Don't add an exfat partition to fstab

 To give honor to the title of this blog I put an new media partition in fstab, but it wasn't an ntfs partition but an exat partition. An exfat can't take permissions of a folder or file level. The whole partition has to be loaded as user to be able to write on it.

So remove the partition  from fstab and do: systemctl daemon-reload

Now we  need the software to manage exfat.  That is not exfatprogs but exfat-utls. I had to remove the first, that came pre-installed, to rbe able to install exfat utils. Then make a mount pooint for the media partition:

sudo mkdir /media/exfats

Now make sure that the partition is not (auto)mounted and if so unmount it. Now you can do , only once necessary:

sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sda2 /media/exfats
Change sda2 to your needed configuration.

source

Autologin problem? Editing sytemd configuration might help

 Got to /etc/systemd/system/

Mkdir getty@.service.d

Create file override.conf with following ocntent:

 

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -i -J --nohostname --skip-login --login-options "-f <yourusername>" %I 38400 linux

Make conky transparent

 Following lines in /home/user/.config/conky are not sufficient to make the conky window transparent:

own_window_type = 'desktop',
    own_window_transparent = true,
    own_window_class = 'override',
        own_window_transparent = true,

These two lines are also necessary:

own_window_argb_visual = false,
    own_window_argb_value = 0,

Screen tear in openbox because of composite manager

 An recurring annoyance in Openbox is screen tear. It is especially likely to occur when using xcompmgr or another composite manager. The solution is to disable xcompmgr in /home/user/.config/openbox 

Or better still create a bash script and connect this to a hotkey as described here

Desktop Notification for Audacious in Openbox environment

 First install libnotify, #pacman -S libnotify

Then notification-daemon and create The folders $XDG_DATA_HOME ; in there the folder dbus-1 and in there a folder services; in there the file org.freedesktop.Notifications.service

Edit with leafpad:

[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
Exec=/usr/lib/notification-daemon-1.0/notification-daemon

Now start the service:

 /usr/lib/notification-daemon-1.0/notification-daemon start &

Test with: notify-send "test"

Now add to /home/username/.config/openbox/autostart

a line with: start /usr/lib/notification-daemon-1.0/notification-daemon &

Be sure to have the Desktop Notifications plugin activated,In Services. Plugins.

mpv resume

Mpv player has the option to set resume at latest point reached.
In  /home/user/.config/mpv/ mpv.conf by adding line
save-position-on-quit

Another useful opton is to repeat;add following line
loop-file=yes

qt5ct segmentation fault

Solution:
Back up your Qt5ct config:

 $ mv ~/.config/qt5ct/qt5ct.conf ~/.config/qt5ct/qt5ct.conf.bck 

Start qt5ct:

 $ qt5ct 

Why this  problem?

gtk2 theme didn´t work together with qt5 anymore.

Kept default theme Fusion now.

Manjaro borked during update

Even after many years you can experience a strange meltdown during an innocent update.  In Manjaro during updating, which I always do in the terminal using pacman -Syyu because I want to  see the feedback, the post-installation processes like grub updating were going on, when suddenly the login animation of lightdm-plymouth appeared.
Soon was clear that it was stuck in that. Strange was that I noticed no shutdown before that. I was worried that the grubupdate might not have finished and rebooted. Again stuck in the login animation. I use autologin btw. First via Crl+ Alt +F2 I opened a second terminal and did a grub update:#update-grub.
This proved no solution. Most of the time I saw no feedback or error message or so  short that I couldn't extract information. Then I recognised in a short  flash the word plymouth and found out that that lightdm was using plymouth.
In the second terminal I then tried to start lightdm again and xfce was launched.
After doing some reading I decided to get rid of plymouth and lightdm: I want to  know what is going on during the boot process in case of failure.
A very clear write through is to be found here
Repeating the essentials:
in /etc/default/grub remove  word splash from the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.

and in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf remove  word plymouth from the line HOOKS.
Now in XFCE via System kernel you can view your installed kernels and do for instance, according to the kernels you have 
#mkinitcpio -p linux54
to rebuild your kernels.
Now we are going to disable lightdm
 #systemctl disable lightdm-plymouth


#rm /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service
Remove plymouth:
#pacman -R plymouth plymouth-theme-manjaro-elegant
Replace lightdm with lxdm (not necessary, but I like lean applications):
#pacman -S lxdm
with the force flag:
#systemctl enable lxdm -f

At last but essential update grub:
#update-grub

Set bigger fonts in Qt5 applications

In terminal fire up qt5ct and choose second tab, Fonts, and choose the desired font and size. Further fine tuning by choosing create font.conf will let you make a font.conf file in
/home/username/.config/fontconfig/  and you can set anti-aliasing, and more. You can  increase the dpi value to 128 to increase letter size for example.
To check the dots per inch of your screen use:

xdpyinfo | grep -B 2 resolution

and check out the line resolution.

