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Any fellow Linux users on here?

Outdated said:
My first modern computer was a 386, second hand but it had been beefed up a bit. I could run Xcell spreadsheets because it also had a math coprocessor installed. :)
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My first was a 286 Philips "Headstart". My second was a Dell 386. Things took off for me when I increased my ram to 16MB and replaced the CPU with a Cyrix 486. Great investments at the time.

After that I began to build my own computers.
 
Judge said:
After that I began to build my own computers.
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I did that for more than 20 years too. Just the last few years I've been using a local privately owned (non franchise) computer shop and it's a lot easier to just tell him what I want and let him do it, and test it, for me.

But now I've got two decent modern machines running it'll only be occasional upgrades as things die.
 
The only component I can ever recall that died was a substandard Cooler Master power supply that just happened to come with a case I bought. Ended up using the power supply in a lesser system I had, and it predictably didn't last long. Still have the case though...lol.

When I actually buy a power supply, like most components I try to buy the best. Leaving me to get rid of them mostly when they simply become obsolete. Glad I held onto my Windows XP system though.
 
I wonder if anyone can help me out. I've been trying for a while to build a new version of Ardour from source code. I've tried to get most of the dependencies, but this one stumps me.

Code: 
Checking for 'libarchive' >= 3.0.0
['/usr/bin/pkg-config', 'libarchive >= 3.0.0', '--cflags', '--libs', 'libarchive']
err: Package iconv was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `iconv.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'iconv', required by 'libarchive', not found

I keep running into this when I try to configure the build. The problem is that I have already built a later version of libarchive, as well as iconv, and I've even tried to relocate the libarchive package so that maybe the Ardour build will recognize it. So far, I keep getting this in the config log. Any ideas?
 
tkcartoonist said:
err: Package iconv was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `iconv.pc'
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Sorry for the tardy reply. I did a bit of a search for you.

iconv.pc does not ship with standard builds of iconv.

You'll find this a lot when compiling your own stuff - always install any dev and header packages that are also relevant.
 
@Judge and @Outdated

Games are what started it all for me as well. My first modern computer was an IBM PS/2 model 70. A hand me down from a relative, which was an upgrade from an 8-bit BBC Micro. Only had one game, Castle of the Winds. Just playing around in Windows 3.1 was as much fun as any game to me back then and it sometimes still is now with Linux.

I have a couple of Windows XP capable physical machines around, virtual machines for gaming and other tools have been a bit hit or miss. Maybe I'll have better results with an emulator.

Also, the Judge vs Photoshop saga has been an interesting ride to follow!
 
Angular Chap said:
Also, the Judge vs Photoshop saga has been an interesting ride to follow!
Click to expand...
It's a bit humorous in one way.

Now that I've gotten past a question of Photoshop running under Wine, I'm going back to the other basics of customization. I already hacked the stylesheets to make the application overview menu background translucent in Pop!OS, but I'm also back to attempting to change some of the application icons purely for the sake of esthetics.

Risky business as I have finally come to understand that the more dynamically functioning icons like the Pop!_Shop, Terminal, Applications and File Manager icons cannot be altered other than through a comprehensive theme change. Otherwise it crashes the system with an "unrecoverable error". It sounds preposterous for icons to have such an impact, but in looking at so many folders of icons in Linux, I've realized how sophisticated they actually relative to individual sizes and scalability relative to vector and not bitmap images. Where my Windows background is again utterly of no value in this case.

I'm still apprehensive about replacing the dock icons for Audacious (media player) and Thunderbird (e-mail). But in theory changing those icons shouldn't bring it all down. Ahem....."in theory".

Though paralleling messing with icons individually is that I'm still exploring themes and icon sets I could potentially download. The idea of making the whole OS have the appearance of a Mac still intrigues me as well. I still have this lust for uniform icons that apparently most Linux distros don't have with whatever GUI they offer.

It just struck me that some of my past images of my attempts answer my own questions and suspicions about icons in Pop!OS22.04. I put red circles around the application icons that apparently did not crash the OS when I changed them in the dock:

Pop OS 2204.jpg


But had I changed the icons of the file manager, terminal, pop!_shop or settings, or the applications icon I know it would kill it all!

Icons changed- from left to right: Thunderbird, Audacity, ConvertAll, Abiword, Timeshift, ClamTk and Stacer.

Firefox is technically an application, but as the OS includes it at the outset I'm reticent to attempt to change it on an individual basis. Replacing it may or may not crash the OS. These are all issues I have yet to find in googling for answers.
 
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Finally putting things into some real perspective with Pop!OS 22.04.

