On 15-03-10 14:07, Jeffrey Parke wrote: [installing XFCE, xorg]

Have you read the beginners guide? It's a great help for times like these, I'll post it below. Well what you wanna do now is to install the xorg group (pacman -S xorg) then the xfce group (pacman -S xfce4). Then move the .xinitrc file to your home folder (cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc/ /home/user/.xinitrc); edit this file to so that the line with startxfce4 is uncommented (in other words has a '#' in front of it. Finally, run 'startx'

Actually, you should /remove/ the '#' from the start of that line... ;) mvg, Guus

On 15-03-10 20:01, Jeffrey Lynn Parke Jr. wrote:

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Guus Snijders<gsnijders@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 15-03-10 14:07, Jeffrey Parke wrote:

[installing XFCE, xorg] [...]

Actually, you should /remove/ the '#' from the start of that line... ;)

that's exactly what I said, just wanted to make sure he new what a comment was.

Lol, very good. Sorry for spoiling it, then. mvg, Guus

It would appear that on Mar 15, Damien Churchill did say:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide is always a good place to start.

Yeah, I guess maybe I woulda if only my brain hadn't run out of steam. Now that I've looked a little closer at it than the quick glance I did pre-install I've gotta agree, I shoulda started there... It would appear that on Mar 15, Ananda Samaddar did say:

The wiki is your friend:

When your right... Your right! Now that I've looked a little closer, I have to admit that the wiki (at least the one for Arch Linux) appears to be overflowing with good stuff that I'm embarrassed to say I didn't notice.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce4 http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox

And thanks for the additional links :) I couldn't ask for better.

you can use Lynx to view these in the console:

pacman -S lynx

Whoa! It's been so long since I used lynx that I kinda forgot about it. I didn't give up on it easy though. It's just that so much of the web is specifically designed for graphical browsers. But I suppose that I should have realized that wiki pages tend to be formatted properly. And looking at Arch's wiki with lynx is, well, beautiful... I guess lynx is back in my vocabulary. It would appear that on Mar 15, Jeffrey Parke did say:

Have you read the beginners guide? It's a great help for times like these, I'll post it below. Well what you wanna do now is to install the xorg group (pacman -S xorg) then the xfce group (pacman -S xfce4). Then move the .xinitrc file to your home folder (cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc/ /home/user/.xinitrc); edit this file to so that the line with startxfce4 is uncommented (in other words has a '#' in front of it. Finally, run 'startx'

But do read the beginners guide, it is a very nice page that details all of these steps and more.

Thanks, for the info. Incidentally, I am familiar with using startx. But I wouldn't have thought to look in /etc/skel for a sample .xinitrc with initialization details for the most recent desktop installed. Does that also happen when other desktop/"window managers" such as e17 or kde are installed? While I spend most of my computer time inside some GUI desktop... I always prefer to boot to a console and use startx when and if I'm ready. I'll likely wind up starting XFCE with a script that if I select xfce will do a: cp ~/xintrc-xfce ~/.xinitrc && startx It would appear that on Mar 15, Guus Snijders did say:

Actually, you should /remove/ the '#' from the start of that line... ;)

It would appear that on Mar 15, Jeffrey Lynn Parke Jr. did say:

that's exactly what I said, just wanted to make sure he new what a comment was.

Actually THAT I do understand. But I'm guessing you get more refugees from other GUI configured distros that don't than do... I always did think it was dumb to replace "well commented" human readable config files with GUI only configs. Especially when a GUI can just as easily be written to parse & modify or at least rewrite such a file as to hide all the settings away someplace where you can't edit them by hand. But from what I've seen of Arch so far I think I may just be preaching to the choir... It would appear that on Mar 15, Ond?ej Ku?era did say:

I don't know much about xfce, being a KDE user, but start by looking at /var/log/pacman.log. It should tell you what packages actually were installed or which errors occured.

Thanks... Just had a peek at the log, and evidently the error wasn't significant enough to be mentioned there. And all it says about xfdesktop is: [2010-03-15 01:29] installed xfdesktop (4.6.1-1)

Or for a basic troubleshooting you could try a terminal-based browser, such as links. It's not much, but at least ArchLinux wiki will be perfectly readable.

