Development of my desktop

 5

I just tweaked my desktop once again. I've been running i3 for quite some time now, so I looked a bit more closely at the advanced features I could use. So far I've added some scripts that would just read from sensors (a tiny tool that outputs some details about your temperature sensors). For the fun, I modified one of the default splashscreens (using fbcondecor) to show the CABAL humanoid computer from the good old Command & Conquer games series, hence the local name of my kernel. Thanks to my new NVIDIA GPU I can also play OpenRA now, although I don't really do. I just compiled it to show that it works. :D And finally, I built KVM into the kernel to enable hardware support for the Android emulator. Now it responds even faster than all the native devices I have (seen). :)

Getting settled...

6

It has been almost 3 months now since I last wrote, and here I come again with a bunch of new stuff.

First my excuse: I just moved to another town, and I'm damn happy with our new flat. It couldn't be any better, really!

Meanwhile, in a small case full of HDDs, a lonely CPU has been working and beeping hard. I am now...
Read More

Wayland - way to go!

 4

Sample screenshots taken from within Weston - once using the native tool, once using scrot (the grey image)
cyrevolt:
I've been testing Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, the new display server finally going to replace X.org, for a bit now. Today there was an announcement in the news http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTUzNTU that a new version of Rebecca Black OS - a i386 live CD for Wayland testing - has just been released. So I gave it a try. The screenshot on the left shows a browser rendered through Qt, the Dolphin file manager and a vte on one of the 4 desktops you can choose from. Hint: You can take a screenshot via the Super+s keyboard shortcut. Apparently scrot isn't able to grab the buffer properly though as you can see in the second image. It was designed for X11 anyway. I am really seeing Wayland fully featuring our desktops soon. Go try it out, too, if you like, download links can be found in the news article - or check out the project website on SF: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/

Reboot, root, and chroot

 4

ArchARM on HUAWEI U9200 (Ascend P1) featuring LXDE
cyrevolt:
Sorry for commenting on this a little late - last time SG was down for maintenance just when I wanted to write (once again :/). Anyway, I found a great tutorial on building an Arch chroot on ARM powered devices in the forums on http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1361&start=40 . My Phone is powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 processor so I chose the package http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-omap-smp-latest.tar.gz to get started with. It's really fun to try although it might get a little tricky from time to time. I put the image on my external sd card, and my phone had a hard time extracting the .tgz archive. So I did that on my laptop instead and reinserted the card into the phone. When I then installed further packages through pacman, i.e. lxde and tigervnc, it crashed a couple of times again and I had to fix the file system and manually delete pacman's db lock file, overwrite files, force reinstallation and so on. But as you can see in the first screenshot, the result is beautiful - and I could even capture the image through scrot from within the phone without the graphical glitches! I guess it's reading a different buffer than the Android apps, but I don't know much about it. I'm just happy it worked.

Bleeding edge won't bleed enough!

2

First of all, sorry for not posting for some time - I had my oral exam to pass on basics of theoretical computer science. And I did, yay! :)

Now there is the new version 4.4 of Android, aka Kitkat. This is the first time Google has chosen not a generic name but a brand's product name (Nestlé's). I don't see the purpose of this...
Read More

My first steps on BSD

2

Before I start complaining, I should mention that the issues I'm having for now aren't even half as bad as they would have been about a year and a half ago. So let's review: I had installed GhostBSD, taken a glance at how it might work in the background and read through the FAQs a bit. From my understanding, it is actually as closely related...
Read More

GhostBSD 3.5 "Levi" feat. MATE

 4
cyrevolt:
I've just installed another OS on my main laptop and it's actually the first time I'm exploring a BSD system. This is GhostBSD 3.5, featuring the MATE DE (a fork of GNOME2) and based on OpenBSD. You can download it from http://ghostbsd.org/ and try it yourself if you like. Not too long ago a podcast on BSD has started, already featuring 11 episodes: http://www.bsdnow.tv/ Tune in and find out about BSD! :)

Themes on Linux

 0
cyrevolt:
I care a lot about design - and that's one main reason I love Linux for! It is fairly easy to modify the looks of your windows, cursors, icons... whatever. Here's what I'm currently/mostly using: cursors: Cyclone (see deviantart); icons: Azenis (green, also found on deviantart); GTK2: Delorean Dark (green, also on deviantart and available in AUR); Firefox: Red Cats (green, from the addons page); Thunderbird: TT DeepDark (from the addons page). Colors for bash/mrxvt and i3 are configured manually. I hope you like it, *I* love it! ;) I've also set up GRUB2 to use the nice Arch Linux theme someone from the community has made and a customized theme for the LXDM login prompt based on the Arch Linux theme which again someone from the community has made. Both can be found in AUR. ;)

Bria on Arch Linux

 0

I finally got Bria running on Arch Linux 64-bit! :)
cyrevolt:
This was a real mess! I have really spent some hours getting things to work this time. Here's my 10-step-recipe: 1. Install dpkg. CounterPath offers 64-bit and 32-bit .deb packages. Accept it so far. 2. Install Bria 64-bit with all force flags: # dpkg -i Bria_3.2_68886_Ubuntu_amd64.deb --force-all 3. Exec Bria. Freak out because Bria doesn't seem to find some libs that *do* exist. [see 1st screenshot] 4. Run # file /usr/bin/bria to find out that the so-called "64-bit version" is an ELF 32-bit LSB executable. Freak out again. dpkg --info on the .deb file shows its dependencies on the respective 32-bit-libs as well. 5. Trace libs with # ldd /usr/bin/bria - some nerds search for books in a library. I prefer looking for whole libraries. Woohoo! [see 2nd screenshot for a before-after-comparison] 6. Find the correct libs through yaourt/pacman. Install from AUR: # yaourt lib32-gconf lib32-libxslt lib32-libidn lib32-libltdl 7. Freak out because gconf pulls in a hundred other dependencies and the compiler keeps on running for an hour. 8. Run ldd again to confirm all the libs can be located now. 9. Run Bria. Enter license key. Set up SIP account. Do a test call with g/f. Add STUN server configuration if inbound calls don't work properly. Make another test call. 10. Be happy and cool because everything works now! 8) By the way: On request the CounterPath support team answered me that Bria is only supported on Ubuntu systems. That's plainly bullshit since the ABI is the same - all you need is the correct libraries of course.
Load more