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Showing posts from July, 2015

no sound in VLC

run pavucontrol while VLC is playing something http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=206&t=101568

citrix under Arch

First time getting Citrix running under Arch instead of Debian. Most straightforward one yet, thanks mostly to an updated installer from Citrix themselves. Download it from: http://www.citrix.com/downloads/citrix-receiver/linux/receiver-for-linux-13-2.html unpack it and run: sudo ./setupwfc [go through install steps] that should pretty much do it, apart from sorting out the browser certs, which I finally managed using (I think) the following command: sudo ln -sf /etc/ssl/certs/* /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/ having tried all kinds of other stuff I googled. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Citrix#Security_Certificates

menu icon numix theme

sudo cp /usr/share/icons/Numix-Circle/scalable/apps/archlinux.svg /usr/share/icons/Numix/24x24/places/start-here.svg sudo cp /usr/share/icons/Numix-Circle/scalable/apps/archlinux.svg /usr/share/icons/Numix/24x24/places/novell-button.svg

conky autostart

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1101856#p1101856 This works: edit ~/.config/autostart/conky.desktop like this: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=0.9.4 Type=Application Name=conky Comment= Exec=conky -p 10 StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false The -p 10 gives conky a 10 seconds break so that it starts drawing after the desktop is up. You can increase this pause if needs be.

arch latitude desktops

I've been really bad at writing up what I've been doing recently, probably because I've just been trying stuff and I don't know ahead of time what's going to work or what I'll be happy with. I was trying to get plasma 5 desktop all configured up real nice, but I was struggling with it a bit. on one hand it was almost TOO slick looking for my low-tech tastes. on the other it didn't seem to be as infinitely configurable as it's made out to be. at least, not so I could figure it out. to cap it all off the thing started crashing on me , so I decided to try mate again. The only thing that's put me off mate when I installed it independent of Mint has been the look, which was dumb, beacause it turns out I was only a theme away from something I like a lot. Just had a thought; I'll dump my terminal history below. It has lots of stuff there, but other things are missing. I must've used different terminals for those. Anyway the main points are:

no sound in Papers Please

No sound at all, actually. First I installed alsa-utils, checked alsamixer master was not muted. Installed pulseaudio and pavucontrol. This gave me sound on youtube but not the game. Eventually found this tip in the hotline miami AUR comments: On x86_64 I had to install lib32-libpulse to get sound working. Without the package there was that error: ALSA lib dlmisc.c:252:(snd1_dlobj_cache_get) Cannot open shared library /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so AL lib: (EE) alsa_open_playback: Could not open playback device 'default': No such device or address   https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Unmuting_the_channels https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/hotlinemiami/

Partitioning and LVM

Wasn't getting anywhere with the partitions I built in the mint live distro with gparted and system-config-lvm - it kept complaining about corrupt GPT - so I decided to have a stab (and fstab! ha!) at using the cli tools in live arch. Turned out pretty well, I think. the best source was this one .

Dell Latitude E6520

Got an old laptop for free from a friend sympathetic to my plight. It's a bit of a dinosaur compared to my lost XPS, but it seems to have 8 gig of ram and be more or less functional. When I was installing Arch on the XPS I had to get to grips with the UEFI boot system, which I've not bothered with before. But since it's the future and since I've got another Dell with UEFI support, I figured I'd have another stab rather than use the distinctly legacy approach of GRUB. On the XPS I had to mess about quite a bit, but I eventually got there. The Latitude has given me more trouble, partly because I didn't take any notes on the XPS process (stupid!) and partly because I've had to start from scratch rather than have an existing UEFI partition and so forth ahead of time (or the Ubuntu installation that came with it). So I'm going to take this opportunity to update my Arch install process. I'm learning it pretty well now, having spent waaaaaaay more tim

:(

After 6 months of research and deliberation and hard saving I bough the xps. For weeks I watched it inch its way from the manufactory in China to delays at Calais due to dock strikes to Lutterworth to London to me. Thursday afternoon I got it. Saturday morning someone jumped in my living room window and took it. I was playing with the toddler within sight of the house the whole time. My wife was in the kitchen. Unbelievable. House insurance, you say? Well since the house was occupied at the time it would be covered by insurance, they told me, except that the house insurance was not renewed so we had no cover. :(((((((( fuckin. £934 up in smoke. Hadn't even finished configuring it with Arch. fuck.