getting ready for crunchbang de-bloat, etc.

I haven’t changed things around much yet beyond what I wrote yesterday. I’ve started looking at what I can remove and what I’ll have to live with. Here’s a list of the things from dry runs I did earlier to see what I can do without causing major breakage:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 abiword abiword-common abiword-help abiword-plugin-grammar
 abiword-plugin-mathview gnumeric gnumeric-common gnumeric-doc
 libgoffice-0-6 libgoffice-0-6-common
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 10 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 60.4MB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 agave
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 1012kB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 claws-mail claws-mail-html2-viewer claws-mail-i18n claws-mail-pgpinline
 claws-mail-pgpmime claws-mail-trayicon tango-icon-theme-claws-mail-3.6.0
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 7 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 9720kB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 linux-headers-2.6.28-13 linux-headers-2.6.28-13-generic
 linux-headers-generic
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 74.7MB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 crunchbang-gwibber-theme gedit-plugins gwibber libmetacity0 metacity
 metacity-common python-gnome2-desktop
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 7 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 16.6MB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 nvidia-173-modaliases nvidia-180-modaliases nvidia-71-modaliases
 nvidia-96-modaliases nvidia-common
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 459kB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 libpurple-bin libpurple0 pidgin pidgin-data
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 28.9MB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 rhythmbox
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 14.5MB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 vim vim-gtk vim-gui-common vim-runtime xchat
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 30.2MB will be freed.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
 libexo-0.3-0 libthunar-vfs-1-2 libxfce4util4 libxfcegui4-4 libxfconf-0-2
 thunar-data xfburn xfconf
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 8 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 19.5MB will be freed.

I think I counted over 200MB and that’s without counting things like gpodder, which is of no use to me if MTP support is lacking for my S3 (so libmtp and mtp-tools will go), and a few other things in that list. I can also get rid of some of the CD/DVD tools (brasero if it’s not in that list above) since I don’t have any plans to start toting around a USB CD/DVD which will probably outweigh my AA1. My mini CDRW bit the dust when I was taking care of family last year. I haven’t been able to find another device this small and thumbdrives are big enough now that I don’t see any reason to get an external optical device. Even Microsoft is considering putting the Windows 7 installer on a USB drive to make installation easier for netbook users. What’s funny is, Microsoft may beat most of the big Linux distros to the punch — with most distros, live images can be put on USB media via external tools like unetbootin or Fedora’s live USB creator. There are only a handful which have USB-ready images that can be installed via simple scripts. I think that’s the future whether netbooks and nettops ever outsell traditional computers.

Yes, that’s the old CDRW next to my AA1. If anyone knows of a DVD-RW (or Blu-Ray!) this small, please let me know.

By the way, no problems like I had in Fedora yet with wifi even though I’ve tested suspend/resume. The only thing that continues to be an issue is the initial association with the wrong AP before it re-associates with my router. I really, really don’t like that but I haven’t looked to see what I can do to stop it. In addition to the stuff in dmesg, iwconfig shows the association with SSID=”the wrong one” and then after the nm-applet icon changes to show that it’s connected iwconfig shows SSID=”my router.”

I have some other things I have to take care of today and a busy evening, too. It might be tomorrow before I get down to business.

crunchbang – More JWM Screenshots

Here are a couple more screenshots. New shell is mksh. Added a few more entries to .jwmrc and also uncommented the Debian part of the default menu. I also moved the <Dock/> tag down so there’s not that big empty space between the applets and clock (compare this emacs shot to the next two).

Remembered to get “free -mt” after a reboot.

I also took the openbox keybindings out of the .conkyrc and added in the other mount points I want to see. I’ll probably set up something like xbindkeys so my keybindings are the same regardless of which window manager I use.

That’s it. I have some reports to finish so I can call it a day. Tomorrow I’ll probably start pruning some of the things from my list last night and see what I can do to keep NetworkManager — or whatever alternative I can find — from associating with any other AP before it connects to mine. I also need to see if I can find out what the problem is with libmto and mtp-tools and my S3; it’s not being detected at all under #! right now.

crunchbang update: jwm, aterm, acpi/wifi issues, and office software

Just had a little time to mess with #! while I grabbed a bite. I installed aterm, terminus (the X fonts weren’t installed in the base but the console fonts were), dillo, and jwm. Edited a quick jwmrc and had to add an entry in /usr/share/xsessions for it so I can choose it from gdm.

