I’ve considered a few alternatives. KDM is of course out of the question. It doesn’t even come close to being lightweight and I’d rather use Windows than pull in any kind of KDE dependency. Viable alternatives are among others SLIM, Qingy and simply using startx to fire up XMonad. I’ve tryed out SLIM briefly in the past but wanted something even more simple and from what I’ve read, SLIM is not begin further developed. Startx is of course as easy as it can possibly get but is in itself featureless and only works well for a single user/session.

In the end I went with CDM, the Console Display Manager, developed by Ghost1227, a fellow Arch Linux user. It is a minimimalistic, full featured, dialog-based login manager written in pure bash. It supports multiple users/sessions and can start virtually any window manager or desktop environment. I am impressed that it can fire up multiple X sessions of the same user on different ttys.

One step closer to a GNOMEless system.

Few things have really changed since my latest gnome setup because I’m already pretty satisfied with what I’ve got so far. The major change is the wallpaper and some icons here and there:

What’s you’re seeing:

• Operating System: Arch Linux
• Desktop Environment: Gnome
• Window Managers: Metacity
• GTK: Customized Ubuntu Human
• Icons: Ubuntu Icon Set
• Wallpaper: Tarantula Tree
• Various: ncmpc++ playing music, mencoder dumping a video and uzbl displaying this website

I can easily squeeze a respectable 3 hours out of my battery with 100% brightness. This can be increased to at least 4 hours when working on a lower, but still workable brightness. I hope developers will continue to work on power management so that I can get to work 5 hours without plugging in the cord as in Windows. I believe work points are automation of powering down/off usb devices, hard disks, sound card and wireless network card, things that can be done manually in the console if you have the expertise.

Looking forward to the next stable gnome release 2.28 with hopefully some new power management features.

Install & configure ABS

First you will need to install the The Arch Build System (ABS) and the basic development tools:

pacman -Sy abs base-devel

Make sure the core, extra and community repository are enabled in /etc/abs.conf:

REPOS=(core extra community !testing)

Now grab all the PKGBUILDS with:

abs

Install & configure PulseAudio

Install pulseaudio with:

pacman -S pulseaudio

There’s a lot to say about configuring pulseaudio, things I’m not going put here. More info on configuring pulseaudio can be found at The Arch Wiki and The Official PulseAudio site. The must do things are installing alsa-plugins to maintain alsa compatibility, configuring .asoundrc, adding yourself to the pulse-rt and pulse-access groups and configuring gstreamer to use pulse. I also don’t recommend using PulseAudio as a system-wide daemon. Just use the per-user daemon.

Rebuild related Gnome packages

There are a few gnome packages that need to be rebuilt against pulseaudio in this order:

1. gnome-settings-daemon
2. gnome-applets
3. gnome-media

Grab the build files from abs one at the time. They are all located under /var/abs/abs/<packagename>. You can build and install the package with:

makepkg -si

gnome-settings-daemon – Remove the patch line (2nd line right after build) in the PKGBUILD.
gnome-applets – Just needs a rebuild, no need to change anything.
gnome-media – Add –enable-pulse to the ./configure line in the PKGBUILD.

That’s pretty much it. Next time you login using gnome, it will use pulseaudio. By default it adds a rather ugly volume slider to the panel (you can prevent it from starting by removing it under system > preferences > startup applications. You can add a better one by right clicking on the panel and adding the volume applet.

As a student Computer Science Engineer I very much appreciate the modular design. PulseAudio contains a lot of (module) plugins.  All audio from/to clients and audio interfaces goes through these modules. PulseAudio clients can send audio to “sinks” and receive audio from “sources”. A client can be GStreamer, xinelib, MPlayer or any other audio application. Only the device drivers/audio interfaces can be either sources or sinks (they are often hardware in- and out-puts). This diagram nicely illustrates the big picture.

With the integration of PulseAudio in GNOME, it will most likely become the dominant audio solution for linux. There are, unfortunately, many opposed to PulseAudio, mainly because of the poor implementation in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex. For those interested in fixing PulseAudio on Ubuntu, I can warmly recommend this topic on the ubuntuforums. While I experienced this issue firsthand,  it remains  an unjustified reason as PulseAudio is not to blame here. Hopefully the general acceptance will improve in the near future.

Funny thing is that of all distros it is Arch Linux that decides not to implement PulseAudio. JDG, the gnome maintainer, patched gnome to its previous state mainly because of another unjustified misconception about PulseAudio. People generally believe that PulseAudio acts like a regular daemon and that it needs to be started in order to get any sound. This is however not true. Unless you want it to act like a central system-wide sound server, the daemon will be spawned when an application tries to play sound. You can follow  the discussion of gnome 2.26 on Arch linux here.

