General Linux Chat and Small Questions v. Year of the Linux Desktop!

[TheCreeper]

[QUOTE=DerpishCat;47708748]Cinnamon is garbage[/QUOTE]

Please elaborate.

[killerteacup]

[QUOTE=TheCreeper;47716023]Please elaborate.[/QUOTE]

Is cinnamon the one with the super annoying pause between clicking the start button and the menu opening? Because if so that's pretty janky

[rilez]

[QUOTE=TheCreeper;47716023]Please elaborate.[/QUOTE]

It's a fairly buggy fork of Gnome Shell. Its also pretty resource heavy, for what it is. It uses the same WM/Compositer as Gnome (but forked, so you don't get upstream fixes) and you can't use your own

They use JavaScript for all their extensions, so having a bunch of applets slows it down even more. And their system for actually installing new themes/applets is also bad, because its through their own service, which is also really slow

You can get GNOME to do all the same stuff with extensions, and then you get all their upstream fixes. Cinnamon has a slow release cycle, and they're not very good at showing what they're working on

[mastersrp]

[QUOTE=rilez;47716172]It's a fairly buggy fork of Gnome Shell. Its also pretty resource heavy, for what it is. It uses the same WM/Compositer as Gnome (but forked, so you don't get upstream fixes) and you can't use your own

They use JavaScript for all their extensions, so having a bunch of applets slows it down even more. And their system for actually installing new themes/applets is also bad, because its through their own service, which is also really slow

You can get GNOME to do all the same stuff with extensions, and then you get all their upstream fixes. Cinnamon has a slow release cycle, and they're not very good at showing what they're working on[/QUOTE]

I'm pretty sure GNOME uses JavaScript for all their extensions too though?

[Trekintosh]

I need some quick Linux help with my Raspberry Pi. I'm using it as a looping video player that responds to external stimuli(A motion sensor). I've got almost everything working, the only thing I've yet to figure out is how to keep the screen black when it switches video. Is there a way to just make the screen black at all times except when it's playing video. I'm using a Node.JS script and OMXPlayer to play the video, if that matters. I need to be able to do this automatically from boot, as well.

[Darkwater]

You could disable the TTYs. Not sure how, though.

[Trekintosh]

What's a TTY?

[rilez]

[QUOTE=mastersrp;47716797]I'm pretty sure GNOME uses JavaScript for all their extensions too though?[/QUOTE]

A lot of GNOME shell is JavaScript. The problem is that Cinnamon is a lot more JavaScript on top of a forked version of GNOME shell. The applets add even more bloat.

Cinnamon just isn't useful/different enough to be worth a fork

[nikomo]

i3 is life, i3 is love

[rilez]

[QUOTE=Trekintosh;47717895]I need some quick Linux help with my Raspberry Pi. I'm using it as a looping video player that responds to external stimuli(A motion sensor). I've got almost everything working, the only thing I've yet to figure out is how to keep the screen black when it switches video. Is there a way to just make the screen black at all times except when it's playing video. I'm using a Node.JS script and OMXPlayer to play the video, if that matters. I need to be able to do this automatically from boot, as well.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Darkwater124;47718226]You could disable the TTYs. Not sure how, though.[/QUOTE]

Don't disable the TTY, just reroute the messages

Add these to your bootloader cmdline (for Rasb. Pi, you should have a file at /boot/cmdline.txt)

console=ttyx (replace x with a number greater than 1 but less than 6)
loglevel=3
vt.global_cursor_default=0

console=tty[B]3[/B] for example would reroute all console messages to the [B]third[/B] console, which you would access by pressing CTRL+ALT+[B]F3[/B]. loglevel=3 hides all kernel log messages, except for important ones. vt.global_cursor_default=0 disables the text cursor.

[vlad]

don't suppose anyone knows how to get two different wallpapers for two monitors in gnome?

[Trekintosh]

[QUOTE=rilez;47718971]Don't disable the TTY, just reroute the messages

Add these to your bootloader cmdline (for Rasb. Pi, you should have a file at /boot/cmdline.txt)

console=ttyx (replace x with a number greater than 1 but less than 6)
loglevel=3
vt.global_cursor_default=0

console=tty[B]3[/B] for example would reroute all console messages to the [B]third[/B] console, which you would access by pressing CTRL+ALT+[B]F3[/B]. loglevel=3 hides all kernel log messages, except for important ones. vt.global_cursor_default=0 disables the text cursor.[/QUOTE]

Very helpful but I still have this here after it automatically logs in. Up until then it was great. Any help?

[t]http://i.imgur.com/axRBWgt.jpg[/t]

[editline]13th May 2015[/editline]

Oh and the raspberries are still there as well if you don't go to a different console and back:

[t]http://i.imgur.com/R0F5Sbj.jpg[/t]

[rilez]

Check to make sure there's only one entry for "console=ttyx" and that you've set it to something higher than 1

If that doesn't work, post the file

[editline]13th May 2015[/editline]

To remove the raspberries, add "logo.nologo"

[Trekintosh]

There's 'console=ttyAMA0, 115200'. Removing that still leaves the raspberries and login message.

[editline]13th May 2015[/editline]

I'm using [url=http://www.opentechguides.com/how-to/article/raspberry-pi/5/raspberry-pi-auto-start.html]this tutorial[/url] to automatically log in, does that cause a problem?