Why jwm? I got a look at the menu for openbox with the number of tags it uses for each entry — just too much. I mentioned in comments previously that jwm is much lighter and yet has the basic pieces (panel/tray, etc.). Plus I can set it up so things open without borders or title bars, etc. It just suits me better. No idea yet when I’ll install ratpoison or even if this means I’ll make more space by removing openbox, tint2, etc. Who knows.

I  unplugged to see if the power manager applet would pop up like it’s supposed to. For some reason, it doesn’t do anything until I cat for battery state. Similarly, there’s a delay with nm-applet looking for my SSID when I boot or resume from suspend. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to start until I do iwconfig. Coincidence? I don’t know but it’s okay for now.

Speaking of wifi, I noticed in dmesg that NetworkManager isn’t associating first to my AP but to another one without encryption. I thought the whole point of setting it up is so it would scan for what you have listed first. Not sure what to make of that. I need to see if I can blacklist any other router so it won’t inadvertently try to connect. It shouldn’t be promiscuous by default like that — it should scan for approved APs first and, if so desired (I don’t), connect to “any.” I’ll look into that more this weekend.

(Edit: Here’s the relevant part of dmesg showing the wrong initial association to another AP.

wlan0: authenticate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:78
wlan0: authenticated
wlan0: associate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:78
wlan0: RX AssocResp from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:78 (capab=0x401 status=0 aid=3)
wlan0: associated
wlan0: disassociating by local choice (reason=3)
wlan0: direct probe to AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx try 1
wlan0 direct probe responded
wlan0: authenticate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
wlan0: authenticated
wlan0: associate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
wlan0: RX AssocResp from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (capab=0x431 status=0 aid=1)

The wrong AP’s MAC ends with 78,  mine is the second set which are all Xs. It shouldn’t matter that my SSID is hidden and the much weaker signal isn’t encrypted. It should only associate with the AP which I’ve configured.)

Other than that, the few messages I’m getting about wlan0 appear to be normal and don’t look like the ones I had while running Fedora 10.

Finally, I was going to see if I could work on a couple spreadsheets in gnumeric before committing to installing OpenOffice.org instead. As I suspected, a lot of things broke when I opened in gnumeric. Now I’m looking at what all comes with the OOo package and wondering why the hell I keep doing this to myself. Guess what, pulseaudio is one of the dependencies. So are all kinds of fonts I’ll never use. Great. Just fucking great. I may hold off making any changes and only work on things from Windows until either I decide what I’m going to do in October or see if IBM will get the OOo-3.x-based version of Lotus Symphony (my favorite office suite; too bad the current version is based on OOo 1.x and not yet compatible with my OOo 3.x spreadsheets) out this year.

Update 20090710 am – trivial pursuits

I’m running later this morning (broad daylight for a change) so I have some time to poke around more with crunchbang.

Fiddling around with wallpaper and app settings and checking out overlap between apps and their features to see what can stay or go; btw, that wallpaper didn’t last long. I don’t think this terminator thing is for me running through python like this. That’s overkill and I don’t see what it offers that something lighter like mrxvt wouldn’t. I installed aterm and it uses about a quarter of the RAM of the instance of terminator running through python — which I’m sure pales in comparison to anything else it possibly requires (thinking gnome-this or gnome-that) that aterm doesn’t.

I’ve also lightened the load of services at boot. I’m still showing over 200MB in use at boot with free -mt; conky and htop report only the much lower cache amount. I’ll take a closer look later, and might also get around to removing some of the stuff on that list from last night.

Update 20090709 pm – installed crunchbang

I did some backups this afternoon and installed crunchbang. I made a few partition changes. One thing I almost regretted off the bat was only setting aside only 5GB for / and now it’s about half full. I have separate partitions for /home and /boot as well; this time I decided to go ahead and set up a really large FAT partition (mount point /windows in Linux, D: in Windows) to share data between operating systems. I transferred my music collection and some documents to the FAT partition and set up links (shortcuts) in Windows so everything is basically just as it was before.

I know, I know. That’s a little harder than Vivaldi and Schubert.

