Handling X upgrades with AMD graphics onboard (Debian)

My girlfriend’s laptop has AMD graphics, and every time an xorg update comes, the driver breaks and of course X won’t start up, not even a tty, just complete blackness after the bootup has finished. Yesterday this happened again, and again, it took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to fix it, so I’m posting it here for future reference, and maybe it’ll be helpful for some.

First step after the upgrade is to make sure you have the sgfxi script installed. In a terminal become root:

sudo su

or just

su

if you don’t have sudo installed. Then

cd /usr/local/bin && wget -O sgfxi smxi.org/sgfxi && chmod +x sgfxi

After this is done, remove your xorg.conf file (otherwise not even a tty will show after bootup):

rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

After this, just reboot, log in, and become root again with sudo su or su. Then just enter

sgfxi

First it will ask if you want it to create an xorg.conf, say yes. Then it will download the driver, and start AMD’s installer. When installing, DO NOT choose the “create distro specific package” option! Basically just stick to the defaults. After it’s done installing it will ask whether you want to reboot or start the desktop. I say reboot because at times I couldn’t log in, even though the display manager was running OK.

That’s it. I’ve tried doing all of this in recovery mode, but there it doesn’t connect to the wireless network automatically, and I just couldn’t do it manually, so this is the way I ended up doing it.

I don’t remember if kernel updates will break the driver (because everything does), but if you can’t boot up, just boot into recovery mode, remove your xorg.conf, reboot, and do all the other steps from the tty.

I feel like ranting

Yes, I haven’t posted anything in quite a while, and that’s because I thought I’d try out tumblr. Well, it didn’t work out. I ilke reading there (and the funny/interesting pictures), posting, not so much.
So here I am with another rant.

So, the shiny new Ubuntu has been released. Normally what I do at the time of releases is try out the thing, but not now. Canonical has turned Ubuntu into something hateful for me. Well, maybe not hateful, since I’d still take it over Windows and OS X, but it’s just not welcoming anymore.

What do I mean? Well, the integrated Amazon search for example. It’s the kind of feature that I wouldn’t ever want to see in any Linux distro. That’s all I have to say about that. Then there was the hideous and arrogant sentence on the frontpage of ubuntu.com. Avoid the pain of Windows 8, or whatever it was. Now, see, being arrogant isn’t one of the reasons Ubuntu managed to turn me into a full-time Linux user. Idiotic comments like this will take Canonical on the same road that Microsoft, and most of all Apple is already on.

It seems like the Ubuntu peeps have realized this, because after only a few hours, they changed it to “Your wish is our command”. This doesn’t make much sense to me, but at least it’s not some arrogant crap.
I’m now confident that I don’t really want to use Ubuntu anymore (not that I was consistently, ever since I made the mistake of “upgrading” to 11.04). It’s the same reason why I don’t use Gnome Shell. I don’t know about others, but it’s the little details (not so little in this case) that manage to turn me away… And it’s not like I’m a hater of theirs, because I’ve defended Unity and Ubuntu several times in the past on the forums and IRC, and wrote a few posts too on making it more efficient.

Anyways, Xubuntu looks real good. It seems to be the real Ubuntu, if you know what I mean.

Making Ubuntu Eat Less

We’ve had a discussion on IRC today about the RAM consumption of various desktop environments, and I was amazed how Unity can use such huge amounts of memory for others. So I thought, why not write down how I get it to idle ~ 200mb.

The reason behind the ugly memory usage is that in Ubuntu a lot of applications are autostarted by default (most of them unnecessarily, at least for me). What’s more, in the process of “dumbing down” Gnome 3 and also Ubuntu, there is no simple way of disabling them.

In the Gnome 2 days, there was a simple “Startup applications” entry in the System menu. Gnome 3 also has this, but there is no menu entry for it, so you have to launch it with the command

gnome-session-properties

You’d think that this is it, it’s done, life goes on, but no, not with Ubuntu. It works OK in Fedora and probably all the other distros, but in the dumbing down process Ubu devs made it so you can only add applications, and can’t remove the existing ones (because they’re not visible in the GUI). Of course this makes sense, because in 12.04 there is a menu entry for gnome-session-properties, and they probably didn’t want inexperienced users to bork stuff by disabling the keyring, etc. It’s getting confusing, right? Damn annoying too. What you actually have to do in Ubuntu is launch Nautilus with root privileges:

gksudo nautilus

Then you have to navigate to

/etc/xdg/autostart

back up the whole folder (!), and then remove the .desktop files of the applications you don’t need.
I always remove the entries for Jockey, Update Notifier, Ubuntu One, Deja Dup, Gwibber, Onboard, Orca, if I don’t want to use a printer with the given computer, then I also remove the entry for the print applet, and if I don’t want (or have) bluetooth, I remove the bluetooth applet as well.

