine, and I believe it probably does everything aptitude does, but I'm just used to doing it from the command line. The GUI seems like a lot of extra visual noise that's not actually doing very much useful work.

Note: if you run aptitude by itself, without arguments, it runs this weird curses-based GUI, which is abysmal. If you want a GUI, use Synaptic, because you will probably hose things with aptitude's GUI. I just use it as a command line tool; "aptitude install X", "aptitude remove X", and "aptitude --purge-unused purge X" are the commands I use most often.

Aptitude has a search function, but it only seems to search program names. If I want a broader search, I use apt-cache, as in "apt-cache search X". That does a full text search on descriptions as well.

I've gotten the impression that it may be suboptimal to mix package managers, so because Ubuntu doesn't come with aptitude installed, you might want to use the native Synaptic instead. I don't think anything will get broken if you mix them, but you might potentially end up with dependencies not being removed when they're obsolete.

edit to add: another nice tool is 'apt-file'. You have to install that separately, and then update it separately (apt-file update, just like aptitude and apt-get), but it keeps a master list of all files provided by all packages, and lets you search for them. I've found this handy sometimes for figuring out what package provides a utility I want.... eg, "apt-file search rot13".

maybe I should start using aptitude. Because yeah, if you install something and it requires 20 dependencies, but then you remove that app, those dependencies just stick around doing nothing.

Citizen86 wrote:

maybe I should start using aptitude. Because yeah, if you install something and it requires 20 dependencies, but then you remove that app, those dependencies just stick around doing nothing.

Well, that's the reason I use it. The --purge-unused switch will totally annihilate unused dependencies. By default, it just does a remove, which means that any configuration files will stick around. That's definitely safer, and you can always purge later on if you want, but I guess I like to live dangerously, because I use it a lot.

deborphan is a good utility for telling you about things that aren't being used. With no arguments, it searches in the libs category, and tells you about any that aren't depended on by any other package. (and, thus, should be safe to remove.)

"deborphan -a" searches all packages, which I've occasionally found quite useful on servers, but on a desktop-style system, you may end up with a really long list.

In which you all confirm my discomfort with using dependency-managing package managers without being nigh as fastidious as I am with Slackware. Thank you.

gore wrote:
muraii wrote:

Is it possible, or better, easy, to disable DEs in *buntu and just run a WM? I know you can substitute WMs, e.g., Openbox for Metacity. ...

Frankly I don't think Ubuntu is a good choice. If you have a particular environment in mind, there are much better distributions to achieve that by selecting what you want, rather than taking Ubuntu and ripping the things you don't want out.

Ubuntu is good for "plug and play" type scenarios when you don't have a preference and you want things to function. You can certainly bend it to your will if you're willing to invest the effort as with any distribution, but the entire "value add" of Ubuntu versus upstream Debian is basically that Canonical makes a lot of choices for you. If you want to make those choices, I think using Debian proper would be a better option.

[Insert note about Arch being the ideal distribution here ]

I've buggled about going Arch but I feel like running it appropriately requires more effort than even Slackware. Maybe Slackware-current is similar, and that's why I don't run Slackware-current. Thanks for the perspective on *buntu. That's about what I anticipated.

pneuman wrote:
muraii wrote:

Is it possible, or better, easy, to disable DEs in *buntu and just run a WM? I know you can substitute WMs, e.g., Openbox for Metacity. I don't know about doing away with all the DE stuff and just taking advantage of dependency-managing package managers and broader availability of ready-made packages. Would be interesting.

Of course! Just install your window manager of choice (Openbox is a fine example), and you should then get an option in your display manager to launch in to a session running just that window manager. I run Openbox in the Debian VM on my Macbook Air that way, since I don't have enough RAM in this thing to dedicate enough to the VM to run GNOME acceptably. I do the same on my Ubuntu 14.04 HTPC to run just Openbox and XBMC.

