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[arch-general] (groff+)ghostscript/us letter/paper size problems
by Mike Bishop 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

I have just spent a happy hour PULLING MY HAIR OUT over misformatted troff documents on my printers ... which printed perfectly several months ago. The problem is that recent versions of ghostscript will (often) assume a4 paper size, regardless of /etc/paper. This applies after ghostscript 8.64-5 but I am not sure which version (8.70 has the problem). If you use ISO standard paper sizes you are probably okay. The solution is described here-- http://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2009-September/008565.html and consists of passing an explicit "-P-pletter" when formatting your groff source; "groff -pletter ..." doesn't make it on my system. Neither did modifying "gs_init.ps" (?) Other postscript generating programs may do this explicitly (evince does). surf/zathura users may wish to take note. Hoping this saves you hair, Rgds, -- Mike (baldy) Bishop Willow, Alaska

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[arch-general] [wlan-ng26-utils] should be removed from repos.
by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

Hello There is an open issue: FS#12979 - [wlan-ng26-utils] doesn't build from ABS [#1] An acording to upstream: http://lists.linux-wlan.com/pipermail/linux-wlan-announce/2009-August/00010… "With prism2_usb in the mainline kernel for a couple of releases now, the mainline kernel now supports all prism2 devices. The linux-wlan-ng project is completely obseleted, and there will be no further development. The linux-wlan-ng source code (tarballs and svn/git) will remain available for the forseeable future, but the mailing lists are being shut down as soon as this message goes out, and future attempts to send mail to them will bounce. The server housing the mailing list archives is set to be retired in the medium term, but we will try to ensure they remain online after that. So long, and thanks for all the fish!" [#1] http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/12979 -- Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi ( djgera ) http://www.djgera.com.ar KeyID: 0x1B8C330D Key fingerprint = 0CAA D5D4 CD85 4434 A219 76ED 39AB 221B 1B8C 330D

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[arch-general] kde4 kleopatra dependency missing when installed
by David C. Rankin 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

Guys, Just a note. When you install kde4, the kleopatra certificate is installed without the needed dependency 'dirmngr'. When you first run kleopatra, you will get the error. Do you want me to open a ticket, or is this email enough? Let me know. Thanks. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com

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[arch-general] Trouble with RaLink RT2561/RT61
by Bram Schoenmakers 08 Nov '09

08 Nov '09

Hello, >From time to time, my network shows some poor performance. My 64 bit Arch Linux box is connected with a wireless connections with a RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI, the system is up-to-date. The symptoms are: * Looking up a website takes very long, or it will never load at all. Only in Chromium snapshot, Firefox loads the same page instantly at the same time. However, some videos on Youtube load for 25% and refuse to continue to fetch more (in both browsers). * Kopete is unable to keep a connection with either MSN or my Jabber accounts. They simply time out. * SSH connections drop dead (or are interrupted for minutes). No high traffic involved at all. The problem does not always occur, at some days I have a good connection, but sometimes the symptoms above occur. I suspected it had something to do with IPv6, but disabling it did not have any effect. I don't think it's interference either, the connection to the router is quite healthy: normal response time, 0% packet loss (also with servers outside my network), download rates are often at their max. I also have a laptop with 32 bit Arch Linux installed, using the Atheros wireless drivers. It also runs Chromium and doesn't show any problems whatsoever, on the same network. When I run tcpdump on both machines, I see many lines like 12:09:37.134509 00:30:3f:50:19:e5 (oui Unknown) > 00:18:f8:45:10:c3 (oui Unknown), ethertype Unknown (0x05ec), length 1530 where 00:30:3f:50:19:e5 is the wireless router (unsure about the other MAC, I'm on a shared network). My laptop shows seems to capture much more of these messages than my PC does, not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Could it be a driver issue? I'm tending to think that is the case, actually. Any other hints are very appreciated. Kind regards, -- Bram Schoenmakers What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. (Punch, 1855)

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[arch-general] Cannot set xattr
by André Ramaciotti da Silva 08 Nov '09

