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pacman, the package manager that was created as fundamental feature of Arch Linux, has a long and successful development history. The pace of development might not be speedy but it’s always been very sensible.

Recently install hooks were introduced to pacman. In short this means, for example, that rather than each font package updating the font cache itself, the font cache is updated once when all the font installations are completed. It’s not ground breaking but it’s a neat, tidy and important solution.

However, I was bit concerned when the post-install script that builds the kernel initramfs wasn’t one of the first scriptlets moved to a hook. I was further dismayed when a discussion on arch-dev-public suggested that some developers might not see the point of doing so.

Part of the fun I have with Linux is fixing things. It probably doesn’t sound like fun but it can be a challenge that rewards with knowledge. However, when the problem is that you can’t boot, well, that’s no fun. It means rescue disks and chroot, and a second box to look up solutions on.

The most frequent cause of a non-booting Arch Linux system (after an update) is not having read the recent News Announcements or followed post-install messages. One time, though, I just got really unlucky. A module that needed to updated in the initramfs was installed after the kernel had been updated and the initramfs had already been rebuild. That really sucked. Since then I have rebuilt the initramfs manually after every system update has completed.

So, I was actually very relieved, when other developers did see the point of moving the scriptlet to a hook. This doesn’t fully solve the problem because that hook still needs to run after other hooks to be as bullet-proof as possible and the current process didn’t seem to support that. Fortunately, this was identified too.

Awesome.

This is great example of open source development going right. Too often it disintegrates in to disagreement and death by committee.

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Last night I had a bit of an epiphany and uninstalled Twitter from my tablet. I haven’t deleted my accounts or anything, I’ve just removed it as a possible “go to”. However, this wasn’t because, like many people, I’m starting to resent the distraction it causes but rather I’m starting to think I just don’t like the offer.

My grumbles centre on “algorithmic curation” i.e. the service decides what I’m interested in and promotes items in my news feed. The problem is that these algorithms don’t work on me. I don’t follow more than about 50 accounts on ANY service I use. There just isn’t enough data for these algorithms to make meaningful decisions on and so, to me, it’s totally arbitrary. That ruins the experience for me.

I mainly use social media to keep in touch with people that share my interests but that I don’t know personally. In the past I would have used forums for that sort of thing. Forums have become extremely tedious in recent years. There is so much risk of offence or upset in the face of poor wording or tone. Social media doesn’t seem to be blighted by that problem. It’s accepted that you’re stating an opinion and that opinion is your own. Having an opinion on a forum is a recipe for disaster.

Timeline curation was one of two things that ultimately pushed me away from Facebook. I just didn’t have confidence I could actually see everything my friends were saying, or that anyone was even seeing what I was posting. What an awful system. This morning I’m reading that Instagram is planning a similar approach. Apparently “the average user misses 70 percent of posts” so they think curation is important. I must be way below average then because I can not login to Instagram for a few days and catch up on every post in a few minutes. In that sense I don’t think curation on Instagram will be that much of an issue for me. There really is nothing to curate.

I’ve actually just logged in to Twitter to get an idea of just who I am following and, lo, the new timeline was just switched on for me. “Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline,” goes the claim. I think not.

 

 

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I work for a small not-for-profit and we use Drupal to power our website. There are only 6 people on staff and we all have access to do pretty much anything on the site.

Yesterday, our Chief Exec came across something strange. A link had been sent out in our newsletter that pointed to oursite.com/404-page-not-found. How could this have happened? Not being very familiar with Drupal, I suggested it was some weird redirect as a result of a 404 to the most recent post. But it was the right post. Coincidence? The universe is rarely so lazy.

So I looked into it. Turns out, and I’m not entirely sure how this happened, someone had actually edited the page that was set as our custom 404 page. So the link in the newsletter was technically correct. The problem was all 404 were being directed to that article.

Because we didn’t want to break the link in the newsletter I set up a new 404 custom page. In the process of testing it, putting in a few aliases and redirects I discovered a few broken links. Amusingly, these broken links had never come to light because they were supposed to direct to the article that was ON the 404 page!

With the new 404 in place they really were broken. I soon had that fixed but it led me to check a few more pages and it turns out that who ever made the original error made a bit of dog’s dinner of it. There were a few duplicate nodes and aliases pointing all over the place.

Didn’t take more than about half an hour to the whole thing out but it did provide a nicely little puzzle!

 

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This took me ages to find. I started off messing with Xmodmap until I realise GNOME would ignore it.  I finally found the solution here.

navigate to org >> gnome >> desktop >> input-sources

Put your options under xkb-options as a list. Ex: [‘altwin:ctrl_alt_win’,’caps:backspace’]

I hope that I can help others find it faster!

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Then

I’ve been using Arch Linux for years. It’s been my main Linux distribution since I decided I needed to switch from an i586 optimised system to an i686 optimised system. Yes, it was that long ago. To be honest, I’m astonished my original distribution is still going but I’m really pleased for them!

When I first got interested in Linux it was because of a distribution called Mandrake. Back then KDE and the Keramik theme were all the rage. It was all so refreshing compared to Windows.

