Nvidia-beta update problem -Arch

After doing a full system update in Arch I could not login in X because of the nvidia driver wasn't found. The nvidia-utils-beta were updated.
So I switched back to the ordinary nvida driver.
First moved to tty2; start another terminal session at the login by doing Ctrl+Alt+F2.

Then sudo pacman -S nvidia nvida-utils. Remove nvidia+beta etc.? yes.
Reboot after install.

Update problem because of bad package

I had an update problem because archstuff repository had a bad copy of packer; only by removing this repository in etc/pacman.conf I could update.

problem to install a basket note pads tutorial getting things done -Solved

One of the various ways to use BasKet Note Pads is to implement the "Getting Things Done" method in order to be more organized.
You can get more information by reading the article on Wikipedia or this book summary.

This basket archive you can download will help you getting started quickly with the method. The basket group is ready-to-use, specially made to adapt the Getting Things Done method to BasKet Note Pads, and all baskets have a short introduction text informing you about their goal. Click the left image to get a bigger screen capture of the first basket. To start using Getting Things Done, just save the archive and open it with BasKet Note Pads.

Tip: The top-level basket "GTD" is to be used as an inbox for this method. You can assign a global keyboard-shortcut to it by displaying the basket properties window. Then, whenever you get an idea, you can press this global shortcut, press the Insert. key to add a new entry, type your idea, and close with BasKet Note Pads to return to what you were doing right before. Easy and very fast.

Soltion install problem:

Getting Things Done

Auf der Projekt-Webseite finden Sie im Downloadbereich [2] ein Basket-Archiv namens GTD.baskets, das die Zeit- und Selbstmanagementmethode "Getting Things Done" (GTD) umsetzt. Die vordefinierten Körbe enthalten Anleitungen zum Einsatz dieser Methode.

Um GTD zu installieren, laden Sie zunächst das Paket GTD.baskets herunter. Bei unserem Test verwendete das Archiv merkwürdige Verzeichnisnamen zur Ablage der enthaltenen Icons -- Sie sollten darum zunächst in einem Terminalfenster mit den folgenden Befehlen eine Reihe von Unterverzeichnissen erstellen:

export ICO=~/.kde/share/apps/basket/basket-icons; mkdir $ICO; cd $ICO
for d in xygen-icons n-icons cons icons; do mkdir -p $d/16x16/actions; done

Create folder xygen-icons n-icons, cons and icons and make in these folders subdirectories 16x16 and in that subdirectory actions

Rufen Sie dann in Basket den Menüpunkt Korb / Importieren / Korbarchiv auf und wählen Sie die Datei aus.

Wenn Sie GTD verwenden (Abbildung 10), werden Sie hauptsächlich Einträge von einem Korb in den anderen schieben -- denken Sie dabei daran, dass Drag & Drop zwischen Körben in der aktuellen Basket-Version nicht stabil arbeitet: Cut & Paste ist die sicherere Variante.

Writetype chokes in wrong text file

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 6304: invalid continuation byte.

Solved by saving it in gedit as Character encoding current locale UTF-8, line ending linux/unix

Set locale in Arch

Set locale in Arch:
irst you have to enable the locales you want being supported by your system. To enable or disable them, the file /etc/locale.gen is used. It contains every locale you can enable, and you have just to uncomment lines you want to do so.

As we want to setup an English UTF-8 conform system, we want to enable en_US.UTF-8. But for compatibility to programs that don't support UTF-8 yet, it's recommended to support any other locale, prefixed with en_US as well. Having this in mind, we enable this set of locales:

en_US.UTF-8    UTF-8
en_US  ISO-8859-1

After you've enabled the necessary locales, you have to run locale-gen as root to update them:

# sudo locale-gen
Generating locales...
 en_US.UTF-8... done
 en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
Generation complete.

Setting system wide locale

To define which locale should be used by the system, you can easily add your locale to your /etc/rc.conf file. As we've just added ISO-8859 support just for (backward-)compatibility, we add en_US.UTF-8 here:

LOCALE="en_US.UTF-8"

The system wide locale will be updated after rebooting your computer.

Setting per user locale

As we discussed earlier, some users might want to define a different locale than the system-wide locale. In this case, you can export LANG in your ~/.bashrc. For example you can use the en_AU.UTF-8 locale.

export LANG=en_AU.UTF-8

Your locales will be updated as soon as you re-source your ~/.bashrc. This happens on login or alternatively you can type:

$ source ~/.bashrc

found this here:https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Locale#Enabling_necessary_locales

Dictionaries in Linux

Tried four dictionary programs: Aarddict, Stardict, Goldendict and Artha.
When you're writing in English and understand the language reasonable well I would say Artha is a first and best choice, compact but because based on Wordnet:

WordNet is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller . Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser.

It is of a very high quality; it is fantastic to get a more gutsy feeling for the meaning of many rare or more intricate words.

Are we more in translating I find Goldendict the most feature rich app.
Importing dictionaries is very easy.
Important also is that different kind of dictionaries can be imported; the interface is clean an efficient and you can import a lot of stuff -nearly everything that is in htm format- to make a encyclopaedia or so.

The special feature of Aarddict that is very useful for using an offline wikipedia file.
Stardict and Goldendict are online capable of online Wikipedia viewing.
All programs are through Aur available in Arch.

