Today I finally tried Awesome, a well-known tiling window manager. I must say that I like it a lot, and I’m gonna be using it for some time. Awesome is truly awesome.

awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.

It is primarly targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on theirs graphical environment.

To begin the Awesome journey I went to Awesome Wiki that has everything for beginners, like myself. The setup itself was very fast and just by copying the sample configuration file, I was up and running Awesome window manager. Without making any changes to configuration, I must say that Awesome is pretty good out-of-box. It has nice pop-up menu which reminds me of Openbox, a panel/taskbar, a system tray and space for widgets – everything that a window manager needs.

If we look at the configuration file, we see that it is pretty straightforward. The Lua syntax is simple and understandable. Making adjustments and adding new features is pretty easy. Thanks to the well documented Awesome API documentation.

Since I have a dual-head setup, it is important for me to know how a window manager handles two screens. By default configuration Awesome creates two screens, each with own workspaces, which are called tags in Awesome.

Without any customization to the default configuration file Awesome handles things quite good. For example, I can watch videos (from vlc, mplayer or flash) in full screen no matter what the layout is, which I couldn’t do in Xmonad. Of course this could be set in Xmonad, but Lua syntax is understandable than Haskell’s. Although it doesn’t have a debugger like Xmonad, you can check the syntax for errors with awesome –check.

Awesome - January 2010

I must say that Awesome is very user-friendly, it is fast, customizable, visually appealing, works very well with default configuration, seems stable and even can be fun. It is great for beginners.

Ever since I bought my laptop, Linux has had problems with its touchpad. For example, Arch recognizes it as an PS/2 mouse instead of Synaptics or ALPS touchpad. Because of this, when I switch off the touchpad with its off button, I can’t turn it back on again.

So after doing some research, I discovered that there is another way to do what I want. That is to load/unload responsible module with modprobe.

I made a simple bash script that does this, and mapped a keyboard shortcut. Also I needed to change the sudoers file, so that I can use modprobe -r psmouse and modprobe psmouse without giving the root password. Works like a charm.

#!/bin/sh

if lsmod | grep -q psmouse
    then sudo modprobe -r psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned OFF'
    else sudo modprobe psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned ON'
fi

Recently I heard about Bluetile. So I gave it a shot.

Bluetile is a tiling window manager for X based on xmonad. Windows are arranged automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap, maximizing screen use. Bluetile’s focus lies on making the tiling paradigm easily accessible to users coming from traditional window managers by drawing on known conventions and providing both mouse and keyboard access for all features. It also tries to be usable ‘out of the box’, requiring minimal to no configuration in most cases.

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

Its been some time since Google announced that there will be extensions similar to the ones that Firefox has. Few weeks ago they released a build featuring the extensions. Very quickly people started developing them and even sites for extensions  showed up (http://chromeextensions.org/).

But only today Google officially launched the beta version of extension channel.

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

xmonad

For over a year now I have used Openbox as my only window manager in Linux. It is lightweight, stable, easily customizable and fast, yet somehow I was interested in something new.

Xmonad is the first tiling manager that I installed. I chose Xmonad because it seems to be the most popular out of them all. It has great documentation and community.
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

While browsing various Linux related forums, I have noticed that people mention tiling window managers more often. They are saying things like – awesome, dwm, xmonad, wmii. And the screenshots associated with them are really pretty not with eye candy but with their simplicity.

So, I did a research and educated myself about tiling windows managers. The main idea for a tiling window manager is – it arranges windows so that no desktop space is wasted – every open window is relatively maximized.

As Wikipedia says:

In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.

This concept seemed to me very appealing, since I like to have things organized. Shuffling throughout many windows just to find the needed one takes a lot of time.

Besides that I like exploring new things, especially those that are considered to be elite. So next article will be about Xmonad.

Today I got fed up with the fact that I don’t see fonts in Linux as I should. Luckily after about 30 minutes of browsing through Arch Linux forums, wiki and googling around, I fixed the problem.

For starters, I discovered that there is a configuration file for fonts, which can do interesting stuff. Not only you can set default font options like hinting and so on, but you can also define a system-wide font-family. Thanks to awesome Arch Wiki I got a nice configuration file. After restarting X, I nothing much really changed, somewhere in the web fonts had changed, but still something looked wrong.

After some research I found out that changing DPI might solve that. It seems that there are two standards for DPI being 72 for Macs and 96 for PCs. So, I checked my current DPI

xdpyinfo | grep dots

resolution:    86×85 dots per inch

This did not seem right. I decided to stay with the PC standard, so a line to xorg.conf fixed all my problems.

Option    “DPI”   “96×96″

Now everything seems perfect, although in the same time weird, since I haven’t accustomed to the current changes. Fonts are more readable, easier on eyes and just right. An hour spent