08 Nov '09

Hi all, I'm thinking of different ways to organize my files and xattrs seem a nice, standardized way to do so (don't ask me exactly what I'm trying to do, for I only have a slight idea). The problem is: I can't use them at all. I'm using the default kernel, which, according to /proc/config.gz has: CONFIG_EXT4_FS_XATTR=y and I'm using ext4, evidently. I've tried doing the following: $ echo 'asd' > test $ attr -s user.author -V andre test attr_set: Operation not supported Could not set "user.author" for test but, as you can see, it doesn't work. Running it as root doesn't work, too. I've also made a small C program, but it also fails to set the xattr, returning ENOTSUP (operation not supported), so it isn't a problem with 'attr'. I do have 'attr' from [core] installed so I don't know what else can be the problem. Thanks in advance, Andre

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[arch-general] kde3 sources available anymore & missing garbage collector
by David C. Rankin 08 Nov '09

08 Nov '09

Guys, I don't know if the kde3 sources still live on a server some where, but I would be interested in finding them. I still have all the PKGBUILD files for the kde3 install, but I need a few sources. kpdf for starters, and there are a couple more. Also, I successfully built quanta from AUR -- works fine, but I was unable to build pdftk due to missing dependencies: gcc-gcj package not found, searching for group... error: 'gcc-gcj': not found in sync db ==> ERROR: Pacman failed to install missing dependencies. I think that is some type of garbage collector. Anybody know where I can find it? I have a couple of scripts that use pdftk so it is somewhat of a pressing matter. Other than the sound I'm still working on (haven't had time to mess with it), the install is done. (Arch+e16+e17+openbox+kde4+full LAMP+GNU development pkgs+full Office setup). This was my sixth arch install since April. In the same time period I have done "one" suse install (for my youngest daughter). Arch is such a damn good distro it is a grand testament to some very smart thinking about how best to put together and -- more importantly --> maintain a Linux distribution. The folks on the suse list just can't explain why, with the abundant resources of Novell in their pocket, little 'ole Arch is always 1-2 major versions of just about everything ahead of them. (gotta love it!) I -- can tell you why. Arch nailed it with the rolling release approach. That is the right way to do a distro. Even if on occasion packages need to say in testing for 30-90 days to accomodate a major kernel change/whatever, it still beats the hell out of trying to maintain 3 separate versions of a an opensource distribution, built for 3 different kernels, and the complete set of some 4000 packages per distro version that need to be maintained. The resources required to try and do that are staggering. (I needle them that going to a rolling release would tripple their net revenues overnight just due to cost savings alone ;-) I'll try and cobble together my install notes after I'm done and update the wiki in any of the areas I faced challenges. (I'm a bit tight on time at present) Thanks you all for all the help needed in the areas where I got hund up. Cheers! -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com

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[arch-general] programmable API for flyspray?
by Chris Brannon 08 Nov '09

08 Nov '09

Is there any way to access bugs.archlinux.org programmatically? I'd love to be able to manipulate it from the shell. TIA, -- Chris

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[arch-general] [signoff] mdadm-3.0.3-1
by Tobias Powalowski 07 Nov '09

07 Nov '09

Hi downgrade in testing repository due to potential dataloss problems: http://marc.info/?l=linux-raid&m=125748985908870&w=2 Changelog: http://neil.brown.name/git?p=mdadm;a=blob_plain;f=ANNOUNCE-3.0;hb=7f0066ba7… Please update and recreate your initcpio after upgrading. One thing i observed, when using a custom /etc/mdadm.conf file our rc.sysinit will run mdadm --assemble --scan, which will always give exit code 2, due to devices busy. greetings tpowa -- Tobias Powalowski Archlinux Developer & Package Maintainer (tpowa) http://www.archlinux.org tpowa(a)archlinux.org

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[arch-general] We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.
by RedShift 07 Nov '09