I have a few nits to pick. I love the fact #! has some of my favorite apps. I went to use naim and it’s configured to open in GNU screen. Fine, I can live with that. But after it showed that it was starting in screen, I did C-a c to open a new terminal instance within screen. Nothing happened. So I tried again. Then I opened another terminal to check. Sure as shit, screen was running but naim was running separate. WTF?! So I shut down naim, attached to the screen session, and tried to start naim again. It detached screen and started running on its own. I quit naim again and tried starting within screen again using the –no-screen flag, got some error messages, and then naim finally started within the screen session rather than outside it. I’ve used naim and screen so much that I know this shouldn’t be happening. I didn’t spend any time beyond that to see what was happening, but I have the most recent sources and I’ll probably go ahead and recompile it myself so that it functions the way I want it to.

Another thing, #! has a few remaining clues that it once offered xfce. I don’t know if some of those things are there as dependencies of something else. I saw libthunar-vfs* and xfburn (brasero is in the base as well) along with a couple libxfce* things. Could be in use, but I’m going to see what happens when I start de-bloating (heh) it this weekend.

Speaking of which, I went quickly through the list to find things to get rid of after installing emacs22-nox. Here’s the starting point. Maybe openoffice.org will fit when I’m done. 

abiword    
abiword-common   
abiword-help   
abiword-plugin-grammar  
abiword-plugin-mathview  
agave    
claws-mail   
claws-mail-html2-viewer  
claws-mail-i18n   
claws-mail-pgpinline  
claws-mail-pgpmime  
claws-mail-trayicon  
dwm    
dwm-tools   
gnumeric   
gnumeric-common   
gnumeric-doc   
gwibber    
inkscape   
jfsutils   
libgoffice-0-6   
libgoffice-0-6-common  
libgweather-common  
libgweather1   
libpurple-bin   
libpurple0   
libthunar-vfs-1-2  
libxfce4util4   
libxfcegui4-4   
linux-headers-2.6.28-13  
linux-headers-2.6.28-13-generic 
linux-headers-generic  
metacity   
metacity-common   
mutt    
mysql-common   
nano    
ndiswrapper-common  
ndiswrapper-utils-1.9  
nvidia-173-modaliases  
nvidia-180-modaliases  
nvidia-71-modaliases  
nvidia-96-modaliases  
nvidia-common   
pidgin    
pidgin-data   
rhythmbox   
tcl8.4    
thunar-data   
vim    
vim-common   
vim-gtk    
vim-gui-common   
vim-runtime   
vim-tiny   
xfburn    
xfsprogs   

 That’s subject to change – I don’t know what some of these (agave?) are and there may have been something else I overlooked as I quickly edited the list. I’ll leave any of those lynch-pin packages that look like they’ll remove half the system with them. I know I don’t need kernel headers. I love vim and mutt but I’d rather leverage emacs for all I can. I also like dwm but I doubt I’ll use it on my AA1, even though I’ll probably install ratpoison sooner than later.

My impressions over all are really positive. Surprisingly positive. I didn’t have a bunch of stupid icons to delete from either the desktop or the menu. I didn’t have to go find dubious codecs or closed source stuff (Skype, Flash) I want. I had a few services to shut off by default but that’s going to happen with just about any distro anymore.

That’s it for today. It’s bedtime.

Update 20090709: crunchbang uptime over nine hours

I left #! running overnight to see if I’d get any signs that my wifi would start flaking out. With about nine and a half hours of uptime, the only thing in dmesg was one “unsupported jumbo” notice. Sweet.

On the other hand, I checked free before I went to bed and again when I woke up and RAM use had increased significantly – from about 490MB to 820MB. That’s with nothing else but the default desktop and wireless running. I’d expect a little increase from logging, etc., but that seems a bit steep. Might be able to monitor that better this weekend and see what’s happening and if it’s worth any concern.

Despite that (and I’m not going to take off points until I know there’s a real problem or if it’s a price of running from USB without swap — no LVM support?), my impressions are pretty much favorable. Can’t believe I’m saying that about anything built on Ubuntu. Go figure.

Update 20090708 pm: More CrunchBang

Posting this while running crunchbang from USB. I have to admit I’m pretty impressed so far. It boots up with a minimalist look. It has a decent variety of default applications. Even the conkyrc is set up with a list of default keybindings so the user doesn’t have to click anything to get a menu or open an application. Nice touch.

