Monday, June 23, 2008

The Arch way ...

I took a liking to command line applications when I switched to ArchLinux from Ubuntu during the start of the year. Seeing that Arch by default didn't have Xorg or Xfree86 I thought I might as well try and stick with the console.

However, soon enough I got an X running and for a change I now use Window Managers exclusively. No KDE, no Gnome, no XFCE. I have openbox, awesome, xmonad and wmii installed. I liked the tiling approach to window management and hence the biased decition of keeping three tilled WMs, although I mostly use awesome.

Currently my most used apps are mpd-svn, ncmpc-svn, elinks (for flash and pics I have Opera, and I also have to keep Kazehakase since my ISP allows only firefox and IE to check my usage), vim, rxvt-unicode, mplayer, feh, antiword, epdfview and gftp (the only client I found thats easy on resources and don't need commands, any other suggestions? ), nmap.

I have tried and kept my system as bloat free as possible by only installing things when I need them. The startup memory usage is around 110MB with Slim as the login manager, I could do with startx probably, but slim looks quite pretty :)

No problems with the setup as of now, just a pacman -Syu once or twice a week keeps it bleeding edge. Only I tried the whole afternoon but couldn't get mutt working, settled for claws-mail as of now.

Any nice apps you know of? Please let me know.