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  1. And the winner is…

    August 3, 2008 by Vincent

    Last week, I wrote that i was still looking for a window manager that I really like. I have tried all the mayor tiling ones and I finally settled with Xmonad. Yes, the window manager with the 300Mb haskell compiler dependecies. I’m okay with it now.

    The way xmonad handles two (or more) screens is the way all window managers should do it. You have one set of workspaces. The screens are portals to these tags. So you can have workspace one on screen one and workspace two on screen two. Then you can have workspace two on screen one and workspace four on screen two. A picture to demonstrate:

    Xmonad workspace screen explanation

    The configuration file is easy to edit and I like it a lot. Even more so then the config file of awesome. It sounds scary to edit a haskell file but haskell is a nice, easy to understand language. My config file is found here.

    So the reason I sticked with it were the multiple screen support, config file and the simplicity. I know a 300mb dependecy for a ~1 mb window manager is not really KISS but the way XMonad works is really KISS. That is because only manages your windows. You can choose youre own panel(if any). I like it!

    Category Linux, Window Managers, XMonad | Tags: | No Comments

  2. The quest for the perfect window manager

    July 25, 2008 by Vincent

    When I started with linux, i started with Gnome. It was fine for a while but I didn’t like it very much. You weren’t able to delete all panels for instance, and I wanted to. Also, I don’t like the DE idea. I only want to install what I need.

    So I installed Openbox. And it was amazing. The configuration file is very nice, and the whole wm is really clean. It’s in my opinion the best floating window manager. The right-click menu is amazing, you can choose your panel yourself and it has no dependencies! So I ran Openbox for a while. But I only had terminals and a movie and a browser. The browser on screen one, and the rest on screen two. So I figured that with a tiling window manager I would use the space on my screens more efficiently. Sadly, Openbox doesn’t have a tiling feature. Wich I pitty, and quite a lot of archers with me.

    But tiling window managers are hard to configure. Xmonad is configured in haskell, wmii in ruby or python and dwm in C. And I am not a programmer (yet). But I tried Xmonad for a while, it’s very nice, the dual screen support is amazing, but I hate installing 300 MB(!) of dependency’s for one program.

    But then I found Awesome. And Awesome has an awesome name ánd an awesome configuration file. It is easy to understand and edit. But awesome 3.0 (it’s 2.3 now) is going to have a lua configuration file. And I don’t think that is an improvement. Awesome was the window manager that made it easy to tile.

    So I tried dwm, becuase I love the idea of simplicity. Also the configuration file is really nice and clear. More so than awesome’s lua configuration file. But dwm doesn’t do dual screen as awesome. So I am going to stick with awesome for the time being. Learning lua, but when dwm does dual screen like awesome, wich means one statusbar per screen and different tiling layouts for each screen, I am going to install dwm right away. Do, by any chance, you know if I can start two instances of dwm, one for each screen? And what window manager do you use and why?

    Category Linux, Window Managers | Tags: | No Comments

  3. Lvm is lovely

    June 19, 2008 by Vincent

    I am a neatfreak. Not in real life but on my computer. Everything must be in the right folder with the right name. I don’t like clutter on my desktop. I hate it. But i have a reasonably large video and music collection. But it’s difficult to keep it neat with three seperate hard drives. I used to have a /data folder with in that folder 3 different folders linked to the different disks. I had one disks for Animé and Music, one disk for TV-shows and one for Movies. But I don’t have that much Anime and Music so I have a lot of unused space on that disk. But I can’t put other stuff on there and still keep it organised. I was interested in raid but raid 1 is a waste of space, raid 5 is nice but for good performance you need a raid card, and raid 0 is too insecure.

    And then I discoverd Lvm. Lvm stands for Logical Volume Manager. What it does is it combines hard drives and partitions (physical volumes) into a large volume group. Within this volume group you can make partitions that cover multiple hard drives.

    So what I did was combine all my drives into one large 2.16 TB partition. And I love it. If your interested as well, use this howto. It’s all you need. And this is what I love about linux. I like to finetune my system. And this was so much easier than I thought but remember, ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA.

    Category Linux, Software | Tags: | No Comments

  4. New Opera

    June 13, 2008 by Vincent

    A new version of Opera has been released yesterday. Version 9.50. There are some nice changes. First of all, they claim everything is faster. I haven’t tested that but I believe them.

    Second, they have a new feature called quickfind. You type in a word that you remember from a page that you have visited and it looks it up. For example, if you type in “discovers linux” it finds my site :) . I really like this feature. For example, you have been reading a forum thread about something, but you can’t remember the link, you just type in the topic title en Opera finds the page.

    Third and best feature is Opera link. Opera link is a way to synchronize your bookmarks and speed dial between your computers. But not only that, it syncs it to your mobile phone as well. You just create a my.opera.com account, log in in your browser and thats all.

    Another thing I found out yesterday is that I passed my final exams at my school. So that means I graduated High School. Finally, two years over do but it happened. I’m going to do computer science next year and I’m looking forward to it. That also means I’m into the market for a new laptop. I’m thinking about the Dell XPS m1530 but if anyone has got any suggestions, I would love to hear it.

    Category Software | Tags: | No Comments

  5. New Distribution, New Blog

    June 10, 2008 by Vincent

    Yeah, I started a new blog. I guess i would like a place to share my experiences with linux. I hope you like it.

    So, linux… When i got my very first own PC I inmediately tried to install ubuntu on it. Didn’t work that well in the beginning, my graphics card was to new so it wasn’t supported yet by the driver shipped with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, so I installed the beta of Gutsy Gibbon, and it worked. And I was happy, for a while. I still had the feeling that i was missing something. So i went out and searched for a different distribution. I came across Debian but it resembled Ubuntu too much.

    Then I came across Arch Linux. I was a little scared though, after the textbased install you had a command line system. I didn’t knew if i was advanced enough to do that kind of stuff. But I took the risk. I read the beginners guide in the amazing Arch wiki and did it. And it was much easier then I thought. It takes a little more time then an Ubuntu install but it is much more to my liking. Not a ton of programs that I never use, I just install what I want. And then I saw how great Arch is.

    Arch has a lot of things I like. To begin with, it’s rolling release. I don’t have to wait until a new release of the distribution to get a new version of a program. It’s amazing. In theory you never have to reinstall. Second, we have the AUR which stands for Arch User Repository. User can submit programs themselves so almost every program is to be found in the Official Repository’s or in the AUR. Third we have the ABS. The ABS makes it really easy to rebuild any package from the repository’s.

    So the conclusion of this post? Arch, I love you

    Category General Talk | Tags: | No Comments

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