Hell, you don't even need a display manager -- I'm pretty sure you can still do the old trick of writing up your own .xinitrc and just running startx at the console to start your X session. I haven't tried that for a while, though.

This is roughly what I do, though I don't roll my .xinitrc manually. I use openbox-session and its contingent .xinitrc, boot to the console, and issue startx to get into X. Then Openbox's autostart.sh file, which I edit to start up two panels (tint2 and lxpanel) and dropboxd and such. The X settings are typically fine when installing to this commodity laptop. On my desktop, even though it's not much newer, it's a little more involved in the video driver department.

Basically, Debian and Ubuntu aren't tied to specific desktop environments anywhere near as much as it sounds like you think they are. With Debian especially, you can very easily do as Malor suggested, installing a base environment (without X at all, let alone a full desktop environment) and then installing just the packages you want on top of that.

I was thinking about that on the way home, and may give it a shot.

boogle wrote:
pneuman wrote:

Basically, Debian and Ubuntu aren't tied to specific desktop environments anywhere near as much as it sounds like you think they are. With Debian especially, you can very easily do as Malor suggested, installing a base environment (without X at all, let alone a full desktop environment) and then installing just the packages you want on top of that.

Using debian with dwm as my xwindow manager on top.
Really need to make an honest go of xmonad at some point.

Why not Ratpoison? If it's good enough for Mark Pilgrim...

[Arch advertisement]
Arch is in some respects the most user friendly distribution I've ever used, because it expects me to tell it how I want it to be used, and then it does what I expect.

There are no training wheels, but anybody already using Slackware certainly doesn't need any training wheels, so this is not a negative. Unburdened by the shackles of distro specific GUI tools and grandma-safe default configurations, Arch is free to move fast, and there's joy in moving along with it.

I like Arch. It's not right for "fire and forget" deployments, where you want everything frozen in time so you don't have to ever think about it, but if you have any desire for the newest/latest/best (and you have formulated a basic notion of what you want from the system) I think it makes the best set of compromises out there.
[/Arch advertisement]

gore wrote:

[Arch advertisement]
Arch is in some respects the most user friendly distribution I've ever used, because it expects me to tell it how I want it to be used, and then it does what I expect.

There are no training wheels, but anybody already using Slackware certainly doesn't need any training wheels, so this is not a negative. Unburdened by the shackles of distro specific GUI tools and grandma-safe default configurations, Arch is free to move fast, and there's joy in moving along with it.

I like Arch. It's not right for "fire and forget" deployments, where you want everything frozen in time so you don't have to ever think about it, but if you have any desire for the newest/latest/best (and you have formulated a basic notion of what you want from the system) I think it makes the best set of compromises out there.
[/Arch advertisement]

All this and a rolling release means I don't have to reinstall again every year or two. But I mean, I'm not biased.

Spoiler:

I'm totally biased, but I don't even care.

Damn it now I have to try everything.

Malor wrote:
In other words, why would you prefer aptitude over apt-get, then abstracted for the other managers?

Well, they're all hitting the same databases, but I prefer aptitude to apt-get because it does better dependency checking: it's smart enough to mark packages as auto-installed, and then to remove them again when nothing needs them anymore. The last time I looked into this, apt-get didn't do that; it just installed dependencies like you'd specifically asked for them. Anything installed by apt-get would stick around until you manually removed it.

apt-get has done that for a while, too -- "apt-get autoremove" will uninstall anything that was installed as a dependency of things that are no longer installed themselves. For a while, aptitude was recommended by Debian because it tended to smarter about resolving issues than apt-get was, but AFAIK that's no longer the case; the squeeze release notes recommend using apt-get.

They're both very similar tools, though, so it's mostly a case of personal preference, outside specific cases like OS upgrades where one might be recommended over the other.

muraii wrote:

Damn it now I have to try everything. :)

Yeah, they tickled my curiosity about Arch. I've been using the Debian family for something like ten years now, with just a bit of dabbling with Fedora. (yuck!)

