General Linux Chat and Small Questions v. I broke my Arch Install - Hardware & Software

I've had "figure out FFmpeg screen casting" on my todo list for a really long time. Technically it's not that hard to figure out, but FFmpeg has so many options and I've seen so many variations on commands that I could never figure out what the "correct" options were. Well finally someone edited the Arch wiki article on FFmpeg to include a nice, simple example: [url]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FFmpeg#Screen_cast[/url] Which was almost perfect except they were missing the -video_size option, so I added that to the wiki and finally updated my [URL="https://github.com/silverhammermba/scripts/blob/master/capture.rb"]FFmpeg wrapper script[/URL], which uses xwininfo to record a single window. It feels so good to finally figure something like this out.

[QUOTE=Birdman101;44276786]Well, ive finally gotten around to installing fedora 20 on my desktop so i can dual boot with windows 8.1. I know my way around linux and terminal fairly well, as ive taken a few linux classes at my tech school. The only thing is, now that i got it installed and set up, what do? Basically what are some cool awesome things i can do with it? Also is there steam for fedora yet?[/QUOTE] Steam is on the RPMFusion repositories. [URL]http://rpmfusion.org/[/URL] These repositories contain all the shit that don't agree with Fedora's release philosophy. Steam isn't free software according to them, so they don't ship it. So you get it from rpmfusion. There's a lot of other cool stuff on rpmfusion, like drivers and other "non free" programs. Once you add that repository, you install the stuff with [B]yum install[/B] like anything else. I think they will also show up in GNOME Software. Speaking of GNOME, you should check their extension website. (I'm guessing you're using GNOME since that's Fedora's default ((and honestly the best reason to use Fedora since they get all major GNOME releases first))) [URL]https://extensions.gnome.org/[/URL] There's lots of cool extensions on here for GNOME. You should also install gnome-tweak-tool to manage them. The guy who made the Numix themes also made Fedy, which is sort of a management tool for Fedora. It can help automate some Fedora tasks. [URL]http://satya164.github.io/fedy/[/URL] I don't really like Fedora, so that's about where my knowledge ends!

Sweet, thanks

[QUOTE=Birdman101;44276786]Well, ive finally gotten around to installing fedora 20 on my desktop so i can dual boot with windows 8.1. I know my way around linux and terminal fairly well, as ive taken a few linux classes at my tech school. The only thing is, now that i got it installed and set up, what do? Basically what are some cool awesome things i can do with it? Also is there steam for fedora yet?[/QUOTE] [url]http://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php?title=Fedora[/url] I wrote a large part of that page and it should take you though the basics

If you're going to use Flash on Fedora (or Linux in general) I would recommend Pipelight over the native Flash plugin [URL]http://fds-team.de/cms/pipelight-installation.html#section_1_5[/URL] The native plugin isn't updated anymore (nor is Gnash) and it's a resource hog. The Windows version actually works better on Linux. Both are propietary software, so if you were planning on installing Flash anyway, this isn't much of a leap [editline]18th March 2014[/editline] Pipelight has the added benefit of supporting Silverlight as well

[QUOTE=rilez;44280391]If you're going to use Flash on Fedora (or Linux in general) I would recommend Pipelight over the native Flash plugin[/QUOTE] Or Chromium with [url]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-pepper-flash[/url] [editline]18th March 2014[/editline] Does anyone know of any good voice recognition software for Linux? I don't care so much about dictation; something that can be scripted to recognize specific commands would be sufficient.

There's gnome-voice-control and VEDICS for GNOME. That's all I know... most voice recognition programs under Linux are very old/unsupported

Made my first PKGBUILD today. Well, sorta. Menulibre is way out of date on the AUR, so I fixed the dependencies and source location/package name. [URL]http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=acEvL9fP[/URL] [URL]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/menulibre/[/URL] Is there a way I can update this AUR file? Or do I have to wait for the maintainer to fix it? He hasn't updated in a year... [editline]18th March 2014[/editline] Now it's crashing when I save a launcher, dammit. Can someone on Arch test this for me/help figure out what's wrong?

[QUOTE=rilez;44282485]Made my first PKGBUILD today. Well, sorta. Menulibre is way out of date on the AUR, so I fixed the dependencies and source location/package name.[/QUOTE] According to this: [url]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR#Q:_Foo_in_AUR_is_outdated.3B_what_do_I_do.3F[/url] You should e-mail the maintainer and, if he doesn't respond, you can volunteer to be his replacement (since it's been quite a while since it was updated).

[QUOTE=rilez;44279309]There's a lot of other cool stuff on rpmfusion, like drivers and other "non free" programs.[/QUOTE] What's with the quotes? Non-free is a real term. Debian doesn't contain non-free software by default either, you have to change your sources.list to allow non-free software to be downloaded. [QUOTE=Mega1mpact;44280198][url]http://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php?title=Fedora[/url] I wrote a large part of that page and it should take you though the basics[/QUOTE] How much traffic is rms.sexy getting nowadays? I keep seeing it linked bloody everywhere.

