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

[QUOTE=esalaka;41169961]Infinality is just about the best thing you could do to your font rendering.[/QUOTE] I looked into Infinality, but I couldn't find very many side-by-side comparisons, and the ones I did see mainly looked "different" rather than "better". I like the idea in theory, but the difference seems too subtle for me to see.

[QUOTE=PelPix123;41244791]I just wanted to take a moment to say that I appreciate XFCE. I've used essentially every other DE and window manager, and nothing is nearly as good (Although Cinnamon is a close second and would be much better if some of the problems in Muffin were addressed).[/QUOTE] XFCE was part of my first Linux experience and I used it exclusively for over a year, I've recently moved to i3 but it will always have a special place in my heart.

[QUOTE=FlubberNugget;41244774]Debian has more support though. [editline]30th June 2013[/editline] Also not in the way of the canonical train[/QUOTE] Debian's packages are also ancient unless you are running sid.

Woke up this morning, disk with mounted /home partition died. Nice awakening.

[QUOTE=SupahVee;41249660]Woke up this morning, disk with mounted /home partition died. Nice awakening.[/QUOTE] Do you have any backups?

I'm gonna get a new laptop today-ish. I want to install arch on it. I'm not sure how to separate my partition. The thing has 1 320g ssd. I want to have a separate /home partition so I can reinstall with having the thing eat shit. I don't know if I should have a /boot partition. Also, the thing has 8 gigs of ram. Should I have a swap partition? I'm thinking I should go with LVM so I can resize my partitions easily. How do I split this thing? Any advice?

[QUOTE=Boris-B;41251419]I'm gonna get a new laptop today-ish. I want to install arch on it. I'm not sure how to separate my partition. The thing has 1 320g ssd. I want to have a separate /home partition so I can reinstall with having the thing eat shit. I don't know if I should have a /boot partition. Also, the thing has 8 gigs of ram. Should I have a swap partition? I'm thinking I should go with LVM so I can resize my partitions easily. How do I split this thing? Any advice?[/QUOTE] /boot > ext2 (100mb) / > ext4 (80GB) /home > ext4 (240GB) I'd partition it like this. I'm sure don't need 80gb on the root, especially on Archlinux.

What about LVM, should I bother with it?

I'm not that familiar with LVM, but f you want to try it, then go ahead.

[QUOTE=Boris-B;41251419]Should I have a swap partition?[/QUOTE] No. Not because of RAM, but because it's an SSD

-snip i should google more-

[QUOTE=lavacano;41252194]No. Not because of RAM, but because it's an SSD[/QUOTE] Why? SSDs have a much longer lifetime now than they did a bit ago. I don't see a reason why you shouldn't have swap. Besides, even if it did affect it dramatically by the time your current SSD dies from it, they will be so cheap it won't matter.

I finished installing arch on my laptop. So far everything works. I do have the odd problem I keep running into. I have slim and awesomewm installed. When I go to exit awesome (log out) everything is fine. Slim shows up and prompts me to log in. When I log in and log out again then slim doesn't show up. I end up in some wort of X limbo. My background is there and I can move my mouse, but anything awesome related is gone. When I looked at the processes running on the system I see that slim is running and X is it's child (running also). Also all the processes started by awesome (battery monitor & network manager) are orphaned. I have to kill X. At this point becomes a zombie but slime is still running. For some reason it doesn't query X's return code and X stays a zombie. I now have to kill slim. When that is done everything is semi normal. I have to run [code]systemctl restart slim[/code] and slim shows up again. I've been able to reproduce this a number of times on my laptop. It's always when I log out the second time. I've also noticed something that may not be a problem. When I log in and awesome is started I have the following process tree [code] slim - X -- awesome --- awesome [/code] The odd thing is that awesome has another instance of itself as a parent. It could just be that it forked itself. Any ideas? Can anybody else reproduce this?

[QUOTE=sabreman;41259137]Why? SSDs have a much longer lifetime now than they did a bit ago. I don't see a reason why you shouldn't have swap. Besides, even if it did affect it dramatically by the time your current SSD dies from it, they will be so cheap it won't matter.[/QUOTE] because swap is quite a huge number of disk operations, moreso than pretty much any other disk-related task your OS will do in its lifetime. SSDs may have a longer life, but swap will still shorten the hell out of that. [QUOTE=Boris-B;41259988]I do have the odd problem I keep running into.[/QUOTE] Did you post this before? Because I am having some serious deja vu right now

Anything with over 4GB of ram Doesen't really need SWAP. Except when you run a Server with resource intensive tasks.

