Arch Challenge

Dason

Dason

Ambassador to the humans
#41
#41
I haven't really used FVWM much so I can't comment on it.

I have used fluxbox though and it's quite nice. It's really easy to customize and like you said there are lots of styles and some of them look really sharp. If I was just going to go with a floating window manager I would personally choose fluxbox.

I think I'll end up going with xfce though. I'm fairly used to it, it's easy enough to customize, and there are quite a few plugins and what not that make certain tasks simple.
 
Dason

Dason

Ambassador to the humans
#42
#42
I buckled. I had xfce installed and my system was running nice and then I decided to install gnome as well. I haven't used gnome shell in over a year so I figured I would give it another try and I have to say that they've done a good job with it.

But I'm up and running. All I have left to do is install some programs I want (Dropbox, latex, blah blah blah). But I have internet, R, several DEs, and Chromium. I've got a usable system.

I must say that they actually made the installation a bit easier for me this time around. The wifi-menu program is really nice and a lot easier than using wpa_supplicant directly.
 
bugman

bugman

Super Moderator
#46
#46
I have heard they are pretty tough on the arch boards. I have read the wiki and th eboards but can resolve this. All I can think of now is there maybe a hardware issue on my machine?

Its a bit beyond my experience level right now. But I am gunna solve this!
 
TheEcologist

TheEcologist

Global Moderator
#47
#47
bugman said:
I have heard they are pretty tough on the arch boards. I have read the wiki and th eboards but can resolve this. All I can think of now is there maybe a hardware issue on my machine?

Its a bit beyond my experience level right now. But I am gunna solve this!
Click to expand...
Oh they can't be worse than Ripley... can they? ;)
 
Dason

Dason

Ambassador to the humans
#49
#49
Xorg errors aren't fun to deal with. Have you made any progress?

I didn't like the way I originally set up my partitions so I reinstalled with a simpler scheme (just separate partitions for / and /home) and this time didn't install gnome. So I'm rocking xfce and have R installed and have customized xfce a fair bit. I don't have a display manager at the moment but I think I'll install slim later. I decided to go with a dark theme. Right now I'm thinking about if I want to install NetworkManager or just use the base tools. I also need to decide on a music program. I'll post some screenshots later as per bugman's request but I'm being beckoned for dinner at the moment.
 
bugman

bugman

Super Moderator
#50
#50
No, no sucess. This time Im really stumped.

Should l try repartioning my drives? Do I need a swap sda? I read somewhere that it could be a driver issue...

like I said, I'm stumped.
 
bugman

bugman

Super Moderator
#52
#52
Thanks for your patience Dason.

I actulaly didnt do this step, witch might explain a few things. The tutorials I have been using were obviously on a VM and I forgot to refer back to the wiki!

Also, I already installed gnome. Do I need to uninstall this before I install the driver or can I just proceed?
 
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Dason

Dason

Ambassador to the humans
#53
#53
Yeah - you need to install some sort of driver first. If you were on a virtualbox you wouldn't need to do this but since you aren't you definitely need to. The steps outlined there should be easy enough to follow along with but if you just want to get something working right away and don't care about any 2d/3d acceleration then you could just install the vesa driver
Code: 
pacman -S xf86-video-vesa
On my laptop I have an ATI card so instead of installing vesa I did
Code: 
pacman -S xf86-video-ati
and after that things *should* work.
 
Dason

Dason

Ambassador to the humans
#54
#54
bugman wanted screenshots so here's one of just my desktop


I have a dark theme going. I haven't decided if I want to use NetworkManager or not yet so for the time being I'm just using netctl.

And with some windows open

I haven't got everything set up exactly the way I want it but it's a nice usable system at the moment.
 
bugman

bugman

Super Moderator
#56
#56
Didn't work Dason.

I just get three new errors:

xinit: giving up (me too, Ive given my best shot)
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Connection refused
xinit server error

running "lspci | grep VGA

says I have a VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Coroporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200 64M] (rev a1) if this helps at all.

Also, my laptop is a 32bit machine.


This is causing me to consume unessecarily large amounts of Guiness.
 
TheEcologist

TheEcologist

Global Moderator
#57
#57
bugman said:
Didn't work Dason.

I just get three new errors:

xinit: giving up (me too, Ive given my best shot)
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Connection refused
xinit server error

running "lspci | grep VGA

says I have a VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Coroporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200 64M] (rev a1) if this helps at all.

Also, my laptop is a 32bit machine.


This is causing me to consume unessecarily large amounts of Guiness.
Click to expand...
Have you tried installing the NVIDIA proprietary drivers?

I immediately did that, as my experience has been that they function better - although a new kernell update can break them which is frustrating.
 
Dason

Dason

Ambassador to the humans
#59
#59
Nice!

I mentioned this in the chatbox but I decided to go away from the dark theme. The themes I was using didn't provide a gtk3 theme which meant it would fallback to an ugly ugly default for gtk3 apps. So I'm now using http://www.jpfleury.net/en/software/clearlooks-phenix.php which I got through AUR (as suggested by https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK+#GTK.2B_3.x )

Speaking of AUR - how are you guys installing packages from the AUR? By hand or are you using a helper. I'm using yaourt mainly.
 
bugman

bugman

Super Moderator
#60
#60
Better late than never:

things to do still: (any help appreciated)

1) install rstudio not as inuative as I hoped
2) start DE automatically at startup (again - finding this difficult to resolve)
3) apply my awsome conkys from main system
4) tweak icons and themes....

PHHHHHEWWWW!

This super fast on my 11 yr old laptop!
 
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