Fixing dbus related problems in jack [Solved] :)

I finally found it! I had a lots of annoying problems with jack (the performance audio system for linux) when it had crashed. It did not want to start again. The only informative i found in the error message was that there was some problem with the "dbus" (I still don't know what the dbus is doing, but it must be something important). Then i found this article.

The solution was so simple: you just go

killall -9 jackdbus

in your terminal and then its only to restart the jack daemon again. Perfect

--Edit a bit later--

Okay, that was not the solution to everything apparently. After a while the sound stopped work any way (for all other programs than jack-programs). So i wanted to restart the audio in some way. I found this article. Naming a way to find witch programs that used the audio:


lsof | grep pcm




Witch listed all programs using the audio. To my surprise it was jackd. (I didn't think i had started it at all!) so i just did

killall jackd

And everything worked again. Magic!

About Openbox - the winner of it all (I really hope i don't have to write anything more about this)

So. I thought i liked Cinnamon better than dash. Apparently I was wrong. Cinnamon was also very slow.

Anyway. I tested Openbox for performance. I noticed that there was nothing. (No panels no way to start up programs) And i realized that I liked it. I always uses gnome-do to start programs, guake to do terminal stuff, and some random method to see witch programs are open. For the latest problem i found that docky was the right solution. And then with autohide i didn't have to see anything of it when i do not use it. The best of all: It is fast. Very fast compared to gnome, or Cinnamon (maybe cinnamon is using gnome, i don't know).

Worth noting is that you need xcompmgr to enable compositing.

My desktop, showing docky and guake

I noticed that you need to make your own ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh script. Here is mine

---

#För att starta effekter
xcompmgr -cfF -t-9 -l-11 -r9 -o.95 -D6 &

#För att knappar och sånt ska se ut som ambiance
gnome-settings-daemon &


#För att byta plats på copslock och escape
setxkbmap -option caps:escape &


gnome-panel &



---

And then you need the programs installed. To install them run this in your terminal

sudo apt-get install gnome-do xcompmgr gnome-panel docky guake
Now i hope this is the last time I ever have to write anything about my desktop configuration... Please write a comment if you have any thoughts about improving performance or usability

Why I use Mint and not Unity

I just reinstalled my computer an had once again have to re-evaluate what desktop appearance I wanted. It was not a very easy choice to make.

I like the Idea of the Unity desktop, so I used it the first couple of days. However I could not stand the dash-launcher to take more than 2 seconds to start when I wanted a program. So I switched to Gnome-shell for a while (again, I hoped that the issues I had before would be gone). But Gnome-shell crashed all the time, so I tried Mint for the first time. And here I am.

I've noticed some people think of Mint being to slow, and using Unity because of that. Strange however that my experience is the opposite. Maybe that has to to do with what hardware you use, I do not know...

Mint running on my Ubuntu desktop

Here is how to install Mint on your Ubuntu computer :). The only thing to do is to run:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable

then

sudo apt-get install cinnamon

And you have Mint installed. It is only to change session next time you log in.

--Edit 2013-03-20--

I finaly realised Mint is to slow to. So it now seems like I am using openbox for a while

Remote desktop on my Raspberry Pi

Since I don't have a screen a hdmi-cable and no TV I've used to just acces my Pi from an ssh shell in my terminal. I don't have any practical use of accessing my raspberry visually, when all functionality I need can be used through the terminal. When I first started my Pi i disabled the X-system so it should not use unnecessary resources.

I did it anyway, just for fun. Here's how:

First i installed a vnc-server on the raspberry pi according to this tutorial (on my Raspberry Pi).
sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Then to run the server i simpli ran
vncserver :1 -geometry 640x480 -depth 24

That was not according to the video but it worked anyway. It started a x-server on :1 with the given dimensions and a color depth of 24 bits. Now with the server up and running all I had to do was to connect to it from my laptop.

To get the ip-adress from my Pi i used ifconfig.

ifconfig

According to this link, the standard vnc-server for Ubuntu (that I use) is vinagre. So I installed it (on my desktop computer):

sudo apt-get install vinagre

And then start it. Configurations was quite self-explainatory. Here's how it looks

 And tataaaa! A running vnc-client on my desktop.

Gnome classic

Since I decided to use just Gnome classic and gnome-do instead of Gnome shell or unity my life just got so much more worth living. I really like the concept of both Gnome shell and Unity, but I constantly get annoyed by the fact when the user interface is to slow to run on my 2 GHz computer. I thought that one of the points with Ubuntu was to be fast, but apparently i was wrong. Any response time longer than a second is torture to me, and why choose? Gnome classic with gnome-do gives me kind of the same experience as Unity or Gnome shell anyway.

(I miss HUD though, just for the menus, I would like an applet where you can just type in names of the menu entities.)

--Edit April 2013--

For anybody reading this, I have abandoned gnome-classic also, in favor to openbox.

Bara en instans av en terminal

Jag blev irriterad av att det verkade vara så svårt att hitta information om hur man startade en ny tab i ett gammalt terminalfönster (med gnome-terminal). Efter mycket sökning hittade jag denna tråd som löste alltihop... Underbart

Gnome shell åker ut.. Tillsammans med Unity

Jag blir så arg. Nästan lika arg som jag var entusiastisk först. Både Gnome-shell och Unity är så sjukt himmla sega så att man blir frustrerad så fort man försöker göra någonting över huvud taget.

Nu har jag återgått till att använda Gnome's klassiska utseende. Det flyter på utmärkt och dess utom har jag lyckats få till exempel global-menu att fungera i classic.

Kalla mig bakåtsträvare, men mitt ubuntu fungerar bättre än vad det gjort någonsin tidigare, det är bara Gnome-shell och Unity som är dryga...