Tag Archives: Linux Mint

Tiling Window Manager XMonad

On my laptop where I run Linux Mint 11 I have been using the window manager XMonad for a while. It’s a tiling window manager, and it’s the first time I’m using one of those. If you don’t know what a tiling window manager is, you can check out Wikipedia’s page on the subject:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tiling_window_manager

Or this video of somebody fiddling around with XMonad:

XMonad works very well with Gnome 2, and it doesn’t conflict with the Gnome 2 panel at the top of the monitor. Here is a screenshot of my dekstop (click on it to show it in full-size):

I like that you open, resize and change active window, and move windows between workspaces with only the keyboard. This means that you don’t have to use the trackpad for those tasks.

I think that using a tiling window manager works surprisingly well, considering that it’s not a commonly used type of window manager. Sometimes do windows look a bit strange when they are forced to fill the whole screen tho, but that’s not often.

I recommend you to check out XMonad if it sound interesting. On Mint it’s really easy to change back to regular Gnome if you don’t like it, just pick regular Gnome on the login screen.

Links:

Ghost in the Shell Linux Mint Wallpaper

Yesterday (around 3-4 AM) I installed Linux Mint on my laptop (Toshiba R830). So now it has Windows 7, Arch and Mint. To enhance the awesomeness, I downloaded a Ghost in the Shell wallpaper and added a Linux Mint logo to it which I edited with a brush. All work was done in GIMP.

Ghost in the Shell - Linux Mint Wallpaper - 1920x1200

Ghost in the Shell - Linux Mint Wallpaper - 1920x1080

My Desktop

Possible Solutions To Two Wine Problems

I have for some time now tried to get games like Team Fortress 2 and Mirror’s Edge to run in Linux Mint 10 64-bit through Wine. However, it haven’t gone very well so I’m only able to play them with really, really bad performance. But maybe will some of the stuff that I found help somebody else, so I will post what I found in this blog post. The graphics card that I have is an Asus Radeon HD 6870, and the driver is the proprietary display driver (CCC 11.5) found on amd.com.

My games won’t start – nothing happens

Try to update your system with aptitude. That was what solved the problem for me.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install
sudo aptitude upgrade

(Not really sure why sudo aptitude install installed some updates when I first ran it)

No direct rendering

I had the problem that running glxinfo | grep direct in the terminal returned the following line:

direct rendering: No (LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT set)

However, if I ran it with sudo (sudo glxinfo | grep direct), it returned:

direct rendering: Yes

Here is a link to a thread with somebody having the same problem. The first possible solution that is given in this thread is to add the following lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:
```
Section    "DRI"
Group      "video"
Mode       0660
EndSection
```
The second one that is given in the thread is to add your user account to the video group. To find where you do this, open the MintMenu and search for Users and Groups.
Another suggestion that I found was to type this line into the command line:
```
unset LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT
```
This did only work for me in the current open terminal window. So when I opened a new one, it went back to saying No.
The final solution, that actually worked for me, was to disable the Compiz desktop effects.

Here is the thread where I got to know much of the stuff above: http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?p=61294. But as I said, I still have pretty bad performance in my games and I’m to lazy to fix it. I think I will keep on gaming on Windows, and doing all other stuff on Linux.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei Linux Mint Wallpapers

I have modified five Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei wallpapers that I found on the Internet with Linux Mint logos. Not much work done, but on the other hand it didn’t take much time. They are all in 1920×1200 (HD?).

Tane Kitsu - Linux Mint

Kanako Oora - Linux Mint

Meru Otonashi - Linux Mint

Miko Nezu - Linux Mint

Shouko Maruuchi - Linux Mint

If you, like me, have two monitors, you may find this wallpaper nice on your desktop:

Kanako Oora & Tane Kitsu - Linux Mint

Here is a screenshot of my desktop:

My Desktop

Why Aptitude Is Superior To Apt-Get

Yesterday I was messing around in the terminal and googeling for cool and useful commands. I had seen the command aptitude being mentioned a few times before in forum threads and such, but I had never tried to use it myself. However, yesterday I did try use it didn’t take long time until I realised how superior it’s to apt-get.

Instead of ranting about what it does better than the other myself, I will link to an article from 2007 that describes everything very well:

http://pthree.org/2007/08/12/aptitude-vs-apt-get

Black Screen After Installing FGLRX In Linux Mint

I have finally bought a new graphics card to my computer, a Asus Radeon HD 6870 DirectCU. It was a bit longer than my old card, a PowerColor 4870, so it was tough to fit in the computer chassis. But I made it at last. The reason why I purchased a new card, was because my old one was half broken and wasn’t able to run with the default clock speeds without getting artifacts everywhere on my monitors.

When I first started Linux Mint with my new card plugged in, I was welcomed by a black screen, which wasn’t very fun. So I booted up Linux Mint in Recovery Mode and tried to install working graphics driver. The driver I had from earlier was ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver from the Additional Drivers window in Linux Mint (and Ubuntu). This graphics driver didn’t work after a clean install of Linux Mint either.

I also found these two guides: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI and http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Maverick_Installation_Guide, which describes how to install ATI driver. But the terminal command aticonfig never worked for me, so I didn’t manage to complete the installation.

However, if you simply download the proper driver from AMD’s website, and then run it like a normal program, it works just as it should. So I can’t really see the reason why you would build the graphics driver into packages and install them and so on in 20+ steps. Maybe it’s easier to uninstall the driver in the future. But how often do you change video card or update your graphics driver on Linux?

Anyway, it works great now and I’m happy.

Change Back Google Search in Linux Mint

Apparently has the dudes behind Linux Mint decided that they want their own Google search engine in Firefox, which lacks many functions. Here follows some steps you shall take to change it back to the default search page:

Open a terminal window.

Type these lines after one another:

cd /usr/share/linuxmint/common/artwork/firefox/
sudo wget http://mxr.mozilla.org/firefox/source/browser/locales/en-US/searchplugins/google.xml?raw=1 -O google.xml.fixed
sudo mv google.xml google.xml.orig
sudo mv google.xml.fixed google.xml
sudo cp google.xml /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

Maybe you have to restart Firefox now.

I found this solution on the Linux Mint forum: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=17438

Missing Fonts in Linux Mint? Look Here!

I got a bit tired on how my Ubuntu 11.04 installation worked, so I downloaded and installed Linux Mint 10. So now I’m a Mint user. However, it’s based on Ubuntu, so it isn’t that huge a step away.

Anyway, I realised that some fonts where missing in Mint, like verdana for an example. Instead arial was showing up on websites and such. If you also miss fonts and want them, follow these hardcore steps:

Open a terminal. (Ctrl + Alt + T)
Type this line:
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
Go through the installation and then you are done!