[QUOTE=nikomo;44284108]What's with the quotes? Non-free is a real term. Debian doesn't contain non-free software by default either, you have to change your sources.list to allow non-free software to be downloaded.[/QUOTE] Meant to differentiate non-free as in Fedora's stance on free software, so not to confuse it for paid software. I guess it didn't need quotes. I don't like their stance on free software though. True freedom is giving the user a choice. I guess they're under no obligation to make it an easy choice, but that's why I've come to appreciate Arch so much. I consider Arch to be more free in that sense. [editline]18th March 2014[/editline] Iceweasel being the most blatant, annoying case of this

holy hot damn tit-nibling shit. why didnt I install linux sooner? I just spent 5 minutes cheesing out over how I can use a drop-down terminal by pressing tilde, like console in source engine. Everything just feels extremely comfortable. If it weren't for most steam games not having linux support, I would easily use this as my main OS.

[QUOTE=Birdman101;44285488]holy hot damn tit-nibling shit. why didnt I install linux sooner? I just spent 5 minutes cheesing out over how I can use a drop-down terminal by pressing tilde, like console in source engine. Everything just feels extremely comfortable. If it weren't for most steam games not having linux support, I would easily use this as my main OS.[/QUOTE] What distro are you using? + Custom stuff if it applies like what WM/DE.

Fedora 20, GNOME, and the drop down terminal extension. Speaking of such, I feel like a fucking genious now. On win8.1 I have steam installed to a second hard drive. On fedora, I installed steam then mounted the second hard drive in a folder with execute permission, then set steam to use the existing steam library.

[QUOTE=Birdman101;44285488]holy hot damn tit-nibling shit. why didnt I install linux sooner? I just spent 5 minutes cheesing out over how I can use a drop-down terminal by pressing tilde, like console in source engine. Everything just feels extremely comfortable. If it weren't for most steam games not having linux support, I would easily use this as my main OS.[/QUOTE] For games, check out Wine. Play on Linux is a program that will help install games/programs from Windows [url]http://appdb.winehq.org[/url] [url]www.playonlinux.com/[/url] Valve released an open source version of their DirectX to OpenGL translation layer, so the games will only get here quicker (The announcement that really amazed me was Cryteks commitment to Linux... considering the fidelity of their games...) [editline]19th March 2014[/editline] The Wine team is also actively working on DX10 support

I've only really used arch mainly because of the package manager. Are there any other distros with a comparable package manager?

[QUOTE=reevezy67;44285941]I've only really used arch mainly because of the package manager. Are there any other distros with a comparable package manager?[/QUOTE] That depends on what you expect from a package manager. Most package managers from major distributions can do the same shit that pacman and yaourt can do.

[QUOTE=nikomo;44284108]How much traffic is rms.sexy getting nowadays? I keep seeing it linked bloody everywhere.[/QUOTE] During the weekend between 20 and 27 requests per second and during weekdays between 5 and 15 requests per second depending on the time. So I guess it's a lot. I'm not using any analytics tools on the site because I know RMS would not approve. So I don't know how many unique visitors etc except from a rough estimate by counting stuff like 200 responses from the server when the favicon is requested. But it's hard to count this because if I gunzip the odl logs the total size would be around 1 GByte

[QUOTE=Birdman101;44285654]On fedora, I installed steam then mounted the second hard drive in a folder with execute permission, then set steam to use the existing steam library.[/QUOTE] If you're dual booting, this is not recommended. [URL]https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/blob/master/RelNotes.md[/URL] I used to do it anyway, but I noticed that Steam had to download tons of updates every time I switched OSes. I guess because Linux and Windows kept overwriting each others' files. [editline]19th March 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=mastersrp;44286045]That depends on what you expect from a package manager. Most package managers from major distributions can do the same shit that pacman and yaourt can do.[/QUOTE] AFAIK what makes pacman different is that it works with Arch's rolling release model. In contrast to, say, Ubuntu where you need to run a separate upgrade process every few months in order to have a completely up-to-date system.

pacman is much faster than apt. Seriously, apt-get update takes forever. pacman also has pkgbuild support. So you can make your own builds, and install them with pacman. Then you can also uninstall those packages with pacman. Not necessarily pacman related, but Arch users have the AUR (which uses pacman to install packages). Probably the biggest Linux repository for building source packages, which also means more up to date packages than say Ubuntu (which depends on your Ubuntu version, whereas Arch always has new packages). Ubuntu has big dependency issues. Try installing the latest Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu. If you use xswat or even edgers you have to upgrade all the packages in that repository to use them, which can break all sorts of things (because the system files in those repositories are generally unstable). So on Ubuntu if you want drivers that aren't a year old, you have to install unstable, fairly untested system dependencies. On Arch, those are current and stable, and are available in the [B]DEFAULT[/B] repositories. Arch is great for so many reasons, but the combination of rolling release, pacman, and the AUR is really awesome. apt doesn't even come close. [editline]19th March 2014[/editline] Did I mention apt is slow? If you want up to date software on Ubuntu, you have to add a bunch of PPAs to get that software. Everybody uses god damn PPAs, the community repo on Ubuntu is a joke. All those PPAs just make apt update take even longer. Especially if one of the repos is slow. The community repo on Arch is awesome and has a majority of what you could want (some off the top of my head are numix themes, icon packs like faenza, emulators like pcsx2 and dolphin, etc) and the AUR has everything else

I prefer yum but pacman seems ok from what I've heard

You really should try it. I can't ever see myself using yum again, knowing what I can do with pacman and the AUR. I've tried Fedora a few times since, and it's always seemed so much slower. I've used Ubuntu, Ubuntu derivatives, Fedora, Debian, even tried SUSE. I think Arch is actually the easiest to use, once you get past the large barrier to entry. That's part of the reason I'm making Cinpli; to apply the KISS philosophy to a working DE.