07 Nov '09

This thread will probably erupt in a massive flamewar, yet I decided to post my story anyway. I am talking about the desktop experience in general, not the technical details behind it. Keep that in mind. I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels very sluggish and incomplete. I can't enable the desktop effects because that makes things even slower. I'm doing this on a fairly decent setup, an AMD Sempron 2 Ghz with an nVidia FX5500. My laptop suffers from this sluggishness as well. On top of that, lots of things annoy me in KDE 4.3, see the end of this post for my top annoyances. Yesterday I had to reboot to my Windows XP installation on this computer and I was shocked when I arrived in XP's userland. Everything was ridiculously fast. When returning to my linux desktop everything felt even more sluggish. That's when I decided to go back to KDE 3.5. I restored my old KDE 3.5 profile, installed the necessary packages and logged back in. WOOOOOF, everything is fast again. Opening new windows is instantaneous, hell even bringing up context menus is faster. If Linux is that much better, why does the current Linux desktop (KDE 4.3) still suck compared to an operating system that's 8 years old? Last week I also had the chance to check out Windows 7, and I was stumped. I was genuinly impressed by Windows 7's GUI. It feels fast, works fluently, it has nice effects which just work and work FAST. When browsing around it felt like a very solid desktop environment. I am jealous. I really am. The thought of using Windows 7 in favor of KDE 4.3 has occured to me much more than I like. And it's little things like dragging the windows to the top of the screen makes them maximized, dragging them to the left makes the take exactly 50% of the screen. How many times have you been manually resizing windows to fit next to each other? I have, too many times. These are things that really improve your productivity. So when should we have started working at a better desktop environment for Linux? When Mac OS X came out. When was that again? 2001. Yes, it really was that long ago. It already had awesome desktop effects that just work on (compared to these days) VERY modest hardware. And it worked fast as well. It was and still is a solid desktop environment. From that point on the Linux community should have recognized the threat Mac OS X was for the desktop environment. Unfortunately nobody did and we went on creating a big mess, fighting over implementations and technical details instead of attempting to create a solid desktop environment. Yet we did have a second chance in 2007. Microsoft obviously screwed up with Windows Vista, we had the chance to win back alot of terrain here until the release of Windows 7. So what did we come up with? KDE 4. Yes, a big dissapointment. We still don't have something that's comparable. So basically, where are we at? KDE 3.5 is Windows XP KDE 4.3 is Windows Vista ??? is Windows 7 When are we getting to the Windows 7 stage? Microsoft didn't do a big advertising campaign for the launch of Windows 7, nevertheless they delivered a big slap in the face to the Linux desktop environments. The numbers speak for themselves, Windows 7 has already sold more copies in its first week than Windows Vista did in its first month. And with good riddance, Windows 7 really is better than Windows Vista. Microsoft recognized the problems with Windows Vista and dealt with them. And dealt with them swiftly if you ask me, doing it in less then 3 years. Conclusion We are losing ground. We are losing it fast. Our competitors recognize what the user wants and delivered. If we are comparing enterprise desktops, there's no going around Red Hat. The current Red Hat desktop (5.4) ships with KDE 3.5, while its succesor RHEL 6 will be, if looking what Fedora brings now, shipped with KDE 4.2 or 4.3. That means KDE 4.2/4.3 will be the main desktop for enterprises for at least the next 3 years. A disgrace if you ask me. Users will be comparing desktop environments and they will find Windows 7 or Mac OS X to be better. After the damage RHEL 6 will have done to the reputation of the Linux desktop, it will take again as many years to rectify the damage done. Granted if we will have a solid desktop environment comparable to Windows 7 by the time RHEL 7 gets released. Which I can't help but doubt. My top KDE 4.3 annoyances: * Slooooowwww. Logging in takes a multifold of times it did under KDE 3.5, repainting windows takes up a lot of time * The battery status applet is buggy, it only shows the actual percentage after you've hovered it with the mouse, even when you've set it to always display. The scale it uses is also difficult to interpret. These bugs have been reported a long time ago and are still not fixed. * The run dialog is useless. The reason is the history function. It can't display a full history when you start typing, you have to type alot more. Having a pull down menu and using the arrow keys to select the entry you want is alot faster. Even Microsoft knows they shouldn't touch that dialog, it still works like a charm in windows 7. * Double clicking the system icon in the titlebar doesn't always work to close an application (the system icon is the left-most icon in the titlebar). This bug has also been reported a long time ago and still not fixed. * I get a full 10 minutes of extra runtime on my laptop when I switched back to 3.5 * Power management is buggy in KDE 4.3 and sometimes powerdevil just loses its settings * Some settings KDE 3.5 used to have aren't there anymore in KDE 4.3. * Where's my "home" icon!!!??? :-(

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[arch-general] looking for MUA alternative to KMail
by Philipp Gesang 07 Nov '09

07 Nov '09

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