Yeah, since "ArchLinux wiki" is evidently so well designed for text based browsers I think I'll go with lynx (for nostalgic reasons) And I will do so not only because I haven't got a GUI up on Arch yet, But because the test I just ran from my PCLinuxOS install tells me that it's actually easier on the eyes to read ArchLinux's wiki with lynx than with opera... Whoda thunk it? It would appear that on Mar 15, Peter Cannon did say:

You don't need to understand the *Order* in Arch either?

Good! Since pacman is supposed to resolve dependencies I hadn't thought I'd have to until installing the xfdesktop, didn't pull in enough of it's dependencies to run it... But armed with the wiki links above I'm sure I'll figure out what I did wrong.

...

I installed mc and vim without a problem. Then I thought it would be nice if I could get a desktop up.

Well it would those are non GUI apps as you know with your opensuse ect experience.

Yeah they (like alpine {my chosen mail client}) don't "require" a GUI to run. But I've yet to find a "GUI" tool that I like to use instead of any of them. I suppose I would survive if I absolutely had to use a different email client, But I'd really be lost without vim & mc...

...

I did a:

pacman -Si xfce|less

and looked for a package that might get me to a minimal desktop I could work with. I thought maybe xfdesktop...

pacman -S xfdesktop

Why have you done this? If you look at the 'man' page you will see http://linux.die.net/man/1/xfdesktop

xfdesktop manages the desktop itself in the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment.

You should have done pacman -S xfce4

You see, that's what I meant by knowing "what order I need to install which packages"... When I searched the output of the "pacman -Ss xface" I was looking for something resembling a meta-package that was designed to pull in everything needed to run xfce, Like using: apt-get install xubuntu-desktop on a Ubuntu base system or, apt-get install task-XFCE on PCLiniuxOS... Not actually knowing the names of all the components of XFCE, xfdesktop sounded like a possible candidate to me.

By the sound of it you've only installed part of the desktop environment.

...

More to the point: Will I need to figure out how to uninstall xfdesktop to resolve the error?

No.

Good!

You need to do as others have suggested and read the beginners guide http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide especially the "Setting up X" section.

Yeah, woulda, coulda, shoulda, but didn't. In my defense I can only say that the one time (pre-install) that I looked at the beginners guide, I had already peeked at: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide And the first several screenfuls of the beginners guide's text was on the same topic, and didn't seem as easy to boil down to the extract I almost needlessly typed and printed..., " At # : /arch/setup Follow menu in order... Choose "Manually Partition" [ uses cfdisk :) ] Good it will let me tell it where to install grub " To that I pasted in the section from the install guide about pacman commands... By the time I saw that error message, my brain was tired. I rebooted into one of my other linux, signed up for the list, & composed my help request while I could still remember what I'd done. Then I went the heck to bed. I was certainly pleased with all the kind replies I found the next day. And not a one that felt like I was being hit with an RTFM... This tells me a lot about the people here. I thank all of you for being so helpful. And I'll try not to abuse this nice list. But sooner or later I'm sure to wind up with another case of brain flatulence that'll have me asking more stupid questions. Hopefully not so often as to become a pest. It would appear that on Mar 15, Linas did say:

Looks like xfdesktop packages doesn't specify some of its dependancies (which is probably provided in the xfce4 group).

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=xfce4 should also include that there's a group with that name. I don't think it was a bad expectation from his part, looking at pacman -Ss xfce output. And even then, it could have worked, would xfdesktop have taken as dependancies the whole desktop.

Thanks for pointing that out. Still it looks like if I'd have read the whole beginners guide first, I wouldn't have been as likely to make this mistake. Probably all I needed was to start with "xorg" then move on to "xfce4" But I'll read "http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce4" before I resume the process as well. It does look like getting Arch Linux configured the way I need it is going to take a bit more work than I'm used to. But if the "rolling release" part of what I've read about it means I won't have to recreate my personal user environment (heavily modified keyboard shortcuts etc...) every 6 months or so just to keep up to date, then I figure it'll be more than worth the effort. -- | --- ___ | <0> <-> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | ~\___/~ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>> Thanks again to all of you!

On 03/16/2010 01:58 PM, Thayer Williams wrote:

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 1:22 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook<jtwdyp@ttlc.net> wrote:

...

