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Storing aumix settings on restart

I recently had the problem that the sound settings were not saved on reboot and therefore every time i needed sound i first had to adjust the volume with aumix. Over time this becomes annoying and so i investigated a few minutes to get rid of the problem.

It turns out that we have just to change one variable at the top of /etc/init.d/aumix and everything works as expected.

HANDLEALSA="yes"

For those wo haven't come in touch with sound in GNU/Linux i recommend reading this article which covers ALSA/OSS and sound daemons.

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Artwiz fonts in combination with fluxbox

As you probably already know i am working with fluxbox and i wanted to use those pretty artwiz fonts. The installation is easy just follow the README file.

Do the following (example for gentoo):

    cd your_font_dir
    tar xvjf artwiz-aleczapka-<LANG>-<RELEASE>.tar.bz2
    cd artwiz-aleczapka-<LANG>-<RELEASE>
    fc-cache -fv ./

    Add this path to your /etc/X11/XF86Config config
    FontPath "your_font_dir/artwiz-aleczapka-<LANG>-<RELEASE>"

    and fontconfig config file (eg. /etc/fonts/local.conf)
    <dir>your_font_dir/artwiz-aleczapka-<LANG>-<RELEASE>:unscaled</dir>

    restart X

Your installation may vary depending on your distro.

But it seemed that fluxbox doesn't like them. The fonts were working in other applications such as terminals or torsmo but fluxbox yust ignored them and displayed an ugly default font. So first of all i made sure that i took a valid font, this can be done with xfontsel or xlsfonts.

xlsfonts | grep -i "artwiz"

I then selected one and pasted it into my fluxbox style file.

*.font: -artwiz-anorexia.de-medium-r-normal--11-110-75-75-p-90-iso8859-1

But the fonts didn't work until i switched off AntiAlias in the fluxbox configuration menu or by modifying ~/.fluxbox/init.

session.screen0.antialias:      false

Thanks to tenner from #fluxbox for pointing this out.

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Detecting unused Debian packages with deborphan and debfoster

The Debian package management (apt & dpkg) is great, but under certain circumstances it keeps unused packages on the system.

For example if you install package A which requires B, B is normally automatically installed. However if you afterwards remove A, then B will be kept on the system although it could be removed because no other packages requires it.

With deborphan you can find all these packages which have no other packages depending on their installation. Another useful tool for almost the same purpose is debfoster which will ask you which of the installed packages you want to keep.

You can use the output of deborphan to remove the packages with apt.

deborphan | xargs apt-get -s -y remove

Hope the two tools help you to keep a clean Debian install.

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Creating dummy packages to fullfill dependencies in Debian

First of all i would like to make clear that this should just be done if you _really_ know what you are doing, otherwhise it could mess up your system.

Ok so you are warned. However in some cases it is really useful. For example i have the proprietary SUN J2SDK (*.bin file) installed on my system, since the JDK is not integrated into the package management system an apt-get install azureus fails because of broken dependencies on sun-j2dk-1.5.

So i decided to set up a dummy package to pretend that sun-j2dk-1.5 is installed. First we need to create a control file.

equivs-control my-j2sdk1.5

This will generate a template control file which can be edited to fit our needs.

Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.5.10

Package: my-j2sdk1.5
Provides: sun-j2sdk1.5
Architecture: all

Description: Dummy package whichs only purpose is to provide sun-j2sdk1.5

Now the next step is to build an acutal deb package.

equivs-build my-j2sdk1.5

This file can now be installed as usual.

dpkg -i my-j2sdk1.5

And azureus should now also work properly.

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X.org and the composite extension on Debian Sid

A friend of mine recently asked how to enable the new eye candy features from X.org in Debian Sid. The required package xcompmgr is currently not part of the official repository, therefore we have to add a new entry to our sources.list:

deb http://debian.linux-systeme.com sid main
deb-src http://debian.linux-systeme.com sid main

Afterwards we can install the already mentioned xcompmgr

apt-get update
apt-get install xcompmgr

To activate the extension we have to add an additionally line to our xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
       Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

After a restart of the X server the eye candy stuff can be enabled by simply running

xcompmgr
xcompmgr -c # with shadows, see the manpage for further options

On my cheap notebook at home the whole thing is just to slow and not very useable (even fluxbox starts to lag). But i am quite sure a few of you will enjoy it.

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