Many moons ago, I wrote about how discovered Archlinux. It’s nearly 6 years and Arch hasn’t let me down. Some people say that they use it at home but not on their main production system. Well I do. And even on my main production system it hasn’t let me down. I can’t remember when was the last time that Arch actually broke for me. It’s always been there. As a solid foundation on which to build my work environment.

Yesterday I got a new phone. Lenovo p770. And it’s great. This is my first post from the phone.

Warning: This is a rant. It’s not meant to make sense so if it doesn’t, don’t ask me. Also, it’s possible that you might loose your sanity reading this. If that happens, I take no responsibility. For quite some time now, I’ve been successfully containing a brain explosion. This post probably is just a way to for my brain to let loose some of the pressure. What’s the pressure is about?

Last week I got a new laptop. Lenovo U410. It’s a nice ultrabook. However, the chief topic of this post is not to review it, however to set up Archlinux on it without loosing any of the features that are, what should I call them… um, factory inbuilt. I’m talking about a raid0 array and a one-key rescue system that came preconfigured with the system. I searched much on the internet to find a safe way to install linux on this system however all of them did something that I didn’t want to do…

Once my computer has started, prompts me to log in. The login manager that I use is LightDM (However, in my days using arch linux, I used a script that automagically started X using .xinitrc when I log into tty1. That script went into .bashprofile). There isn’t much to say about a login manager because it’s pretty common. It asks for a username and a password. Then lets me choose a Xsession to log into.

My choice of operating system is GNU/Linux. The reasons are simple. 1. I still use a decade old Pentium 4 computer with a 2.4GHz cpu and 512MB RAM (Yes, I know phones have more RAM these days…) I could just use good old windows xp, but, I don't want to use a decade old operating system when I can use a brand new one for free of cost. Which beats windows in many aspects.

You might have read my previous post about Yahoo! pipes. However, they weren’t working out as I thought they would. Gnus was still taking up a lot of time to start up. So, I thought, there must be some other way to boost the start up time. I looked around and tried to find out what other people were using. After reading this transcript a couple of days ago, and reading curious little mention of Gwene, I decided to check it out this on Saturday.

For a couple of months now, I am using emacs exclusively for a lot of things. Pretty much everything except web browsing. For it, I use luakit. I use emacs for coding, blogging, note taking, file system management, emails, rss feeds, todo management… pretty much 80% of my computer time is spent inside emacs. However, there was a problem. I use gnus for email and rss feeds. Problem was, I have about 10-15 rss feeds and when I want to check them, I start gnus.

For past few months this website was running on drupal. And it was good. Drupal is an awesome system that can do anything. I love it. However when I switched from wordpress to drupal, I wasn’t sure what I was going to create of this website. However, now, I am sure. What I need is a blog. Noting less, nothing more. So, I have decided to move back to wordpress.

Moved to Drupal I have been planning to move this site to Drupal for quite some time now. Since I read about Drupal late last year I’ve been trying to learn more about it and move this site to Drupal. The opportunity to learn about Drupal presented itself in May when I started working on my second project. First I was planning to use wordpress for the project but when I went a little deeper in the planning phase, I realized it won’t work in wordpress.

Moving to emacs You might have seen my previous post stating that I have chosen to use vim for my text editing needs. However when I made that decision I didn’t even try emacs. What I did was I installed Gvim package on my arch linux. It was about 7 or 9 MB download. I installed it, played around with it and liked it. Then I thought lets try emacs. I issued command :

No it’s not a dinosaur. It’s a Firefox addon which I love. In fact without it I don’t do anything in Firefox. What it does is it makes Firefox behave like my favourite text editor Vim. So I can browse internet without touching the mouse. And it is much faster to use keyboard to browse internet than mouse once you get used to it. Back when I was testing and playing with all those different window managers, after I had set up awesome window manager as my primary working environment.

I love to monitor my system. It’s one of the things that I can spend my time doing. Not hours of time but I can just stare at the system monitor for like 5 minutes and observe and study which processes are taking most system resources and which processes are playing nicely. That’s all nice and good but the most important thing for me to monitor is the bandwidth of my internet connection.