It does look like getting Arch Linux configured the way I need it is going to take a bit more work than I'm used to. But if the "rolling release" part of what I've read about it means I won't have to recreate my personal user environment (heavily modified keyboard shortcuts etc...) every 6 months or so just to keep up to date, then I figure it'll be more than worth the effort.

Welcome aboard and glad you're getting things sorted out. Once you have used a rolling release distro, everything else just seems silly. Reinstall every six months? No thanks!

+1 When I hear about issues people run into when upgrading to, say, the latest version of Ubuntu, my thinking is usually some combination of: 1) "What's an OS upgrade?" 2) "What's an OS version?" 3) "If you were running Arch, you wouldn't be running into so many bugs on upgrade ... because you'd never wind up upgrading so many packages all at the same time." 4) "You're still running into *that* bug? That was fixed in Arch *months* ago!" It's so much fun to be a smug Arch user. :-) DR

On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 15:58 -0300, Guilherme M. Nogueira wrote:

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 3:12 PM, David Rosenstrauch <darose@darose.net>wrote:

...

3) "If you were running Arch, you wouldn't be running into so many bugs on upgrade ... because you'd never wind up upgrading so many packages all at the same time."

Except when there's a new KDE release.... then it's easily 100+ packages =P

Which maxes out to, what... 400 MB? My updates of Ubuntu previously pulled in well over a gigabyte of packages. Painful for the less well-endowed (in connection speed terms) among us.

I've done the ill fated -Syu right before a project deadline. Something in the update broke mdraid and my system wouldn't boot until I booted from livecd to redo the -Syu. I think maybe my mirror was syncing when I was updating and my packages were mismatched. Never update when facing a deadline. On Mar 16, 2010 8:10 PM, "Isaac Dupree" <ml@isaac.cedarswampstudios.org> wrote: On 03/16/10 14:12, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

On 03/16/2010 01:58 PM, Thayer Williams wrote:

...

Welcome aboard and glad you're getting things sorted out. Once you have used a rolling release distro, everything else just seems silly. Reinstall every six months? No thanks!

I enjoyed the 6-month reinstalls... for a while. They reminded me how my system was set up ; to make backups ; etc. When I hear about issues people run into when upgrading to, say, the

latest version of Ubuntu, my thinking is usually some combination of:

1) "What's an OS upgrade?"

2) "What's an OS version?"

true. and on the occasion that Ubuntu breaks something in a stable upgrade, it's awful (although I'm not sure this ever actually happened to me). I still reckon it's useful to reinstall Arch every few years, as "/" gets cluttered with old layouts, .pacnew files, miscellaneous stuff from de-installed packages, packages that are accidentally still installed due to upgrade sequences or forgetfulness, enabled daemons that are no longer part of the mainstream Linux stack (e.g. I hear HAL may be slowly going out of fashion), new advice in the Official Install Guide that you haven't checked in ages, new filesystem formats (or at least, making a new filesystem eliminates any fragmentation in the old one), decaying personal knowledge about how Linux works (due to complacency, if it's all still working, or just not having an all-in-one chance to get a "big picture")... Just don't delete your old "/" until a while after the new one is working, if you can manage it. 3) "If you were running Arch, you wouldn't be running into so many bugs

on upgrade ... because you'd never wind up upgrading so many packages all at the same time."

yes and no. Workarounds are easier, but need to be done more often than once every six months. It was nice to be able to do upgrades during my school-vacation-time rather than when I have a paper due shortly (there's ALWAYS a paper due, or an e-mail to get back to, at my college..) 4) "You're still running into *that* bug? That was fixed in Arch

*months* ago!"

:) -Isaac

On Wed 17 Mar 2010 16:01 -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

So I'm guessing that these "workarounds" happen whenever a "pacman -Syu" leads to breaking something... (Which means that I probably should only do an "pacman -Syu" when A) I've got time to test all my stuff. AND B) I've got time to look for a workaround that I hope someone else already figured out...)

My question is how often would you recommend doing a "pacman -Syu" to avoid having so many "workarounds" that you feel like it might have been easier to reinstall????

It really depends on what happens during development. I'd say once a month is a good frequency, but always remember to read the announcements on archlinux.org. You can also subscribe to the announcements mailing list: http://mailman.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch-announce Cheers.