Archive for July 9, 2009

Update 20090709 pm – installed crunchbang

Posted in MTP, acer aspire one, crunchbang, emacs, gnu screen, ratpoison on July 9, 2009 by lucky

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.

screenshot-0001

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

Posted in acer aspire one, crunchbang on July 9, 2009 by lucky

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.