Optimize for bigger fonts in Firefox

First set zoom to  120% in Settings Zoom. Use Fixed Zoom add on for easy access.
Set fonts in Preferences, fonts and colours. Don't forget to adjust minimal font size in Advanced and untick  "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above".
Make a Chrome folder in your home/username/.mozilla folder. Download template here and paste in userContent.css:
* {
  line-height: 2em !important;
}
html, body, div, section, article, p, span, th, td {
  line-height: 2em !important;
}
This helps to prevent problems with line spacing.

Set bigger letter size for my fonts in X

My eyes are not getting better with my growing age.
Using a 24-inch monitor I can set big letter sizes for my fonts.
Added to .Xresources in /home/username/
Xcursor.size: 48
Xft.dpi: 120
Reload with:
xrdb ~/.Xresources

Next to that in /home/username/.config/gtk.-3.0/ settings.ini
gtk-font-name=Avenir LT 65 Medium, 22
gtk-cursor-theme-size=48

videos won't play and seem to load forever linuz

After a lot a searching I found out that when the jack server is crashed ( control with Cadence),  this endless buffering occurs.  Restarting Jack with cadence solves the problem.

No sound in webbrowser using Pulse audio and jack server

Suddenly no sound when playing some sound in Firefox.
First be sure to play some sound in the webbrowser.
Then open pavucontrol in terminal. Check in the "Playblack"tab if Audiostream is on.
The problem was that the HDMI output of the monitor was chosen in stead of the Jack sink.

convert flac to ape

Why would you do that? ", you may ask. Well, I won't explain. But I needed it to be able to help some people.
With soundconverter you can convert from flac to ape, but not the other way around, from flac to ape.
The solution I found in caudec (AUR).
This command line tool can be used as follows:
caudec -c ape  -q 1 soundfile.flac
You can use 5 different levels: compression level for MonkeysAudio must be a number between 1 and 5, or one of fast (1), normal, high, extra, insane(5).
Without the  -q handle you will get level 2, normal. All levels are lossless; the higher level takes more time and gives more compression.

No sound with mpv using jack server

To connect mpv with the jack server put this line:
ao= jack

in /home/username/.config/mpv/ mpv.conf

How to cleanyour package cache with paccache -Arch linux

You will want to clean up your package cache from obsolete packages from time to time.
Be sure to have installed
# pacman -S  pacman-contrib
 When this is done:
# paccache -rk 2
to keep the latest after uodating and your previous package.

Umlaut

First set the right alt key  {AltGr} to compose

setxkbmap -layout us -option caps:ctrl_modifier,compose:ralt,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

Now to type umlaut:

    press the Alt Gr button

    release it

    then type in u

    followed by "

    which gives you a ü

When you're login is borked

Using lxdm as login manager for entering an openbox desktop environment, I was rather surprised I suddenly experienced a halt halfway starting up.
This was years ago something like that happened.
First I checked if the hard drive by entering another installation on that particular hard drive; that was OK so HD was not damaged.

Another boot into Archbang led to the same failure to get to see lxdm doing, what it is suppose to do.

Using ctl+alt+f2 I was able to start another terminal session, tty2.
Loging  in as user and giving password  I was able to start openbox by using:
startx

I couldn't discover what was wrong with lxdm and decided to check .xinitrc in /user/home/
Was OK with rule

exec openbox-session

Now checking ~/.bash_profile 

making sure following rule was active:

[[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec startx 

As alternative to lxdm I decided to choose to autologin using systemd

Commands:

cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/getty@.service /etc/systemd/system/autologin@.service

Symbolic linking:

ln -s /etc/systemd/system/autologin@.service /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/getty@tty1.service

If the link is already active you can edit getty@tty1.service in /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants

by changing

ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -o '-p -- \\u' --noclear %I $TERM

to in my case

ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -a paul %I 38400

Reload daemon:

systemctl daemon-reload

And restart service:
systemctl start getty@tty1.service

howto use setup.py file

sudo ./setup.py install

Mp3cut in Linux Arch

Install from Aur
$yaourt -S mp3cut

I downloaded a radioconcert from which I wanted to save a part from 8 minutes 49 seconds to 1 hour 11 minutes 42 seconds
Open terminal in the folder in which the file you want to cut (concert.mp3).
$mp3cut -t 00:08:49-01:11:42 concert.mp3
The output will be written as concert.out.mp3