a pacman tip

Found at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks

This pacman command returns a list of installed packages on an Arch system, from smallest to largest:

$ LC_ALL=C pacman -Qi | awk '/^Name/{name=$3} /^Installed Size/{print $4$5, name}' | sort -h

This is how the output at the end looks here:

This expac command can be used for about the same thing; it lists the sizes of installed packages and their dependencies:

$ expac -H M '%m\t%n' | sort -h

Not as cool as Debian's dpigs command, which I mentioned in an earlier post, but simple enough to copy and paste onto the command line.

wintry

A couple of shots of my LXQt desktop in Arch, with a left-side, vertical panel, and an auto-hiding panel (horizontal, top right).

chilly

Frosty in the mornings, but overall not bad for mid-January.

dpigs

Just found out about dpigs, a Debian tool for finding out which packages are taking up the most space on the drive. Looks like dpigs can't be installed by itself; it's part of the debian-goodies package (see https://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/debian-goodies for a complete list of the debian-goodies tools).

Installing debian-goodies also provides access to the dpigs man page, which has info on usage and options. A link to an older version of man dpigs: https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/dpigs.1.html

Here's what happened when I first ran dpigs here:

$ dpigs
270589 fonts-noto-extra
262512 linux-image-4.19.0-6-amd64
260714 linux-image-4.19.0-5-amd64
204486 fonts-noto-cjk-extra
177044 firefox-esr
165839 openjdk-11-jre-headless
145747 libgl1-mesa-dri
132921 libreoffice-core
111246 papirus-icon-theme
86721 fonts-noto-cjk

I promptly did a sudo apt purge on some of that stuff.

still loving firefox

"Dedoimedo" writes "Why you SHOULD use Firefox" -- https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-why-you-should-use.html.

I tend to agree with Dedoimedo on this. It seems like over the past 15 years, Firefox has gone from being the best open source alternative to Microsoft's then-dominant Internet Explorer to these days being the best open source alternative to Google's now-dominant Chrome browser.

I have Google Chrome on my phone, but I rarely use the phone for internet. I've installed Firefox on the phone in the past, though. At home, it's Firefox and sometimes Pale Moon on the laptops. I've used Chrome a little bit at home, and then spent some years using mainly Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based on.

I was never totally anti-Microsoft or anti-Apple, and I'm not totally anti-Google, either. I love computers and technology too much to be having that mindset. But of course I'm gonna go with open source whenever possible.

For more on Firefox, Dedoimedo takes a look at recent versions in "Firefox 71 & 72 - Some of that old fire is back".

branford

Listening to music by Branford Marsalis today. My home collection:

Random Abstract (1987), cassette tape.
Bloomington (1993), manufactured CD.
Requiem (1999), home CD recording.
Footsteps of Our Fathers (2002), home CD recording.

Branford Marsalis discography at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branford_Marsalis#Discography

a new year, a new look

I recently added Fluxbox to my Arch setup, which I'd put in by using the Anarchy installer, as mentioned earlier. Xfce apps from the original installation are available in the Fluxbox menu, along with a collection of my favorites.

I'm using the tint2 panel (vertical, upper-left orientation, of course) instead of the Fluxbox toolbar. I got rid of the toolbar by de-selecting "Visible" in the "Toolbar" submenu of the configuration settings.

Also, I had to remove "systemtray" from the following line in the ~/.fluxbox/init file because tint2's system tray wasn't starting up with Fluxbox's systemtray running:

session.screen0.toolbar.tools:    prevworkspace, workspacename, nextworkspace, iconbar, systemtray, clock


And I added a nice, clean "exit" submenu section to the ~/.fluxbox/menu file.

    [submenu] (exit)
       [exit] (logout)
       [exec] (reboot) {systemctl reboot}
       [exec] (poweroff) {systemctl poweroff}
    [end]

I've been using Fluxbox for many years, usually as a second login session option to an already present desktop environment. That approach works nicely for slower, older computers; the DE's apps seem snappier when run under Fluxbox.

In my opinion, Fluxbox's manual page is the most important Fluxbox documentation, along with the related manpages listed at the end of man fluxbox:

SEE ALSO
       fluxbox-apps(5) fluxbox-keys(5) fluxbox-style(5) fluxbox-menu(5) fluxbox-remote(1)
       fbsetroot(1) fbsetbg(1) fbrun(1) startfluxbox(1)


Still, a web search can turn up lots of good info. The "official" Fluxbox website is at http://fluxbox.org/. Also see:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fluxbox
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fluxbox
https://wiki.debian.org/FluxBox