That’s it.

Mine is a 32-bit installation, so it might consume a slightly smaller amount of memory, but after logging in, with htop running in Terminator it uses a little bit more than 230 megs.

Customizing Unity

I’m not really writing this as a howto for the masses, but more to have a good resource for customizing Unity if I happen to ditch it and come back again, and have no idea what to do. It might be useful for anyone, who’s reading this of course.

To be able to customize the basic behavior and look of the launcher and the panel, you need to have Ubuntu Tweak (UT) and CompizConfig Settings Manager (CCSM) installed. These don’t really need any explanation; Ubuntu Tweak is really self-explanatory, and CCSM isn’t much harder either. Note that most of the launcher and panel stuff that you can change in UT, you can also change in CCSM, but it is useful to have UT around, since it provides many more useful tweaks that you might want to look into.

With the help of these, I remove the session menu from the panel, disable the backlight behind the launcher icons, and set the borders around the launchers to illuminate when the given application is open. I also like to set the launcher to hide automatically, but that’s just my preference

After I’m done with changing these more basic settings, I open Nautilus with root privileges with

gksudo nautilus

and head to

/usr/share/unity/5

All of the PNGs found here are used by the launcher and Unity’s application switcher plugins. All of them are required for Unity to work, so you absolutely can’t remove any of them. The only way to delete them is to use a bit of GIMP-fu, and clear them. It is recommended to back up the whole folder, or at least the images you’re going to clear before doing anything.

After clearing every PNG which has “launcher” in it’s name, you can get something like this:

You can also mix the borders up for example. To get the look you can see below, I cleared the shines from the launchers and and the dash button, but didn’t touch the borders and the border shadows. Then, I removed the border and background of the dash button, made copies of the regular leuncher borders and backgrounds, and gave them the appropriate names. This way, the dash button has the same look as the launchers:

To change the dash button, you can use any 48×48 px PNG. The file you need to change is “launcher_bfb.png”

If you examine /usr/share/unity/5 folder further, you can see that besides the launcher images I talked about already, you have lots of other options to change as well. For example to change the look of the progressbar, find the files that have “progressbar” in their name, and so on. You get it, right?

There are generous people, who, after making changes to this folder, repackage Unity for your convenience, so you can have it beautiful with a few clicks

Slackin’

I’ve been tempted by Slackware for a while now, but felt that my Linux kung fu wasn’t good enough. So I waited until the summer break, when I have less crap going on in the study life, and then jumped right into it. I was unlucky right off the bat, because wget’s continue feature doesn’t seem to work so well, and the md5sum didn’t match, so I had to download the damn ISO *again*. 4+ gigs, ya know, takes a while, when you have crappy internets (of course, at the time I didn’t know about the torrents Linux Questions provides). Before installing, I wanted to check a howto on the installer, and I found one, but that was for 12.1, oh my. But nevermind, Slack doesn’t really change it’s installer, so it was all good. Full installation is a peace of cake. Really. Easier than Arch (which isn’t all that hard either, if you read the beginner’s guide). I chose KDE as my default DE, but to be honest, 4.5 was still buggy, no matter how you look at it. With KDE, the newer the better, so I eventually just upgraded from 13.37 to current (which has KDE 4.8 right now). This brings us to the package management. I’m saying it right off the bat, it’s really not that hard. First off, there’s slackpkg, which you use to install, remove, and upgrade your system, much like all the other package managers out there. For example to install gimp, you’d do a

slackpkg install gimp

and that’s it. But, if you do a full install from the the DVD, you won’t really need to install anything.

For the software that’s not available in Slack’s repos, there’s Slackbuilds.org, and sbopkg. sbopkg I won’t really go into too much, but what is good to know about it, is that it has an ncurses interface. You go root with su -, search for packages, build your queue, modify the slackbuilds if you wish, and install.