I just successfully changed the icons for Thunderbird, Audacious and ClamTk. Rebooted without incident. I've fatally crashed the system enough times to definitely determine that icons outside of themes can be safely changed. The only trick being to know which icons can be changed only through changing their themes using Gnome Tweaks.

And it all explains why there's this one particular folder in usr/share/app-install/icons that explains why they offer a ton of icons inside this one folder, despite how easy it is to crash the system changing any and every icon individually. That it's the exception of application icons that is acceptable. Icons from apps that weren't originally loaded as part of the operating system.

Incidentally, for anyone interested I'm able to not only change icons quickly, but also their name as it shows in the dock as well as the application overview menu. Comes in handy when you can shorten their description so they aren't abbreviated to a point where you can't tell what they are. And rather than using their trade name, you can optionally give them a more generic title, like "DVD Player". Sure beats hunting for the right "desktop" file and manually amending them using the file manager. And unlike the icons, you can change the name of virtually any application or function whether it was added after the fact or came with the original installation of the operating system.

Another thing I'm doing is to individually "hide" certain icons that reflect apps I either don't need but don't want to uninstall, or those that are simply so ugly I don't need or want to see them, such as any old apps running inside Wine like Photoshop, which uses a poorly-rendered bitmap icon (.ico) rather than a current vector graphic made using formats like .png or .svg.

I do this with a simple but versatile app called "menulibre 2.22". Obtained through using the terminal with two commands:

1. sudo apt-get update

2. sudo apt-get install menulibre
 
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Hi!

Can someone recommend a light browser that is good and safe?

Firefox eats away my resources, moreso when using spotify

A safe and lightweight spotify client would work as well, it seems like both mozilla and spotify focus on high end computers and not us, old computer users.

Thank you
 
Judge said:
It sounds preposterous for icons to have such an impact, but in looking at so many folders of icons in Linux, I've realized how sophisticated they actually relative to individual sizes and scalability relative to vector and not bitmap images.
Click to expand...
Yes, interestingly enough I went down an icon customisation rabbit hole on the Raspberry Pi a while back. Looking under /usr/share/icons I was met with folders upon folders of icon sizes, everything from 8x8 to 1024x1024. Up to 16 different icon size folders within each folder.

Never managed to crash the system using icons though. Didn't know you were something of a hacker ;)
 
Just rebooted the system to make sure I wasn't dreaming...lol.

This is presently my Pop!OS22.04 desktop. It may not look like much, but it's somewhat different than what you'd get out-of-the-box. Particularly the application overview menu. I made it translucent instead of solid black, and took out the pronounced borders around it. Made it look subtle, yet dark enough to read the icon descriptions even against a "busy" background like this one. Attempting to keep a consistent degree of translucence between the top bar, application overview and bottom dock.

Not surprising, there are a lot of users complaining to System 76 about them using that black background. I know they did it for legibility reasons, but it still subtracts from an elegant appearance.

Note the descriptions of the icons. Brief with some generic descriptions, yet all readable.

Pop OS Desktop.jpg
 
Angular Chap said:
Looking under /usr/share/icons I was met with folders upon folders of icon sizes, everything from 8x8 to 1024x1024. Up to 16 different icon size folders within each folder.
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Those kind of icons with multiple sizes, scalable or not strike me as precisely the icons you do not want to attempt to change. That in Pop!OS at least, you run the risk of fatally crashing the system.

Nothing worse than rebooting Pop!OS, than to log in and only get a message saying, "oops....blah-blah-blah."

But whether this can happen with other similar systems I don't know. I was having so many other issues with Ubuntu that I never got that point of testing out how icons work with that particular OS.

For my next feat of magic, I'll be trying to hack the login screen. It's pretty ugly and sparse in Pop!OS.
 
Outdated said:
You've got me looking at different icon sets now, there's some radical ones out there.

View attachment 111735
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Yeah, the variety of what's out there for Linux is amazing. But so is the variety of instructions for installing them. I'm still the rookie in that sense. I liked Numix in that it provided a simple set of instructions using only the terminal. But some others are like rocket science to me. My bad!
 
elgat0verde said:
Hi!

Can someone recommend a light browser that is good and safe?

Firefox eats away my resources, moreso when using spotify

A safe and lightweight spotify client would work as well, it seems like both mozilla and spotify focus on high end computers and not us, old computer users.

Thank you
Click to expand...
Lightweight browsers:
I have used Midori, Vivaldi, Dillo and Luakit on resource limited systems.

As for a lightweight spotify client, you could look into spotify-tui. I've never used it myself though.
 
Thank you @Angular Chap

I tried midori (it came with the light fedora version, as recommended by @Outdated) But didn't like it much.

I will stick with firefox and just got spotify-qt and working on setting it up.

Thanks again guys!
 
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