I’ve been enjoying my new toy over vacation thus far, and a vacation[winter, 2015] posting is in the works. What is this toy? This toy will essentially ensure my old MacBooks will get the boot as I have purchased a Raspberry Pi 2, running Arch Linux ARM. I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the Pi yet… a fileserver or media center are the top contenders. I do have few quibbles regarding the current state of Linux on the Raspberry Pi.

My vacation[summer, 2013] ended and I continue to evaluate and tinker with plans to create a standardized deployment across my laptops; I am finding what I once thought was a sure thing isn’t. I currently run OpenBox on my Arch install, my desire to keep minimal system along how much I enjoy many aspects of Crunch Bang I thought OpenBox would be the clear winner. Yet Cinnamon is starting to emerge as a strong contender, I am starting to grow fond of the environment.

According the the Arch MacBook wiki page, the MacBook’s iSight camera should just work out of the box since kernal 2.6.26. Well that maybe the case on new hardware1, older hardware2 doesn’t have the iSight camera just work. One must first do some work, like finding the drivers AppleUSBVideoSupport. The driver can be found on any Mac OS X system, however it must come Mac OS X pre-10.6, so just just google it.

This week I was lucky enough to enjoy a week off from work. I am half way thru the vacation and wanted to post a stats report on my vacation[summer, 2013] project. While I do love Crunch Bang, I would like move my MacBook (4,1) to Arch. I’ve been successful install Arch on my MacBook (2,1) yet before I wipe away my ‘stable’ install I must first resolve a few issues/bugs1.

I’ve had issues getting avahi (zeroconfig) to work properly on my first arch install. I was, I think, finally able to make everything work properly by doing the following. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and make the host line look like1: hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns Finally run: # systemctl enable avahi-daemon.service Testing metric: ping -c 1 `hostname`.local avahi-resolve -n `hostname`.local getent hosts `hostname` More info on what mdns4_minimal and mdns can be found on the nss-mDNS website.

Just in case I run up against this again…. sudo pacman -Syy sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux sudo pacman -Scc

A few months back I installed Ubuntu; shortly after that I moved to CrunchBang. For the most part I’ve enjoyed my experiences with CruncBang. The few things I haven’t enjoyed where directly related to it foundation, Debian. However, I stuck with it and even upgraded the Macbook (4,1) replacing the HD with an SSD and doubling the RAM. I enjoyed the experience even more. Yet I keep feeling like the Debian base was holding me back.