Mar 05, 2010

Eclipse plugins fail after installation (on Archlinux)

After installing Atlassian Connector in Eclipse and everything just goes to shit: all installed plugins disappear from preferences. The problem, as it turns out, lies in installing Eclipse as root (sudo pacman -S) and later installing plugins while Eclipse is running as non-root.

So, the right thing to do is either:

  • run Eclipse as root when installing packages; or
  • chown /usr/share/eclipse to the appropriate user.

http://subclipse.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=1046&dsMessageId=2391942

Jan 26, 2010

Pretty fonts in Linux

After two weeks of research and experimentation, finally arrived at the settings that stop Eclipse from making you want to gouge your eyes out.

This goes into ~/.Xdefaults:

Xft.dpi: 76 #84 for 27" iMac
Xft.antialias: true
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.rgba: rgb

And this is what's installed (in that order):

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 15 11:26 pkgconfig-0.23-1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 15 12:00 freetype2-ubuntu-2.3.11-2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 15 12:02 fontconfig-ubuntu-2.6.0-8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 15 12:29 libxft-ubuntu-2.1.14-2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 15 13:05 cairo-ubuntu-1.8.8-1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 18 10:13 ttf-inconsolata-20090215-1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 18 10:15 ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10-6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 25 22:06 ttf-dejavu-2.30-1

And this is why we like to use Macs.

By the way, the .Xdefaults bit above also helps with X11 on the Mac (yay for wireshark).

Jan 09, 2010

Installing Archlinux on VirtualBox (on 10.6.2)

After a couple of days of digging through outdated and conflicting documentation, I finally figured out the proper steps. Then jamesconway from #vbox put it all nicely together:

As root:
    1. pacman -Syu xorg
        install entire group (is everything actually required?)
    2. pacman -S kernel26-headers gcc make
    3. Install guest additions
    4. X -configure
    5. change the mouse driver from "mouse" to "vboxmouse" in /root/xorg.conf.new
    6. mv /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
    7. add hal to DAEMONS in rc.conf
        rc.vboxadd is not required because it is added to /etc/rc.local automatically
Not as root:
    8. add /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all to the top of ~/.xinitrc (even if it does not exist)

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox#Running_Arch_Linux_as_a_guest