Anyway, I could never really get on with those big desktop managers. With KDE I always wanted some GTK apps (firefox) that ruined the look and Gnome, well, back in the day the word was “cruft”, it was full of dependencies and apps you just didn’t want. Plus it was butt ugly.

The first window manager I really got into was Fluxbox. I even made some popular themes for it. I’d always liked Xfce but, like Gnome and KDE, it still wasn’t very cohesive. At some point Xfce must have grown-up because that became my standard desktop environment from at least 2007. That was probably down to Xfce 4.4.0!

With hindsight, I was lucky to find Arch Linux early on in my Linux experience as I never even considered trying Ubuntu when it was created. Back in 2003 Gentoo was the cause of most flamewars on the Arch forums.

So, my first experience with Ubuntu was around the last noughties when a laptop with an OEM of Windows XP went kaput and we needed an OS. I was pretty pleased with it. It always ran well on the laptop and I didn’t need to mess about with it too much. It almost never went wrong. I went off it a lot when Unity came on the scene but the laptop died permanently shortly after, so I was never really forced to look for an alternative. I always kept half an eye on Ubuntu, though.

Now

A few weeks ago I was at a conference in London for CiviCRM (which is an open-source CRM used by a lot of charities and not-for-profits.) Almost all of the presenters were using either Macbooks or Ubuntu laptops. A few guys from CiviCOOP were also running what I surmised was Gnome so I asked them about their set-up. They simply said it was Ubuntu Gnome and I decided I’d check it out.

As you might know both Gnome and Ubuntu have recently made major releases. I guess Gnome didn’t freeze early enough to make it into Ubuntu’s release window so Ubuntu Gnome still ships with the previous version.

So, yesterday, I decided to try and install. I started out by making sure that the installation wasn’t going to mess with my Arch install. That meant revisiting my bootloader configuration and moving /boot back into the Arch root. Then I had a huge balls-up where I deleted everything in my ESP with some sloppy typing. Yay, me! So out came the Windows disks to restore the Windows EFI bootmgr and, bleurgh. Mission.

Once that was finally sorted (and, as is so often the case with Linux, improved) I got around to installing Ubuntu Gnome in some free space on my Windows drive. I was pretty disappointed. I quickly realised that it was going to a struggle to get the system set-up how I liked; I have so many long forgotten customisations in Arch that I take for granted. Also, the Ubuntu software centre was just weird. There were two versions of Vim and I couldn’t tell what the difference was. Gnome itself was also really unstable; it hanged on me a few times and some widgets vanished, making the UI tough to interpret. However, what really put the tin hat on it was trying to change the Gnome icon theme. I couldn’t find any to install in the software centre and the advice I found while Google was to extract packages straight into /usr! Urgh! That’s like recommending incest!

I decided that Ubuntu wasn’t for me after all and decided to give Gnome a go on my Arch install, especially when Arch is noted by the Gnome Project as already shipping the latest version. It didn’t make long to get it sorted. I’d already decided, while out a on run last night, that I was going to convert wholesale to the “Gnome way” and swap to gdm and NetworkManager.

I can honestly say it’s the most complete Linux desktop experience I have ever had and I think I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s all worked out pretty well in the end!

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So I just spent about an hour trying to fix/troubleshoot something that may not ever have worked.

I’ve switched from lxdm to lightdm on all my machines.  I saw this section of the Arch wiki and thought “Hey, that would be useful on the laptop!”

After spending no small amount of time trying to discover what provides gdmflexiserver (other than gdm) I took to the forums to ask “Am I mad?”  However, in the process of researching my post for all possible explanations I inevitably found the explanation myself.  That’s Arch way.

Ubuntu.

They did a dirty hack on their lightdm package so it would work with XFCE alongside gdm.

This then led me to here, then here and culminated in this wiki edit.

By and large the Arch Linux wiki is amazing but it just goes to show the damage that a bit of misinformation can do to your day.  Thanks graysky.

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Send to Mail Recipient in Thunar always gives me this error.

Image

I’m sure I have Googled for a solution this many times before but never found one.  Today I did.  It’s simply that exo depends on perl-uri to complete this action.  It’s even an optdepend in Arch:

 Optional Deps : perl-uri: for mail-compose helper script

See, so

 pacman -S perl-uri

fixes it with no further effort.

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My team is currently supporting the delivery of a project to inspire young people in Tower Hamlets to consider coding as a profession.  This project is being run by Workshare in conjunction with resonate.  We’re using the Raspberry Pi and python to teach them some code fundamentals and there’s a competition at the end with some internships up for grabs.  Not bad at all!

I’m pleased with how the project has turned out. Since it’s a pilot we’ve had to “make do” with slightly average facilities and fairly “flexible” session plans but it is going well. While I don’t feel that the young people have learned a significant amount of coding there is no doubt that they are more interested in programming and have a better understanding of what coding really means.  That was, at least, one of the goals of the project and it’s a respectable achievement in my opinion.

I’ve also had the opportunity to use the Pi and it’s good fun.  Although we haven’t had a chance to use them with young people we did by some PiFace Digital devices and a few of the young people wanted to use them for their competition project.  I thought it would be a good idea to try it out too and I managed to put together a fun FizzBuzz game that I’ll share on GitHub soon.  I’m also going to write  a blog about how I put the programme together.