Apt is slow, but AUR isn't a straight-up advantage, it has too many problems. You can run into cases where software you want isn't in the official repositories, but is on AUR, but the package on AUR is out-of-date so the compile will fuck up because of changed dependencies etc. etc. Compare it to Debian, where the person building the project will just hand you a .deb, or a repo that contains package that have already been compiled. Arch and AUR can work fine for some people, didn't work out for me, so I use Debian sid, the packages are more up-to-date than what you get in Ubuntu, and not just "package hits sid and ends up in latest Ubuntu in two weeks" up-to-date, I mean months. But the universal truth is that you're a moron if you're not using a rolling release distro (like Debian sid/testing, or Arch).

I've never really encountered a situation where something wasn't in the official repos on Arch, but was on Debian/Fedora, unless it was explicitly something like an Ubuntu package, or a Debian port (Iceweasel, Icedove). Most of the stuff you get on the AUR is something you'd get in a third party Debian repo (difference being I don't have to sync an extra repository every time I update). You can run into dependency issues, sure. Major packages though tend to have great maintainers (I think of things like the ttf-googlefonts-git project, firefox-nightly, gimp-dev, etc). 95% of the time there's no issue, since a lot of PKGBUILDs just pull from git/bzr anyway. The applications I usually have problems with are actually Ubuntu packages. I posted menulibre earlier for example. Turns out it wasn't an issue on my end, menulibre is actually having an issue with gnome-menus, even on Ubuntu. Some Ubuntu applications that rely on Ubuntu services being installed will not work. It depends which distro it's designed for, and how dependent it really is. I think the benefits outweigh any negatives. There's definitely no easier platform to download and install nightly/dev/daily builds of programs for Linux. Also, the AUR/makepkg compiles .pkg.tar.xz files. These install the same as .deb or .RPM files. And there are technically third party repositories for Arch, I just never feel the need to use them (since official support is very good)

Ubuntu users can be an endless source of amusement. [url]http://askubuntu.com/questions/435887/i-can-read-from-dev-null-how-to-fix-it[/url] I'd be really interested to see how quickly that would break a system.

Regarding package manager, I'm personally pretty fond of SliTaz' tazpkg and also cookutils. That, and tazdev, provides the ability to create your own distributions, built packages from source, setup a build bot, install packages blazingly fast, and maintain the tools easily (since they're just Busybox Ash scripts). [editline]19th March 2014[/editline] Oh, and tazdev provides easy configuration of chroot basesystems.

[QUOTE=Larikang;44290556]Ubuntu users can be an endless source of amusement. [url]http://askubuntu.com/questions/435887/i-can-read-from-dev-null-how-to-fix-it[/url] I'd be really interested to see how quickly that would break a system.[/QUOTE] [quote]Since, this gave me a Permission denied Error; I went ahead and used sudo as I normally do whenever I encounter a Permission denied error.[/quote] Welcome to the end of our civilization. Would you like to end our civilization? Permission denied. sudo kill -9 $(pidof civilization)

[QUOTE=rilez;44288431]There's definitely no easier platform to download and install nightly/dev/daily builds of programs for Linux.[/QUOTE] I dunno, the AUR requires going to the website and grabbing the PKGBUILD (or installing something like yaourt). On Gentoo you just put a line in a plain text file and run an update on your package, since most of the "packages" (live ebuilds) are in the main Portage tree (a few are sectioned off into overlays for reasons that are beyond me). It's been a while since I used a live ebuild though, I don't remember if they automatically update with world or not.

Well pretty much everything is in the official repos, if you need something from the AUR you can install a helper to make it dead simple.

Argon and Pamac are both excellent AUR helpers. Pamac functions basically the same way as Synaptic, and both of them can update AUR packages [editline]20th March 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=lavacano;44295631]I dunno, the AUR requires going to the website and grabbing the PKGBUILD (or installing something like yaourt). On Gentoo you just put a line in a plain text file and run an update on your package, since most of the "packages" (live ebuilds) are in the main Portage tree (a few are sectioned off into overlays for reasons that are beyond me). It's been a while since I used a live ebuild though, I don't remember if they automatically update with world or not.[/QUOTE] Not to mention, Arch has the advantage of prebuilt packages: Gentoo [t]http://i.imgur.com/3WOvdwH.png[/t] Arch [t]http://i.imgur.com/xJNDh2e.png[/t] [editline]20th March 2014[/editline] This is what Pamac looks like: [t]http://i.imgur.com/MP5kiJl.png[/t] Pretty easy for anyone who has used Synaptic before