January 2013 - Arch-general - lists.archlinux.org

[arch-general] Optimising ssd setup?
by Mike Cloaked 07 Jan '13

07 Jan '13

As part of my planning for setting up a home build computer which will use two ssd drives - one a Crucial M4 mSATA drive (for root and boot partitions) and a second larger Crucial M4 SATA III drive for the rest, I have been reading up about partitioning and optimising such drives - It seems that it is important to partition with proper alignment to MiB boundaries for partitions but I am unclear if this happens automatically or not when setting up GPT partitions with gparted? ( I usually partition using a liveusb running PartedMagic and then run gparted before installing arch) Also I have been seeing various bits of advice about ensuring that excessive writes are avoided by using a non-default IO scheduler - with "deadline" being the better option for SSDs than the default CFQ scheduler - and it would seem that adding the parameter to the kernel line for boot once a system is set up is perhaps a good way forward? How does that work if UEFI booting? In addition it is suggested that for a machine with a reasonable RAM (in my case 8GiB) then reducing the "swappiness" parameter to 1 via systemctl, or altering the relevant parameter under /proc/sys is the way to do it, even if there is a swap partition on one of the SSDs. I have also seen it suggested that TRIM support is important either mounting with the "discard" option or running fstrim manually via a cron job out of hours to avoid delays during writes whilst the system is in use. Finally I have seen suggested that the "noatime" flag be used for mounting SSD drives. Can anyone on this list who has set up a recent SSD drive and has experience of SSD wear issues, and levelling issues, offer any advice on whether some or all of the above are important when using SSD drives in an arch linux machine or whether partitioning and installing essentially with defaults is going to lead to SSD problems, or not? This will be my first foray into using SSD drives on any of my systems. Thanks for any replies. -- mike c

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[arch-general] How to suppress the list of variables that are output at shell login?
by Jayesh Badwaik 07 Jan '13

07 Jan '13

Hi, Whenever I login in zsh using an `su -l user` command, I get the following list of variables outputted on the shell HOME=/home/user LOGNAME=user PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/share/backuppc/bin SHELL=/bin/zsh TERM=xterm USER=user How can I suppress this message? -- Jayesh

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[arch-general] Gnome3: gnome-shell and notifications, broken?
by Magnus Therning 07 Jan '13

07 Jan '13

I've just changed my desktop back to Gnome3. I suspect that notifications are somewhat broken on my system, but I can't find any information to confirm it. When I run 'notify-send "Test notifications"' the following happens: 1. a small 'i' in a blue circle appears at the bottom of the screen - it disappears when I click on it, or after a short while 2. an 'i' in a blue circle also appears in the bottom bar - left clicking on the icon brings up a smaller 'i' icon, the larger icon remains - right clicking the icon brings up a menu offering 'open' and 'remove', they both behave exactly the same: they remove the notification icon What I find surprising here is that 1. I never get to see the text, no matter what I do 2. 'open' doesn't open but removes Is this weird behaviour unique to my system, or is it just an area in serious need of improvement in Gnome3? /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus(a)therning.org jabber: magnus(a)therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- Alan Kay

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[arch-general] HELP: My webcam stop work.
by Cloud Tao 04 Jan '13

04 Jan '13

My webcam begin can work, but after about 1 minute, the webcam stop work. when skype, gtalk use webcam all have this problem. lsmod output: videobuf2_vmalloc 2469 1 uvcvideo videobuf2_memops 2283 1 videobuf2_vmalloc videobuf2_core 24073 1 uvcvideo videodev 100860 2 uvcvideo,videobuf2_core media 10406 2 uvcvideo,videodev dmesg output: [ 2379.369663] uvcvideo: Failed to resubmit video URB (-27). [ 2379.369673] uvcvideo: Failed to resubmit video URB (-27). [ 2379.369677] uvcvideo: Failed to resubmit video URB (-27). [ 2379.369681] uvcvideo: Failed to resubmit video URB (-27). [ 2379.369686] uvcvideo: Failed to resubmit video URB (-27). when i use mplayer take a photo use driver=v4l2, have a line output: v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument v4l2: ioctl set format failed: Invalid argument How to solve this problem? thx very much.

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[arch-general] Install problem
by Fons Adriaensen 03 Jan '13

03 Jan '13

Hello, today I did a fresh install using the december release of the install media. Everything done 'to the book' (the install guide wiki page). Bootloader is syslinux. When booting the freshly installed system, I get the syslinux menu, select Archlinux or fallback, things seem to be normal for a few seconds then everything stops. After some time I get a message that /dev/sda3 (which is the / partition) can't be found and I'm dropped into an emergency shell. No LVM or RAID, just a single SATA disk with sda1 = /boot (100M, ext2) sda2 = swap (2G) sda3 = / (~250G, ext4) Partioning done with cfdisk. The mkinitcpio.conf used is the default one, which seems to have all required hooks. Everything in /boot/syslinux looks ok. Any hints ?? Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

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[arch-general] Protect a cron job from systemd
by Dimitrios Apostolou 02 Jan '13

02 Jan '13

Hello list, among various tasks, I also run "sysstat" for monitoring my server's load. The way it runs by default is via the hourly cron, as a job that lasts exactly one hour. Sometimes I need to stop crond (systemctl stop dcron) to perform some short maintainance, and restart it a minute later that I'm done. Previously the "sadc" monitoring process of sysstat wasn't being killed, since it double forked and stayed up as a daemon. Unfortunately now systemd kills the whole cgroup, and in this manner it's possible to lose up to one hour of accounting logs. Any ideas on how to instruct systemd to not kill it when terminating crond? Thanks in advance, Dimitris

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[arch-general] [signoff] linux-3.6.11-1
by Tobias Powalowski 02 Jan '13

02 Jan '13

Hi guys, please signoff 3.6.11 series for both arches. package is not in testing, please grab it from here: http://dev.archlinux.org/~tpowa/linux/ This will move to [core] directly, because 3.7.1 is in [testing]. greetings tpowa -- Tobias Powalowski Archlinux Developer & Package Maintainer (tpowa) http://www.archlinux.org tpowa(a)archlinux.org

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Re: [arch-general] Plasma-desktop in KDE 4.7 can not start up
by Chao Feng 01 Jan '13

01 Jan '13

Hey there! i had the smae problem,,, i tried all the things mentioned... but didn't work then i tried installing ttf-dejavu font... which helped me... It is this bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289427 I just create a patch to fix it. Hopefully, it will be fixed the next release. Chao Feng

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[arch-general] Troubles with ALSA
by Jack Stanek 01 Jan '13

01 Jan '13

Hello all, I've been having problems with ALSA recently. Whenever I reboot my computer or wake it up from sleep, ALSA sets the volume of the speakers (and only the speakers) to zero. The headphones and master volume remain normal, but no sound will come from the speakers until I manually go into alsamixer and turn up the speaker's individual volume. I have an Intel integrated audio card, the 82801H HD Audio Controller. This only started recently and I am at a loss as to what is going on. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks, J. Stanek

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