[QUOTE=Boris-B;41259988]I finished installing arch on my laptop. So far everything works. I do have the odd problem I keep running into. I have slim and awesomewm installed. When I go to exit awesome (log out) everything is fine. Slim shows up and prompts me to log in. When I log in and log out again then slim doesn't show up. I end up in some wort of X limbo. My background is there and I can move my mouse, but anything awesome related is gone. When I looked at the processes running on the system I see that slim is running and X is it's child (running also). Also all the processes started by awesome (battery monitor & network manager) are orphaned. I have to kill X. At this point becomes a zombie but slime is still running. For some reason it doesn't query X's return code and X stays a zombie. I now have to kill slim. When that is done everything is semi normal. I have to run [code]systemctl restart slim[/code] and slim shows up again. I've been able to reproduce this a number of times on my laptop. It's always when I log out the second time. I've also noticed something that may not be a problem. When I log in and awesome is started I have the following process tree [code] slim - X -- awesome --- awesome [/code] The odd thing is that awesome has another instance of itself as a parent. It could just be that it forked itself. Any ideas? Can anybody else reproduce this?[/QUOTE] I'm not sure; slim always worked fine, but at one point I tried to go to open-source drivers and anything X related puked, so I had to use my usb recovery drive to disable slim so I could get to a VT and reinstall nvidia drivers. Ever since I've just logged in to a VT and run startx, which is exactly the same thing just without any flashy graphics and with the option to muck around in the VT instead.

[QUOTE=AMD Bulldozer;41249241]Debian's packages are also ancient unless you are running sid.[/QUOTE] Which you should be, unless you're putting it on a server of some sort

[QUOTE=lavacano;41260400] Did you post this before? Because I am having some serious deja vu right now[/QUOTE] It's possible. I do remember hitting a similar problem on my old laptop or on my desktop. I don't know if I made a post about it. I was able to kinda reproduce this on my desktop. I logged in logged out once, everything was fine. Then I did that again and I was dropped to a VT. Looking at alt-f7, slim wasn't running. I did a systemctl restart slim and it fixed itself.

nautilus and caja are utter shit. I was copying a 3,2 GB file to my USB Drive and as the file moved to the USB, the speed slowed down and it reached a point of no speed. This is very dissapointing. [editline]1st July 2013[/editline] Could I use any other application to move files? I spent like 1h 30 minutes trying to get this fucking file into my drive. What's up with nautilus?

[QUOTE=Ol' Pie;41265602]nautilus and caja are utter shit. I was copying a 3,2 GB file to my USB Drive and as the file moved to the USB, the speed slowed down and it reached a point of no speed. This is very dissapointing. [editline]1st July 2013[/editline] Could I use any other application to move files? I spent like 1h 30 minutes trying to get this fucking file into my drive. What's up with nautilus?[/QUOTE] There is Dolphin (Which normaly comes with KDE), or Nemo which comes with Linux Mint/Cinnamon. But Nautilius should work fine?

[QUOTE=Anderen2;41266004]There is Dolphin (Which normaly comes with KDE), or Nemo which comes with Linux Mint/Cinnamon. But Nautilius should work fine?[/QUOTE] It finally did, but took 30 minutes or so.

Fedora 19 has just been released :dance: [url]https://fedoraproject.org/[/url]

So I just made the switch from Windows to Linux on my main desktop \o/ I've installed KDE via aptitude (kde-plasma-desktop) but it's really unstable (crashes, glitches all the time, etc), can I get a more stable version somewhere or should I find another wm?

are you sure it's unstable because of the DE? Make sure your graphics drivers are fully updated.

[QUOTE=FlubberNugget;41283033]are you sure it's unstable because of the DE? Make sure your graphics drivers are fully updated.[/QUOTE] I've got a GTX 560 and installed the drivers through aptitude (nvidia-current), how do I make sure these are up to date?

Are you using Ubuntu or debian?

Ubuntu

Go to additional hardware drivers and install the experimental nvidia ones from there

Do you mean this? [img]http://i.imgur.com/m5dERPw.png[/img] I set it to the top one, pressed apply and my nvidia settings panel now looks like his: [img]http://i.imgur.com/eW8Yp8V.png[/img] I'll check if KDE has improved.

Yes, use 313 if you want the absolute latest drivers from Nvidia.