Here's my cmdline.txt:

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty3 loglevel=3 vt.global_cursor_default=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p6 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

[rilez]

I don't think so. Run "touch .hushlogin" from your home directory.

And then "logo.nologo" in /boot/cmdline.txt should get rid of the raspberries

[Trekintosh]

So close! Now it's just got the command prompt left. It doesn't look pretty when "pi@raspberrypi ~ $" is in the corner in bright green every time the video changes :v:

[lavacano]

well what colors do you want?

[editline]13th May 2015[/editline]

also what shell are you using? if you don't know, "echo $SHELL"

[Thelurker1234]

Trying to reinstall something else over my broken current trisquel install. I'm fairly certain I have my bios set to boot from USB if possible, but it doesn't boot to either USBs. And the bios pop up, but they go straight to grub even if I press f2 or f4 which are setup and recovery (laptop) respectively. Any ideas on what I can do to get it to let me select boot device? The USB lights flash which I think should suggest that they are getting power from the PC.

If there's nothing I could take the hard drive out, put it in my desktop and format it from there, though that's a bit of a pain so I'd like to avoid it.

[Trekintosh]

[QUOTE=lavacano;47720319]well what colors do you want?

[editline]13th May 2015[/editline]

also what shell are you using? if you don't know, "echo $SHELL"[/QUOTE]

I want them to be gone. I'm using /bin/bash, apparently.

[rilez]

Add

export PS1=""

To your .bashrc file in your home directory. Really though, you shouldn't have to do that, most of this should be directed to the tty you specified. Your login script could be causing problems

[editline]14th May 2015[/editline]

Keep in mind that if you do that, you won't have a prompt anymore

[Trekintosh]

Can I run a script without logging in? If it's a login problem, I'm happy to just skip that.

[editline]13th May 2015[/editline]

Thanks for the help by the way, this is a mission critical device and it's the first time I'm using Linux ever, so I'm basically bumbling between tutorials and people who know more than I do.

[lavacano]

[QUOTE=rilez;47721220]Add

export PS1=""

To your .bashrc file in your home directory. Really though, you shouldn't have to do that, most of this should be directed to the tty you specified. Your login script could be causing problems

[editline]14th May 2015[/editline]

Keep in mind that if you do that, you won't have a prompt anymore[/QUOTE]

Then it'd be better (assuming he wants to see where he's typing) to do:

export PS1="\u@\h \w \$ "

assuming i remember my bash PS1s right

[Trekintosh]

I solved the problem by changed the text colors all to black in my cmdline.txt and commentingout force_color_prompt=yes in my /home/pi/.bashrc file. Now I have a glorious black screen!

[del]One final problem has occured and it's rather crippling though. To facilitate looping, what I've done is made a new omxplayer instance open with my node.js module, omxdirector. Unfortunately, this seems to cause a white flash for a single frame, and I'm not sure what is possible to do to fix it. If there's any help at all, I'd greatly appreciate it. This is going to kill our project otherwise.[/del]

HAHAHA IT WASN'T OMXPLAYER! IT WAS THE VIDEOS! The knucklehead who outputted them as MP4's left a dead frame at the end of each one with no video data on it. Once I went into AfterEffects myself and did it, I shortened each video one frame and now it works perfectly.

[Lily]

Holy shit. NixOS with KDE5 is the first Linux system I've used that actually feels [B]good[/B] to use on a desktop.

And I can reproduce most of the setup on my laptop just by copying the configuration over and re-installing a few packages.

[lavacano]

I'm waiting for feature completeness before migrating to KDE 5 myself. I learned my lesson from KDE 4's launch.

Good to know KDE 5 is just as quality as KDE 4 though.

[rilez]

What's the advantage of NixOS's weird package management system? Is it simple to use?

Will it break things that rely on typical Unix file structures?

[killerteacup]

According to the website it doesn't have a /lib, /bin and /usr, or maybe they're encrypted or something. Sure seems like it would break typical file structures

[editline]15th May 2015[/editline]

I'd just use kubuntu 15.04 tbh, it uses KDE5

[Lily]

The point is that the package management is almost completely functional. This also means that the traditional /lib, /bin/, /usr, etc structure doesn't really make sense. Instead everything is stored immutably in /nix/store/.

If I want to update to Linux 4.0, all I have to do is add

boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_4_0;

To my configuration.nix and run `nixos-rebuild boot`. That'll download/build the new kernel, rebuild all kernel modules, put everything in /nix/store (without removing anything) and set the new generation as the default to boot. If the update somehow goes pear-shaped, I can just boot the last generation and everything is back exactly to how it was. If I want to free up disk space, I can remove previous generations and collect garbage.

It's pretty hard to actually break a NixOS system. There are a whole bunch of other great features as well (like nix-shell and being able to install packages per-user without being root).

[mastersrp]

What if you're a developer who wants to create and run a program? How is that done with Nix?

[Lily]

[QUOTE=mastersrp;47729583]What if you're a developer who wants to create and run a program? How is that done with Nix?[/QUOTE]

You should be able to invoke gcc, clang, etc normally. You can also create a default.nix with something like this:

let
    pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
    stdenv = pkgs.stdenv;
in stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
    name = "dev";
    buildInputs = [ pkgs.gnumake pkgs.clang ];
}

Then you can run nix-shell and it will automatically install make and clang (if you don't have them) and put them in your path.

Distributing binaries will get a bit weird though since the interpreter and RPATH are per-install (and have to be patched to install binary blobs), but you can use patchelf to fix that up.