therning.org/ magnus

After installing a basic Arch system and adding X.org it still isn’t very usable. My desktop of choice is Gnome, so that’s what I installed next, with a few extra packages to make it prettier and more useful.

I found out the hard way a few weeks ago that if you install gnome without gnome-extras then it’s a bad idea to install gdm and configure your system to boot to X. That way you’ll end up in a situation where your desktop doesn’t have an X terminal. I made sure to avoid that situation this time around. After installing gnome,gnome-extras and gdm I noticed that both gdm and policykit created users with uid 120 and 102, respectively. Just like exptected from services they have low uids. What surprised me was that they ended up having gid 1001 and 1002. That looks like bugs to me I decided to fix that up manually myself by editing the group file (using vigr of course) and then searching for all file with the offending gids (using find / -gid 1001 for the first, with obvious changes to find the second).

After configuring gdm I realised I also needed gdm-themes And I also added a few pretty fonts, and removed a few of the unpretty ones:

# pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts ttf-cheapskate artwiz-fonts ttf-bitstream-vera
# pacman -Rns xorg-fonts-75dpi xorg-fonts-100dpi

Then of course I needed to install xmonad:

# pacman -S xmonad-contrib

Co-ercing Gnome to actually use it was interesting though. I followed the instructions for running Xmonad in Jaunty, but that wasn’t enough. I also needed to place a file named xmonad.desktop in /usr/share/applications/ with the following contents (greatly inspired by the metacity.desktop found in the same location):

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xmonad
Exec=xmonad
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-WMName=Xmonad
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager

After that it was time to install stuff that is useful First off was Thunderbird, which I immidiately had to equip with a few plug-ins of course. When setting up my mail account again I noticed that my Gnome session wasn’t quite the way I wanted—there was no gpg-agent running. After a quick check with the people on arch-general, without receiving any definitive resolution, I wrote my own little hack to address it. Of course I posted it in the thread I had started, but I might as well include it here too:

--- /etc/gdm/Xsession_orig  2009-04-27 17:13:50.346834448 +0100
+++ /etc/gdm/Xsession   2009-04-27 17:16:25.310151728 +0100
@@ -213,6 +213,14 @@
   fi
 fi

+# add seahorse if found
+seahorse="`gdmwhich seahorse-agent`"
+if [ -n "${seahorse}" ] && [ -x "${seahorse}" ]; then
+    command="seahorse-agent --execute $command"
+elif [ -z "${seahorse}" ]; then
+    echo "$0: seahorse not found!"
+fi
+
 # add ssh-agent if found
 sshagent="`gdmwhich ssh-agent`"
 if [ -n "$sshagent" ] && [ -x "$sshagent" ] && [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then

There’s one more tool I can’t live without, parcellite, which is also available pre-built on Arch.

I’d love to see the Gmail S/MIME plugin for Firefox gain support for PGP/MIME. I can’t imagine it’d be too hard to add for someone who’s familiar with JavaScript and Firefox plugins. Or maybe there’s some other plugin out there that offers PGP/MIME support in Gmail?

Oh, and no, FireGPG isn’t good enough, it doesn’t do PGP/MIME, it doesn’t automatically verify/decrypt received emails, and it requires too much mouse interaction!

My old one has expired so I had to create a new one. It should have hit a keyserver close to you already. I even remembered to upload it to biglumber.com this time