Using the i3 tiling window manager with XFCE services

Since around a year or two I've been using i3 tiling window manager together with the xfce4 services as my desktop environment and I'm quite content with the result. The i3-wm can be installed on top of the xfce4 DE without any package conflicts. Such a combination allows to have both DE at the same time and share common settings and applications between them.

I can't remember exactly why I have chosen the i3-wm as my window manager but maybe it's because I have read that i3-wm has vim style movement keyboard shortcuts. As far as I'm a vim user I decided to 'take it for a spin'.

Sound volume change notifications using pynotify

As I started to use the i3 window manager I wanted to have a visual feedback on sound volume change events. Usually it's done by a daemon that binds to specific keyboard combinations to adjust volume and to send notifications to a notify daemon. In xfce this is done by the xfce4-volumed. I should also point here to other lightweight volume daemons like volnoti or pa-applet. Without a dedicated daemon it is also pretty much simple to handle sound volume keys by a simple bash script which is bind to specific keyboard combinations.

Minimal Xubuntu 14.04 LTS installation

I have previously described the process of minimal Xubuntu Desktop installation with versions 13.04 and 13.10. Now it's time to install Xubuntu 14.04 LTS!

Note: There's already a newer article – Xubuntu 16.04 LTS minimal installation

Minimal Xubuntu 13.10 Desktop installation

I have performed a clean install of the newest Xubuntu distribution and I like the result. They have reacted to the bug reports I posted and fixed dependencies to the bloatware and spying packages that were not possible to avoid during Xubuntu 13.04 installation. I have also spent some time trying to figure out the minimum set of packages for the network-manager to work. Here's the installation procedure:

Multimonitor support in Xubuntu 13.04

One new feature planned for the Xubuntu 13.10 release is the multi-monitor support integrated into XFCE desktop. Previously one would have to use xrandr to adjust monitors settings and now it should also be possible with the updated Display Settings dialog. But it is also possible to use this feature in Xubuntu 13.04

Javascript vs Perl vs Python vs Lua speed comparison

I have previously compared performance of the three most popular interpreted languages - Perl, Python and Lua (part1, part2). The next question was - how do they compare to the Javascript? Unlike the above mentioned languages it was quite unusual to use Javascript outside of a browser sandbox but with developing of the node.js this became possible.

Redirecting terminal output into any X application

Sometimes I want to redirect bash output directly into an X application for further editing. Normally this is done using a temporary file where the bash output is saved and then it is opened by an application. There's a way though to start an X application and paste the bash output into its window automatically.

Python vs Perl vs Lua - speed comparison. Part 2

As far as people show interest in this topic I decided to perform an additional measurement to the one I performed in Part 1.

This time I wanted to compare floating point numbers operations performance because my good friend Anonymous worried about it. He said that I shouldn't have abused lua interpreter with basic arithmetic operations on integers because it's not good at it. He said that I should have tried floating points numbers instead to let lua interpreter shine. I was a bit skeptic about it to be honest but Anonymous's logic was sound.

OpenGL Core Profile and an overlay with the QPainter

I've played recently with the OpenGL Core Profile and QGLWidget to see if I can render a scene with only core profile functions and shaders. Everything worked well until I decided to add an FPS counter using overlaid text drawn with the QPainter.

Improving pm-utils power management scripts for pci devices

By default pm-utils changes power control parameters only for a subset of device classes. The classes id's are hardcoded into the /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/pci_devices script. Unfortunately it is not possible for a user to define his own set of classes to be treated by the script.