Therefore I had to rebuild a small part of gnome in order to get PulseAudio working. The packages involved were the unpatched gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-applets, gnome-media and gnome-control-center. To get every sound application working, I had to rebuild some of them with pulse support enabled as well. The result is very much worth it.

As you can see in the screenshots, the sound applet has received a new look. They now use a horizontal slider instead of a vertical one. In addition, they included a mute check box. Gnome continues with their tradition of minor but useful changes with this nice applet.

Thanks to PulseAudio, you can now also set the volume per application. You can mute for example the sound of MPlayer while  leaving mpd’s sound untouched or simply set custom volume levels for each application. You can create volume sliders for each channel as well. A welcome addition. Even more impressive is the way it graciously deals with multiple sound cards. It recognizes both my on board as my creative x-fi sound card and I can switch between them. If you want, you can simultaneously play sound through multiple audio cards or map specific channels to specific sound card outputs and create a so called “virtual surround sound card”. For example, use 2 outputs of sound card 1 for the front left/right channel and map the rear left/right channel to sound card 2.

PulseAudio comes with some optional extra applications depicted on the right most screenshot above: a volume meter, a volume manager and the pulseaudio manager. Not depicted is the device chooser where you choose the pulseaudio server, the used sink, etc…

In conclusion I can say PulseAudio is really worth having, giving you lots of possibilitiesn and tThe integration with GNOME is a great success.

This leaves me with another question: What tiling window manager to choose? I’ve heared about most of them already while browsing the Arch Linux forum and started with dwm, known as the easiest tiling window manager to configure. Indeed, the configuration is fairly easy but it doesn’t resemble to the simplicity of GNOME or KDE at all. If you don’t read about it first, you start dwm and you’re left with nothing but an empty screen without even knowing how to run an application. While it is supposed to be easy, I still had some unresolved problems with naming my tags/workspaces and shifting windows to it. Though my incompetence is probably to blame, the developers’ unwillingness to document their work didn’t really help me either so I abandoned dwm. The second in line to try was Awesome. It’s very popular and probably the most feature rich one. Configuration is done in the programming language lua. Oddly enough I had a lot more success configuring it than dwm. A notorious downside of Awesome is its ever changing configuration syntax. While this is supposedly going to improve now lua is introduced, I’m not willing to put it to the test.

Opposed to the previous two, my experience with XMonad is a success story all the way. I believe XMonad outranks the others easily. Configuration is done in Haskell. While it’s perhaps not an easy way to configure things, it  allows  great flexibility. The developers have extensively documented each feature, illustrate a lot with simple examples and created a great faq that answers the  most important questions that come to mind. XMonad runs very smoothly and on top of everything, it can be easily integrated with every popular desktop environment. That last feature is a huge bonus. It simply replaces metacity (the window manager of GNOME) with XMonad. While this can be done with the other tiling window managers too, XMonad integrates very nicely in GNOME and handles the communcation between the two very well. I get the best of both worlds with no downsides. Well, there’s adownside, only not for me. It is required to install the +/- 100 MB Haskell compiler. Luckily for me, I need Haskell for my university courses.

Only one minor issue emerged during the upgrade, specifically gdm (login manager) not finding the root user, hence failing to run. Then I remembered having locked down / disabled my root account with passwd -l. A quick search on the Arch Forums revealed the solution: passwd –unlock root && usermod –lock root. Another problem I discovered rather quicly is an issue with the unlocking of your screen with gnome-screensaver. The background of the unlock screen always falls back to the default background in gnome instead of the current one. A temporary fix is to replace the default background with the current one.

I’m not going to sum up every new feature that comes with 2.24 (you can find it here: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/), but here are some things I noticed rightaway:

• Revert item in trash to original location – I already wondered why it took so long to get such a simple feature. It’s not that I’m going to use it since I never delete items that I don’t want to, but it’s nice to have.
• The archive manager to unzip, untar, … files now shows a nice progress bar and an option to navigate to the target location when the process is complete. It’s strange how a minor change can improve usability a lot.
• Tabbed file browsing in nautilus – one of the so-called big features of this release. I haven’t get used to it yet (old habits never die, right?) but I might find it more useful than opening several window in the future.
• An overal speed improvement while working. During my initial comparisons, it seems to consume less memory as well.

• Operating System: Arch Linux
• GTK: Customized Ubuntu Human
• Window Manager: Metacity Theme Chocolate
• Icons: Ubuntu Human Icon Set
• Wallpaper: Flying Penguins

I’ve fnally removed Compiz. The shiny effects a lot of linux users show off with are far from productive and get boring after a while. For the record, the music player is Banshee.

• Operating System: Ubuntu Linux
• GTK: Default Ubuntu Human Theme
• Window Manager: Emerald Theme Ubuntu Golden
• Wallpaper: Yoritsuki Night
• Compiz Fusion & Conky