I'll have to give it a try.

Malor wrote:
muraii wrote:

Damn it now I have to try everything. :)

Yeah, they tickled my curiosity about Arch. I've been using the Debian family for something like ten years now, with just a bit of dabbling with Fedora. (yuck!)

I'll have to give it a try.

It says something that the best Linux wiki is Arch's.

My $0.02 on Arch: I played with it for a summer because I was looking for the latest graphics stack; Ubuntu had just released Unity 1.0, which did NOT play nice with Intel integrated graphics and the specific kernel and graphics drivers that came with said Ubuntu release (I want to say it was 2010, but I know that's wrong, maybe 11.04?). I really enjoyed it. I love the Arch philosophy of keeping it simple, lean, minimalistic. I had a full Arch installation, with LXDE, on a 4 GB flash drive, able to play DVDs. It quickly fell out of date, though, I never used it and a lot changed, so I haven't bothered to try again. Things do break, sometimes in phantom ways: an update to Ghostscript broke my printer, it would only print in grayscale. The hplip people were really friendly and supportive (unlike the Arch forums), and it wasn't until the next ghostscript update came down that I realized it might have been the source of my issues. So yeah, Arch tip: don't update sh*t unless you absolutely want the latest-and-greatest, have time to iron out any bugs, and read all of the notes Arch puts out about problems with updates (I think my flash drive install broke because they consolidated all of the binaries in one directory, /bin, and pacman got super confused).

Someone on the Arch forums summarized it very nicely: "Arch is like a bonsai tree. You trim it here and prune it there, and after a while you have something that's beautiful and unique." I may have to give it another try at some point.

Semi-related question: is movie playback on Linux smooth with Intel graphics? I've been reluctant to move back to Linux as my day-to-day laptop OS because movies of any kind have noticeable screen tearing. I know there's workarounds involving using Compiz and VSync, but if they finally have the problem licked at the driver level (which they've known about for quite a while), I may consider moving back to a native Linux install on the lappy.

Bubs14 wrote:

Semi-related question: is movie playback on Linux smooth with Intel graphics? I've been reluctant to move back to Linux as my day-to-day laptop OS because movies of any kind have noticeable screen tearing. I know there's workarounds involving using Compiz and VSync, but if they finally have the problem licked at the driver level (which they've known about for quite a while), I may consider moving back to a native Linux install on the lappy.

It's still really hit and miss. Some sites / browsers / players seem to be fine, other ones there is definitely screen tearing. I always have to try 20 different things each time to get it to stop tearing, sometimes it never stops. I think it's getting better though.... I can watch Netflix in Chrome without screen tearing, and I think Youtube is alright as well. In Ubuntu and Fedora.

That's with an Nvidia graphics card though. No idea what an Intel chip would be like.

Bubs14 wrote:

Someone on the Arch forums summarized it very nicely: "Arch is like a bonsai tree. You trim it here and prune it there, and after a while you have something that's beautiful and unique." I may have to give it another try at some point.

I usually install a stable version of Slackware, tweak for a few weeks, then run with it for a couple years or more. I don't tend to run bleeding-edge anything so following a rolling update like Arch or Slackware-current doesn't add much value for me from what I can tell. Probably worth a go though.

Semi-related question: is movie playback on Linux smooth with Intel graphics? I've been reluctant to move back to Linux as my day-to-day laptop OS because movies of any kind have noticeable screen tearing. I know there's workarounds involving using Compiz and VSync, but if they finally have the problem licked at the driver level (which they've known about for quite a while), I may consider moving back to a native Linux install on the lappy.

I play online videos, local video files, and DVDs on that 2007-era low-end ThinkPad without much issue. I don't play YouTube full-screen though, as much due to my chappy internet as anything. I play local video files and DVDs via mplayer.

I don't do true HD anything but it seems like 1080p should work okay with newer hardware and Intel drivers.