I made a few tweaks, starting with “xsetroot -solid darkslategrey” and then moving conky down a few pixels so the tint2 bar (full width) could be  moved up.

I like the idea of sticking configuration files for things in the menu. I did similarly in some of my old jwm menus so I could change  things more easily when setting up themes and such. Another nice touch.

I also noticed when I logged out that dwm and dmenu are installed. The one thing I didn’t care for was the sound effect with gdm.

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the apps aren’t exactly my first choices. That’s fine. A few minutes with aptitude and everything should be okay. I just made a list of packages to sort through and see what I might want to change around. One thing I just tested and think I can toss is rhythmbox. It didn’t detect my S3 after I enabled the MTP plugin. I see libmtp is installed but not mtp-tools. No surprises in any of that.

As far as hardware goes, the Synaptics touch pad works fine and I’m not seeing any problems with the wireless card yet. The problem with that is, it occurs sporadically and (seemingly) spontaneously.

Eight hours ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d install this. Now I’m trying to figure out reasons — other than it’s based on Ubuntu — not to.

Update 20090708: crunchbang, etc.

Following up on a recommendation from kruce, I saw there was a new release of crunchbang (#!) and decided to download it since it’s been a while since I last looked at it. I wanted to see if it would work better on my AA1 than Fedora, particularly with the ath5k problem I’ve had. I also want to see how much lighter it is than Xubuntu.

I ran into a problem trying  to get the latest ISO:

Oh well. I’ll try again later. Even though it’s based on Ubuntu.

I’m seriously looking at alternatives to Fedora 10, including Fedora 11 despite some problems I’ve noticed (including broken Synaptics driver and requirement for ext4 root partition when installing from the live CD). I ran the KDE image again the other day. As much as I like KDE and its integration, it’s a bit much for my AA1’s lone GB of RAM. And I think I’d wait for PCLOS 2009.3 if I were really KDE-inclined.

More soon, maybe.

UPDATE 15:28 US/Central - 8 July 2009: Still no luck with the “official” download link which isn’t mirrored. The forum has torrent links and others are making the ISOs — some of them anyway (understandable since most people would ordinarily only download one or two depending on architecture and whether they want the regular ISO, the lite ISO, or both) — available on their servers. First success in starting the download from the main site resulted in failure; the server timed out and I couldn’t reconnect to it. I wanted to download the lite ISO but the only link I saw for it was via The Pirate Bay; that would require a change in DNS servers since my ISP blocks TPB. Trying to get the regular ISO now (really big thanks to those hosting). It’s very slow and tedious, though.

UPDATE 2 – 17:15 US/Central – 8 July 2009: (EDITED AND SCREENSHOTS ADDED) Got it downloaded and installed to USB thumbdrive via unetbootin. First boot was faster than I thought it would be. Default keyboard came up as GB, no problemo. Freaking NetworkManager again. Got connected to my router, no problem. Kept an eye for messages related to my Atheros card freaking out like in Fedora, but nothing in the short time I was running #!.  (I downloaded latest kernel sources to try and see if that fixes the problem with the card flaking out.)

Here are a couple screenshots. Nothing special, just screen and some pinging.

 

The RAM use in conky was cache, actual memory used was closer to 530 after running Firefox. That’s very admirable compared to other things I’ve run off USB.

Will I install? Ummm, don’t know yet. I want to give the lite version a spin first because this has some stuff on it that I’ll replace anyway. To its credit, it recognizes my hard drive as /dev/sda and the USB stick as /dev/sdb, which means it should install (e. g., GRUB) properly if I do put it on my hard drive.

Hiatus

Okay, final straw with this problem I’ve had recur several times now with suddenly losing wireless and no longer being able to even scan. I’ve mentioned this problem a couple times before. It starts in Linux and persists even when I reboot into Windows. It hasn’t ever happened to me in Windows alone — not before I installed Linux and not while running Windows. It only happens in Linux (specifically in Fedora).

There must be something dreadfully wrong with the ath5k driver in Linux or in any patches Fedora may apply to it or in NetworkManager. I didn’t look to see if there’s something in dmesg that might be helpful, but I did notice that iwconfig showed throttling at different transfer rates even when I manually set it down to 11MB. Then I’d look again a few minutes later and one time it’s at 1MB and the next it’s at 54MB.