Edited PKGBUILD for Aarddict after setuptools not found error

Again a PKGBUILD had to be adapted to be able to compile a python packet: error message:

File "setup.py", line 4, in from setuptools import setup, find_packages ImportError: No module named setuptools

So I had to adapt the pkgbuild, becoming this (thick letters were changed):

# Contributor: Jeffery MacEachern

pkgname=aarddict
pkgver=0.9.1
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Aard Dictionary is a multiplatform dictionary and offline Wikipedia reader."
arch=(any)
url="http://aarddict.org/"
license=(GPL)
depends=('python2' 'python-pyicu' 'python-simplejson' 'hicolor-icon-theme' 'setuptools' 'pyqt')
makedepends=('setuptools')
install=aarddict.install
source=(http://bitbucket.org/itkach/${pkgname}/get/${pkgver}.zip aarddict.install)
md5sums=('41224733330d98b61818391e34311802'
'4d14628e16252af7ddf562ad19e3bcb4')

build() {
cd $srcdir/$pkgname
python2 setup.py install --root=$pkgdir/ --optimize=1 || return 1
}

Install with: makepkg -sci PKGBUILD

Virtaal localization and translation tool

Virtaal is a great translation tool for localization of software, but is also usable as a broader translation tool.

Virtaal is a graphical translation tool. It is meant to be easy to use and powerful at the same time. Although the initial focus is on software translation (localisation or l10n), we definitely intend it to be useful for several purposes.

Virtaal is built on the powerful API of the Translate Toolkit. “Virtaal” is an Afrikaans play on words meaning “For Language”, but also refers to translation.

A screencast tutorial is available here

if system time is not correct on Arch

Install openntpd:

# pacman -S openntpd

and set time, type in terminal:
ntpd -s -d

Convert all files in folder from ape to wav

Convert all files in a folder from ape to wav in Arch
Example of a batch conversion script

First install mac by doing
sudo pacman -S mac

Copy the text below in a text file, call it ape2wav and make it executable (chmod 755 it)

#! /bin/bash
cd $1 # change to the directory we passed as a parameter
for a in *.ape; do # only process ape files
if [ -f "$a" ]; then # is it a file? We _could_ have a me.ape directory
b="${a%.ape}" #set b to filename only
mac "${b}.ape" "${b}.wav" -d
fi
done

Put in /usr/bin. Now doing ape2wav /home/paul/apefolder will extract the audiofiles to wav. Of course change user and folder name.

Another example flv2mp3:
#! /bin/bash
cd $1 # change to the directory we passed as a parameter
for a in *.flv; do # only process flv files
if [ -f "$a" ]; then # is it a file? We _could_ have a me.flv directory
b="${a%.flv}" #set b to filename only
ffmpeg -i "${b}.flv" "${b}.mp3"
fi
done

useful tools gprename

http://gprename.sourceforge.net/

Grant user shutdown permission in suoders file

Yes, you will have to edit your sudoers file in /etc

You will have to edit it so it looks like this:
# %users localhost=/sbin/shutdown -h now
paul ALL=(ALL) ALL
paul ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/thunar
paul ALL=NOPASSWD: /sbin/reboot
paul ALL=NOPASSWD: /sbin/shutdown
paul ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pacman -Sy

In Arch you can define your default editor in /home/user/.bashrc

export EDITOR=nano

Of course replacing paul with your username.
What you do is that as superuser you grant user paul the permission to do certain superuser things like shutting done without password.
You will have to edit the sudoers file not with an ordinary texteditor but with "sudo visudo" in the terminal.

"visudo" is the command used to edit the /etc/sudoers configuration file. It is not recommended that you use any other editor to modify your sudo parameters. "visudo" uses the same commands as the "vi" text editor.

Always make a backup of your old original sudoers file;nevertheless visudo is often configured to work with nano.
To be sure it uses nano you can change the editor visudo uses, by typing

#EDITOR=nano visudo

to edit the file

Ctrl+o, Enter to save
Ctrl+x to exit.

Automatic listing of all your partitions in Arch

The nicest way for your partitions to show up is to use pcmanfmMod:
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/downloads/mod-pcmanfm/
If you open it not too fast after startup, some 20 seconds it will show all your partitions, clicking on each one of them will mount them at once.

If firefox is slow

Try this : it's a well-known little trick :
type

about:config

in the navigation bar (no space between about and : )
of Firefox, accept the warning and then fill in in the search bar: network.dns.disableIPv6 , it is set on false, just toggle it to true.

You may also want to install Tweak Network Settings extension

Again problem with python script in Arch?

Change in usr/bin/
#!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/bin/python2

For instance:
#!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/bin/python2 in /usr/bin/linuxconverter

Python is now Python 3

2010-10-18 - Allan McRae

A major Python update has just been moved from the testing repositories and will be available on a mirror near you. The default "python" package is now for the 3.x series while the 2.x series has been moved to a "python2" package, with python-2.7 having been scheduled to be the last major release in the python-2.x series.

Since /usr/bin/python will now point to the 3.x binary, any program requiring 2.x needs to point to /usr/bin/python2 instead. All our packages have been updated accordingly, but any remaining issues found can be reported to the bug tracker (not the forums or mailing lists).

AUR and third-party packages/projects using Python will likely need updating to reflect this move, as many programs are still incompatible with Python 3.