Bubs14 wrote:

Semi-related question: is movie playback on Linux smooth with Intel graphics? I've been reluctant to move back to Linux as my day-to-day laptop OS because movies of any kind have noticeable screen tearing. I know there's workarounds involving using Compiz and VSync, but if they finally have the problem licked at the driver level (which they've known about for quite a while), I may consider moving back to a native Linux install on the lappy.

Using XBMC, I've had no troubles playing 1080p videos smoothly and with no tearing on the Intel video (HD4600) on my HTPC. I don't think I had to do anything special to get that working, either, though XBMC probably knows exactly what to do to make it work so YMMV with other players.

(I want to say it was 2010, but I know that's wrong, maybe 11.04?).

I think it was probably 10.10; the 10.04 version was one of my favorite desktop distros ever, good enough that I couldn't be arsed to switch my laptop back to Windows. (which, as I've said before, is the highest of praise: not using it for political reasons, or because I needed Unix, but because it worked well enough that it wasn't worth the effort of installing something else.)

But then both GNOME and Canonical lost their minds, albeit in different ways, and I stopped using Linux desktops for several years.

So, going to install Ubuntu on a temp drive. It's a 320gig 7200rpm drive. Why temp? As I need to go thru my 1tb 7200rpm first to move pictures, documents and Whatnots.

When I moved from my 320 to 1tb, I used acronys in Windows. It was breeze.

So anything recommend to do the same easily?

I installed teamspeak on my Ubuntu session. Is it normal is need the terminal to run all the time?

I need to use a .run, first time that happened to me.

Manach wrote:

So, going to install Ubuntu on a temp drive. It's a 320gig 7200rpm drive. Why temp? As I need to go thru my 1tb 7200rpm first to move pictures, documents and Whatnots.

When I moved from my 320 to 1tb, I used acronys in Windows. It was breeze.

So anything recommend to do the same easily?

I frequently used Clonezilla at work for cloning drives, back in my desktop days. If you are wanting to clone it and then grow the partition, opposed to having multiple partitions on the drive, you may need to use GParted - but for all I know Clonezilla may include that these days/

I don't think you want to use a clone utility, because your Windows files will be NTFS, and you'll want to convert them over to a Linux-native filesystem, whichever you choose. (ext4 is a fine default choice, and most distros will automatically format any Linux partitions that way.) Basically, you're going to want to mount the drive under your Linux filesystem somewhere, and either use the desktop file manager or the command line to copy the files where you want them.

Is it normal is need the terminal to run all the time?

Um, well, it can be, but depending on your desktop environment, you may be able to launch it directly from an icon, and not require a console. But I've never used Teamspeak under Linux, so I have no idea how the program actually works.

You might be able to edit that .run file, see what it's doing, and duplicate it with an icon -- it may, for instance, be passing command-line arguments, and if you do that from the desktop, the program may run without needing a console.

edit: I'm assuming that the .run format is text; things like that in Linux usually are, but that's not guaranteed.

Pretty sure that Manach wants to be able to clone his Ubuntu installation from its temporary location on the 320 GB drive to the 1 TB once the data is moved off the latter.

Manach wrote:

So, going to install Ubuntu on a temp drive. It's a 320gig 7200rpm drive. Why temp? As I need to go thru my 1tb 7200rpm first to move pictures, documents and Whatnots.

When I moved from my 320 to 1tb, I used acronys in Windows. It was breeze.

So anything recommend to do the same easily?

And that is a bad idea for steam usage... Steam under Linux only want to install game on the /boot drive only... So much for multiple drive. Guess I'll use it as a file drive.

Thanks Malor, it is to clone the Ubuntu HDD.

So, I'll look into it tonight for team speak.

Oh, and does someone have a good repo for nvidia driver?

I was able to get the .run from Nvidia, but don't know how to remove the current drivers to reinstall them.

I used the utility tool in Ubuntu, which list the 331 driver, and the 340 is out.

I could go with synapse tho... Any suggestions?