I was running nm-applet and suddenly got a notice that I’d lost my network. Then it tried to reconnect. I was able to scan briefly while it tried to reconnect the first time, but it picked up only my SSID (there are at least six visible now in Windows) and showed a weak (12/100) signal strength (”EXCELLENT” in Windows). Then I got into this circular hell with the Gnome keyring dialog and then another one with my WPA settings. Meanwhile, scanning showed no visible networks anymore. The problem once again persisted when rebooting into Windows. I logged in, the wifi LED blinked a time or two, and then I got the icon in my system tray showing that I didn’t have wireless; it was unable to scan again, too.

This tells me that whatever the fuck is happening, it can’t be very good for my wifi card because a software-only issue should resolve when the system is rebooted. So it seems to be affecting the hardware. Is the card overheating? I don’t know. I mentioned before that the area above the card gets pretty hot when running Linux (I recall similar heat under other distros I’ve run). All I know is that I’m able to get things up and running again after resuming from suspend.

Between this craziness and the card readers issue, it’s getting easier to decide to upgrade to Windows 7 in a few months. I was hoping to be able to find an alternative, but right now I see too many problems to consider Linux a viable solution for me — especially if it turns out the problem is or could be deleterious to my hardware. Maybe this can be fixed somehow between now and October 22nd. Maybe not.

In the interim, my Linux-related posts may be less frequent than they’ve been the past few weeks because I honestly have no idea if or when I’m going to bother booting back into Fedora.

EDIT/UPDATE – 6 July 2009 – 22:05 US/Central: I read through some of the bug reports and need to doa little more homework to see if the Fedora kernel has the appropriate patches. If not, more work for me to do and I may go ahead and install Fedora 11 — or something else — with a newer kernel with the rewritten module and see if that works. If anyone reading this uses the ath driver in any of the BSDs, please leave comment about any issues with it (with or without the patch mentioned on the netbsd wiki’s Aspire One page).

Update 20090705 – services trimming, fluxbox tweaking, added xsel, dircolors, etc

I was going to install some ratpoison-friendly tools late (for me) last night but, as usual, they come with so much overhead that I decided against installing. These are things that work well regardless of window manager. I’d run into similar bloat issues back when I was using Debian on my old laptop — try to install something light and it comes with MBs of dependencies that aren’t needed unless you compile with every option. This is one of my biggest gripes against binary-based distros. For the convenience of not having to compile anything, you’re hostage to how others compile them for you.

This time the apps I wanted to add were xsel and xbindkeys; the dependencies in Fedora are guile and tcl/tk.

Had to say no. I think I can add xsel without guile or tcl/tk — I’ll check and see in a bit. (Edit…) Okay, I’ve installed xsel because it has no dependencies I didn’t already have installed. I could live with guile but I’m not going to install even more languages like tcl just to use one small app. Fedora comes with enough as it is. Why not streamline everything and use perl, python, or lua only? I think I installed ruby when I installed mew. I wish everything in open source was more standardized and more attention was paid to reducing dependencies so you don’t have disparate libs for disparate apps like this.

I also spent a little time last night trimming down services that start up in my favored run level. I decided to start CUPS manually since a lot of the time I’m not connected to my main printer or near enough one of the available network printers to get my stuff. I also shut off the NFS-related (rpc) services, IPV6, and a few others.

This morning I started on something totally unimportant except to Linux “reviewers” (especially the ones at distrowatch), aesthetics. I wanted something a little less dark. This is it for now. Whatthefuckever.

Of course, my terminal is still black and about 75% of what I do is in that (screen) so it doesn’t make much difference. I decided to alias ls to include dircolors in my mksh profile so I have a little more color there now. Not a big deal either way. Same information as before.

Since I added more stuff in my .xinitrc, it’s apples to oranges comparing initial RAM hits. At login, though, I’ve lost about 10 more MB. I know there are people who consider unused RAM a waste of resources, but I find it more wasteful to clog up RAM with things that won’t be used or which serve dubious purposes lacking any utilitarian value (including wobbling windows).

I still have more things to do with fluxbox configuration, especially adding more keybindings. It’s kind of awkward the way it’s set up now with some of the defaults. I also want to add more things to the menu to automate tasks.

That’ll all have to wait. I hadn’t planned on doing any of this last night or this morning. More during the week when (if) I find time.