Thursday, October 3, 2013

Manjaro / Arch Power management - Battery monitor - hybernation

Problem:
The battery monitor that came with Manjaro doesn't inform me when I'm running out of juice and my computer will just shut off without warning.

Hibernation also seems does nothing, just makes it harder to boot back up.

Fixes:
I played around with tint2 using tintwizard and other peoples shared tint2rc config files as a guide and found adding the following to my tint2rc file added battery status to the system tray, but I was still not seeing notifications that the battery was down.

# Battery
battery = 1
battery_low_status = 20
battery_low_cmd = notify-send "battery low"
battery_hide = 0
bat1_font = Sans 6
bat2_font = sans 6
battery_font_color = #FFFFFF 65
battery_padding = 3 1
battery_background_id = 1

As it turns out, the notification was just too dark and disappeared to quickly for me to notice it.

One solution to this was to change tintrc to increase the timeout of the notification and add an icon to make it more visible:

# Battery
battery = 1
battery_low_status = 25
battery_low_cmd = notify-send -t 600000 "WARNING:" "Battery Critically Low!" --icon=battery-low
battery_hide = 0
bat1_font = Sans 6
bat2_font = sans 6
battery_font_color = #FFFFFF 65
battery_padding = 3 1
battery_background_id = 1

Another option would be to change the default setting of all notifications to be more visible by going to Settings --> Notifications and bumping up the time a which notifications will disappear and
and choosing the Theme: "ZOMG-PONIES!"

I did both.

Another fix worth mentioning is a program to extend battery life.  The Arch user Spatry who does the how-to videos recommended I try Jupiter.  It wasn't part of the normal Manjaro build so I had to install it from AUR:

yaourt -S jupiter

After that, it appeared I needed a way to start it upon bootup in Openbox.  While searching how to auto-start on Manjaro I came across a post recommending the program ob-autostart, which also had to be installed via AUR:

yaourt -S ob-autostart

After that one just launches ob-autostart and creates a shortcut to launch Jupiter.





Network printing on Manjaro / Arch linux

I'm starting to find the Arch user documentation isn't as helpful as it seemed when I was an Ubuntu user.

Came across this post related to network printing:

Optional advanced network setup

It is also possible to run a entire cupsd+cups-browsed instance on your client with Avahi browsing enabled to discover unknown shared printers in your network. This can be useful in large setups where the server is unknown.
Note: This behavior did not change with cups 1.6.x - the difference is that until 1.5.x cupsd was able to do printer browsing alone and now it can only browse its own shared printers. To get the local cupsd recognize other shared printers offered by a remote cupsd server you need a running local cups-browsed (supported since cups-filters 1.0.26) instance using Avahi to discover unknown printers.
There is good news in April 2013 (still has to be incorporated above).

Following the link to the news links you to information that isn't clear enough to be useful, or is no longer correct.

Would love to know if anyone has got a network printer up and running on Arch...











Google talk plugin on Manjaro / Arch

I'm not sure why getting a basic functional system needs to be so complicated on Arch / Manjaro, but I guess it does force me to learn about the entire system, which I guess is kind of the point.

Anyway, pacman doesn't work, and the forums said to use packer, but that didn't work for me either.  Try:

yaourt -Sy google-talkplugin


Installing Insync client on Manjaro / Arch Linux

The easiest way to install Insync on Manjaro (Arch) Linux, is to use the AUR (Arch user repositories) repositories.   There are different clients to help you interface with AUR, and I'm not clear about why getting sources sometimes works in one as opposed another, but I digress.  I used yaourt to install Insync, but first I had to install yaourt:

$ sudo pacman -S base-devel yaourt

Being a relatively new install, of course my mirrors file was all out of whack, and the above command didn't actually work until I ran:

$ sudo pacman-mirrors -g
$ sudo pacman -Syy

then one can install Insync:

 $ yaourt insync

yaourt will present you with some developer chat and ask if you want to edit the config file, just say no (unless you really know what you are doing).
Accept the rest of questions about continuing, then use synapse to start Insync.