If you just can’t find a package or slackbuild for something, then there’s src2pkg, to build you a Slackware package from source (works like 98% of the time). If you’re like me, and use AfterShot Pro, which is closed source, you’re still in no trouble at all, because there’s rpm2tgz. Yes, it does just that, it converts RPMs to TGZ packages. That’s it for package management. Sometimes you do have to search for dependencies, but I’m really satisfied with what I have, and I didn’t really need to compile anyhthing from source (well, I did install the gstreamer codecs from source with src2pkg as an exercise of sorts).
with
Problems… Well, no serious ones. I had to reinstall vim (yes, I’m trying to get into it) to get normal system clipboard support (had to modify the slackbuild). There’s was also a weird phenomenon: urxvt and xfce terminal always started in my documents directory. That was kinda weird, so at first I put cd into the bashrc, but then I figured out that urxvt (and probably any other terminal that’s not Konsole) starts in the directory that’s specified as your documents path in KDE’s system settings. Weird that, I might have to open a thread on LQ about that or something, but for now I just changed that path to my home directory. That’s it for the problems…

And lastly, there’s one thing to say: try Slackware! It’s a great distro, and after using it for a while I can really see why they say it’s easy, and why it’s loveable. Plus, if noob like me can use it without much trouble, others can too. CrunchBang is still my baby though, that won’t change. I might just install Openbox on Slack, and import the #! configs, to have something like best of both worlds.

Screenshots!

High noob level

I managed to solve the sound issue, finally. The solution was easy, I just had to read the Arch wiki some more. Basically: you have to make two configuration files for alsa, one is in the /etc directory called asound.conf, and the other is a hidden file in your home directory called .asoundrc. The reason asound.conf is needed, is because there you can set the default sound card by using it’s name. You can check what the needed card’s name is in /proc/asound/cards. Just having an .asoundrc is not enough, because it uses numbers to set the sound card used by alsa (you can check the that with aplay -l), but those numbers get mixed up with almost every boot. Still, configuring just the asound.conf wasn’t enough for me, and I had to create an .asoundrc file one last time. Now sound works just fine. More on how to create the config files here.

I have given up on editing the XFCE menu. It’s too much work, and not worth it. Removing entries is fairly simple, but as I understand it, adding entries is a much harder process. It is possible to use alacarte on it I think, but I haven’t tried it yet. It probably has many Gnome dependencies anyway, so I’d rather not install it. So I’m just using a dock now. It’s better anyway. The only way a menu worked for me so far for launching applications was with Openbox and tint2.

Right now i’m working on a HUD styled desktop. HUD panel, HUD dock, HUD conky, and elementary GTK. The fonts look very nice in elementary’s new theme, especially in Ubuntu/Mint. And now Arch too, thanks to Infinality.

Anyway, I’ll post the screenshots here too, when I’m done with it.

One week into my Arch XFCE install

Maybe a little bit more than a week ago I started fantasizing about how I tried lots of distros and desktop environments and window managers, and I mostly know how they work, but I don’t really know that much about how Linux works, how the terminal works, etc. Plus XFCE 4.10 got released. So I nuked Xubuntu, and slapped Arch on the disk.

It was a bit tricky to configure. First off, I dunno why, but I still have sound problems. Alsamixer tells me that I have two sound cards, and it of course always chooses the wrong one (until now I didn’t even know this one existed; I guess this happens when someone else puts your PC together) and I don’t have sound. So I fired up the Arch wiki, it told me to enter aplay -l into the terminal, so I did, and then stared at the screen with that stupid face I make when I just don’t get something. Because aplay -l doesn’t show that wrong sound card that alsamixer always chooses. No worries, I made an asoundrc file, and then everything was fine, until alsamixer (or whatever is choosing the sound card) chose that wrong fooking card again, and I looked in amazement again. So I checked the sound cards again, and now the device, etc. numbers were swapped. So I changed this asoundrc again, and it worked, until this happened again, so I repeated the procedure yet again. Now I have sound, but I wonder for how long. Also, the xfce mixer applet sometimes crashes on me, and it of course  doesn’t give any error messages.

Fonts were also a bit tricky to configure, but the Infinality patch and a bit of tinkering took care of this one pretty fast.

Then came a bit of a dependency weirdness, because I wanted me a dock, specifically AWN. So I tried to install it from AUR, but one of it’s dependencies also had to be installed from the AUR, so I did, but AWN still didn’t want to install, so I had to modify the PKGBUILD. I must have done something right, because then everything installed fine, and AWN works.

Honestly, I’m thinking of installing Slackware in the summer break, just to see how long I would last. At least I wouldn’t be able to complain about dependency problems.

Anyway, the whole thing is now set up mostly how I like it. The only thing left on the to do list is editing the main menu.