My first impressions with ArchLabs (+unresolved bugs)

Basic Help & Support
#1

well, hello everyone!
I saw Archlabs at the beginning of the day the first time on Reddit and prepared immediately for the switch from f27 back to this Absolute Beauty of Archness!!
I just startet a few days ago to use i3wm on fedora and played already with polybar, neofetch,rofi etc…
after getting comfy in the configs and decided to settle my config i saw archlabs!

went from arch to fedora to see how it would run on my new TP P52s .
so i backup-ed my files, and tried to install it.
the installer was a beauty to use, but for my taste everything looked a bit (way) too small on the 4k screen :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: but as i went into these troubles before, i managed to resolved most of them (still some trouble left, but i will list them later).

Unfortunately the installer crashed for me every time after choosing the “lvm-option” at the point where name and save your first volume group.After several trys i ended up creating the partitions manual and pointed /boot /root /home to them.
Installation went fine and i rebooted successfully for the first time.

al-hello script started and waited for a network connection… then it closed suddenly (think shortly after i put in the wifi key) and this is where some real troubles startet to happen including kernel errors, several hard resets, and high-cpu usage on gdm processes experienced. after every reset, the whole system worked for a few seconds well, until it freezed to deah again…Damn! i didnt experienced any of that, at live enviroment on usb stick.
i decided to chroot the install from live and run an pacman -Syu and i created an

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

with

Section         "Device"
  Identifier    "Intel Graphics"
  Driver        "intel" 
EndSection

rebooted…and that fixed it for now! didnt spend further research for now into this…

since i experienced all this with very tiny tiny letters on the 3840x2160 15,4" panel , i added scaling in some configs i rememberd from previous setups.

–dpi 192

after archieving finaly normaly view distance i decided to look for the .al-hello script that crashed first.
liked the well choosen and advised software. really nice and well done experience!
i even decided to go with the nvidia drivers with bumblebee/optimus for the Nvidia P500 (basicly an MX150).
Didnt test the performance yet but installed steam also :wink:
i also got asked for battery and bluetooth and installed them.
Question #1:
Since then, a bluetooth symbol and a battery symbol are on the the bottom left corner also not correctly scaled and way to smal i think. are they supposed to be there?
Question #2:
seems the keyboard layout always resets after reboot, is there any config who overwrites this?
localctl shows:

X11 Layout: n/a

where is this set or gets overwritten?

Question #3:
seems like the scaling of the default window sizes when opening are not scaled up and have sometimes kind of double top frame (added screenshots) help how to fix this is much appreciated.

Question #4:
cpu load is still a bit high, and graphic performance a bit sluggy, what kind of optimizations and driver should i use? should i try also to switch away from gdm?

After all i am already enjoying it and will keep it as my new main Distro. This is already well done and looks also pretty Promising! love the retpoline strategy also! Looking forward to report some Bugs and help where i can :wink:

#2

That’s the system tray. The default setup for openbox places trayer in the lower left corner. You can adjust it to suit your needs in the openbox autostart file.

2 Likes
#3

thanks! check

#4

Are these default ArchLabs applications or GNome applications such as Gnome Weather for instance?

#5

I think these options are obsolete, with the latest kernels, but it is only my opinion, for the cpu there is cpupower.service that manages the cpu, and disable the turbobost at startup.
If you search the net there are several discussions, but the bible is always the arch wiki

#6

think these are OB related somehow seems like the window sizes didnt scale up with the rest of the scaling…:frowning:
for example i added the window how pacli is opening (and the missing screenshot from first post):

ArchLabs_2018-04-25-47_750x500
ArchLabs_2018-04-25-47_750x500.png750×500 209 KB
ArchLabs_2018-04-25-52_3840x2160
ArchLabs_2018-04-25-52_3840x2160.png3840×2160 1.02 MB

isnt there one place where i can add the the dpi scalling and it works for everything?

.Xressources and .xinitrc didnt changed anything and i had to add dpi options in almost every config…
but not all it seems… i will look into openbox related options…

@ector… hmm thanks will look further into that soon.

#7

ArchLabs openbox session starts xfsettings; from the menu:

Preferences --> Settings Manager

Under the Appearance tag is the custom dpi setting. That what your’re after?

Termite also has it’s own config file, there may be a separate dpi setting in there.

#8

What scaling are you talking about? Are you ona 4k monitor?

#9

exactly! a 3840x2160 resolution on 15,4"
@PackRat found and changed that also but no changes with the default window size…can i remove the custom dpi options and changes that i made then before in xinitrc xressources and the config files like polybar etc.?

#10

You’ll need to modify them for a 4k monitor. A couple members use them, so hopefully they post something here for you.

#11

@n1ete, I use 4k. I have this in my .Xresources.

!--------------------------------------------
! Custom DPI
!--------------------------------------------
!Xft.dpi: 144
Xft.dpi: 192
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle:  hintslight
Xft.hinting: 	true
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb

Xcursor.size: 32

Don’t forget to merge your .Xresources. Reboot, adjust your fonts to a reasonable size. This goes for system fonts, conky, polybar and anything else.

1 Like
#12

thanks dobbie03!
tried your config and merged it… after that i commented the
dpi settings, (for example at polybar master.conf) out.

after a reboot, polybar is back to tiny! :frowning:

#13

You will need to adjust your height of polybar and font sizes :smiley: I have mine set at 15px.

1 Like
#14

ok thanks! this worked! but i still have the problem with window sizes like in the screenshot…any idea wich configuration to tune?

#15

You need to tune Openbox default windows sizes i suppose. It breaks cause window width in characters less then needed with your current font size.

#16

You need to reduce your font sizes, I am using an 8px.

#17

This should be set in /etc/default/keyboard and /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf

Mine are as follows

/etc/default/…

# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS=""

BACKSPACE="guess"

/etc/X11…

# Read and parsed by systemd-localed. It's probably wise not to edit this file
# manually too freely.
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "system-keyboard"
    MatchIsKeyboard "on"
    Option "XkbLayout" "us"
    Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
EndSection

If they don’t exist it’s likely that you just missed the step during install as they aren’t essential to the system being bootable

I’ll look into this, many apologies for the issues and thank you for posting

Cheers,

1 Like
#18

sorry for this nut to crack, but the menu (rocket top left) is still not scaled… even if i change font size…(everything else is as far as i can tell)

#19

Hi

DPI support is on the jgmenu TODO list. Just haven’t got to it yet :-):slight_smile:

#20

You need to change font size in menu config manually. It’s pixel based so you need to put bigger size there:

vim .config/jgmenu/jgmenurc 

font = IBMPlexSans 18