Though SystemRescueCD is powerful, if it is system specific, then it cannot work. With the recent changes of the Arch Linux filesystem, I made a mistake that I cannot start Arch Linux after a careless reboot.

The instruction from the official site mentions,

1. Fix any non-official packages with files in /bin, /sbin or /usr/sbin to put those files in /usr/bin.

The term “fix” does not give me too much solution about the packages. These packages mostly come from AUR. What can I do to “fix” them? There is no much hint for me. Thus, I ignore this part, though I can list those packages.

This is interesting. Previously, if I want to change a computer, I will (re-)install the OS and other software on the target computer. Then only move the data.

Since Arch Linux is a minimalistic distro, and installation only available with network connection. This will be exhaustive to install the OS on the target computer. Not only wasting time downloading, but also setup the configurations, such as web server, FTP server, hibernation, power save, etc. User’s configurations are easier, because I can just copy all the files in /home/$USER directory to the target computer. The only problem may be the differences of the owner ID and group ID. But that is not really a big deal. So, the main problem is the root (/).

Recently, I found that Puppy Linux has a higher (visits of page) ranking than KNOPPIX in DistroWatch. Furthermore, Puppy Linux is also well-known for its old computer support. This is interesting.

Previously, I tried KNOPPIX, which I liked most is that it is able to save the user session. That means, if you installed any package or save the files in $HOME, reboot the KNOPPIX in the USB, those settings are still preserved. This is a feature which I didn’t found in other Live Media. I tried KNOPPIX because it is a distro targets on Live Media.

I tried to escape from the Windows dependency problem. Wishing that all my devices can work without problem with Linux. But one of the greatest problems is that Canon PIXMA iP1600 does not have driver for Linux, except using iP2200 which is compatible.

Previously, I solved this problem with the virtualisation. This work perfectly to do my printing. However, it is still depending on Windows. Without Windows, the virtualisation is almost useless.

Preface

I am Arch Linux fan. Recently, I discovered a distro, Fuduntu, which stated that it is optimised for laptop and netbook use. This increases my interest due to battery draining problem for my old netbook. Though my old netbook was installed with Arch Linux using LXDE, the battery can only last for only 1 hour. That is why, I think I am going to switch to Fuduntu. However, after installation of Fuduntu, then I found some problems like missing the packages FreeFileSync and VisualBoyAdvance, and also failed to install Wine because of dependencies error. This made me regret to uninstall Arch Linux from my netbook, because installing Arch Linux is really exhaustive.

Finally, I solved the problem doing printing with my Arch Linux with Canon iP1600 printer. It is an old printer. With several tries of those drivers mentioned in forums and other discussions, I never success to use this printer with Arch Linux. That is why, whenever I want to print, I need to reboot into Windows 7, print, then reboot into Arch Linux again. This is really troublesome.

However, recently, I found a possible solution. That is using hardware virtualisation. Actually, it is using the guest OS to detect the printer, then print from the guest OS. So, my guest OS is still Windows. Meaning that, Linux is still not working with Canon iP1600. But, this solution avoid rebooting for different OSes.

Latest Arch Linux announcement mentioned that AIF (Arch Installation Framework) is no longer included. And this installation method is replaced with Arch Install Scripts. Users who are willing to install Arch Linux need to follow the guide. So, I just tried the installation of this latest Arch Linux with the VirtualBox.

If you follow the guide accordingly, everything should be fine. But without the basic Linux knowledge, it is really a hell (I think so).

In Arch Linux Wiki page, it mentioned that OpenJDK is nearly perfect which we need not to install Oracle proprietary Java. But sadly to know, there are some Java applet which needs Java Runtime Environment version 6 instead of 7. That means, neither OpenJDK nor Oracle proprietary Java 7 works.

Therefore, I need to replace the jdk7-openjdk, jre7-openjdk, and jre7-openjdk-headless with AUR jre6 and jdk6. Besides that, icedtea-web-java7 is also no needed.

After I tried to enable show thumbnail in ristretto (image viewer), the application freeze. Whatever image I open with ristretto, all will freeze. To solve this, remove ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ristretto.xml, logout, and login. The application will not freeze anymore. But I don’t try to enable the thumbnail after this.

I tried to synchronise my Thunderbird address book with GMail manually. So, I need to export the contacts  into CSV format. However, there is encoding problem after exporting to CSV, because my contacts contian Chinese characters. The text file has encoding error if viewed by Gedit. I tried to import it from GMail, these errors still exist.

To solve it, I use the command-line to run Thunderbird with:

env LANG=en_US.utf8 thunderbird

This solves the problem after I tried to export the contacts to CSV format again. Actually, the Arch Linux is already set the locale (in /etc/rc.conf) as en_US.UTF-8.