Getting my Manjaro to look just right

I use Manjaro (main XFCE edition) on my main desktop machine,  a second hand HP 6000 Pro bought for around £150 a year ago,  upgraded to 8Gb RAM and now running a moderate Nivida video card.

Its been running fine with just the odd hiccup since then.

I'm generally a fan of the dark themes and I do like a bit of Compiz (I'm a sucker for the wobbly windows).  I went with the manjaro-compiz package and I run it at startup using the Compiz Fusion Icon.

A consequence of this is that you end up redoing a lot of your settings again in compiz settings manager.  For example: I had to set new keyboard shortcuts for minimizing and maximizing windows.    One annoyance is that if you go this way you lose windows snapping.  The addon for wobbly windows conflicts with the one for snapping via CCSM and I chose my good old wobbly windows.  I'd like to have both.

Now that we have GTK3 coming in things change again.

Manjaro have recently updated pamac, their app for updates and installing packages that runs as default in the main XFCE edition.

This means that I need a theme which can deal with GTK2,  GTK3 and Compiz.

If you have had Manjaro running for a while you will of course have had all the updates but you may still be on the first theme that came with your initial install and that is the Menda theme.  I moved away from this when I had some issues with it and GTK3.  The solution is the great new theme that now comes with Manjaro : Vertex-Maia.  This works great with GTK3.

I used to use Emerald theme manager for Compiz but I've gone back to GTK for the window decorations.

However,  when you do this you'll find that the window decorations (the look for the maximize,  minimize & close buttons) are not consistent with the theme.

I found the solution in the Arch WIKI:

• Selecting the theme in Compiz 0.9: The 0.9 version of GTK Window Decorator will read Metacity's theme settings from GSettings. The theme can be set with the following command:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.metacity theme theme-name

where theme-name is the name of the theme you wish to use.

• Selecting the theme in Compiz 0.8: The 0.8 version of GTK Window Decorator expects Metacity's theme settings to be stored in GConf. Despite the fact that Metacity no longer uses GConf, the GTK Window Decorator theme can still be set using the following command:

$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/theme -t string theme-name

where theme-name is the name of the theme you wish to use.

I'm using  vertex-maia as my icon theme as well.  I use the dark variant of the main theme,  the package is: Vertex-Maia-Dark.

Here's what a normal window looks like:

And Pamac is now pretty consistent in its GTK3 guise:

I think the theme looks great on the start menu as well:

I think the background is of of Charlie Henson's excellent backgrounds.

Finally: the GKT Greeter: if you had the old menda theme and then are moving to Maia then you will need to look at this too.

Get in via the "all settings" manager and click on:

Now make sure that you have the new theme selected in there instead of the old menda one:

Finally lets consider LibreOffice.  It works fine with a dark shell but the icon set used is not the best by default.  I like the breeze and sifr icon sets available to LO but the standard ones don't show up well on a dark theme.

To get round this you may want to look up libreoffice-breeze-icons in the AUR.  This will allow you to install a special set of adjusted icons:

You can now select the icon set from within settings in LibreOffice Writer:

And this is how things should look now in LO:

Logitech Media Server memory mangement under Linux

I've had a Squeezebox up and running for many years.  Its served me very well in that time,  and although admittedly a bit "techie" for all tastes it runs well and  has been reliable over the years. 

Around a year ago the NAS I was holding the data on and running the server software from (ancient Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ running sparc) died a sudden death.  Despite many attempts I could neither revive the NAS nor even get the data back from it.

I did have some backups and other sources for getting the data back,  and after a few weeks I had amassed most of it again,  thank goodness.  All those hours of burning CDs,  filling in MP3 tags and finding appropriate album images had not been wasted. 

I have an old Dell machine running in a small area I laughingly refer to as an "office area" and I thought: since its almost always running: why not use this as a media server instead.  So I went ahead and installed the linux version of the Logitech software on there and then added a 2nd hard drive and copied over my music and photos. 

After a good deal of fiddling around the setup seemed to work well: except for one thing.  A huge memory leak!  Within a week of a reboot the machine (Dell Vostro 200 with 4GB of RAM) had pretty much run out of memory.

A few days ago I came across a YouTube posting by Joe Collins which was talking about memory management under Linux.

He mentioned this command:

sudo sh -c "sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"

I ran this on the machine and lo and behold: back came some free memory.

The next job was to schedule this to run regularly: otherwise the freed up memory would slowly disappear again. 

So I created a cron job to facilitate this.

Since the command was preceded by "sudo" I needed to edit the root contab file in order for it to run so the command was:

sudo crontab -e

This command takes you into the appropriate file to edit (after choosing your editor, in this case I chose NANO).

 At this point you need to enter some syntax into the file which firstly tells cron how often you want the command to run and secondly gives it the command to run. 

In my case the command was:

*/120 * * * * sudo sh -c "sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"

The first bit (*/120 * * * *) tells cron to run the job every 120 minutes,  and the 2nd is our command.

No more reboots to reclaim memory for me! 

Clean shutdown for Manjaro from a keyboard shortcut

I always like to shut down my computer using a keyboard shortcut rather than the GUI.  For me,  its just faster and its one of the things I set up in all new linux setups.

The command I always used to achieve this was:

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit /org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.Stop

However,  recently I found that this stopped working.

When I ran the command from a terminal I found the following error:

The name org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit was not provided by any .service files

Eventually I found a post on the ubuntu forums (referencing their french forums) which suggests that this no longer works and to try instead:

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 "org.freedesktop.login1.Manager.PowerOff" boolean:true

When combined with a keyboard shortcut this works perfectly again.

Power saving and the kernel on a Dell Vostro 200

The power saving features on the Dell I've been using for a while have been bothering me for a while.  Its running Mint 17.1 cinnamon and has always had a few issues with sleep.  I tried all sorts of permutations but left on its own the machine always crashed after a while: when going into power saving mode.

I've not totally sorted it: but I have found a parameter to add to the kernel startup which helps quite a bit:

quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor

You'll probably find using grub customizer the easiest way to test this parameter.

In praise of Kobo

Around about 3 years ago I was given a Kobo E Reader by my brother in law as a birthday present (it could have been Xmas but I digress....).  The choice was actually mine but he bought it.

I chose Kobo at the time because I wanted to avoid the ever present Kindles and I was worried about Amazon cornering the market in E books with their proprietary formats and readers.  I also liked the idea that they were available here in the UK at WH Smiths who have a branch locally and I remembered from my childhood.

As time went by I found I used the Kobo quite a lot although mainly when I was on the train to work.  I bought quite a few books from their store and also downloaded some of the classics that were available for free.  I kept updating it as new firmware came out and all seemed well.

Around 6 months ago the Kobo started to play up a bit.  I found that it would no longer mount as a separate drive when attached via USB to a computer and it seemed a little bit slower.  I had backed up my books to a computer and the ones that were bought from the Kobo store were always available via their web portal and online store but I worried that I would lose my content eventually. 

So with a heavy heart I contacted their online support people and started a long correspondence aimed at fixing it.  Despite our mutual best efforts it appeared that all was lost and the Kobo was going to fail.

Then to my surprise they offered to replace the Kobo for free (apart from some shipping charges to Europe which to be fair were probably in place to stop jokers trying to get something for free).  I am now the proud owner of a shiny new replacement Kobo!

So praise be to Kobo.  My cynicism was misplaced and it only seems to give praise where its due.  If you are in the market for an E reader perhaps this will give you some more confidence to go with the Kobo instead of a Kindle and together we can at least put off yet another monopoly for a while.