Gnome3 for the experienced (FUN Stuff!!!)

[cbowman57]

Hey guys, just wanted to say hi. I recently decided to tackle gnome shell on LMDE. After doing my own remaster of Ubuntu 11.04 with gnome shell (gNatty Gnome), I decided I wanted to get closer to the source & see how it goes. Have been very pleased with the experiment so far, easily as feature rich & stable as my Ubuntu installations.

I've also found that the themes & extensions I collected for gNatty work well with LMDE, so here is a link https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=32ec6e89 ... AA803B!201 .

[zerozero]

Hi Charles
welcome to Mint and LMDE
and i have to agree with you, atolm looks great

[cbowman57]

Hi Charles
welcome to Mint and LMDE
and i have to agree with you, atolm looks great

Thanks for the welcome, I agree Atolm is a nice look, works for me. I've modified mine a bit, can't remember exactly how anymore but they were subtle changes.

[zerozero]

just saying because after playing with a few themes here in LMDE (gtk3 and shell) i went with the same setup i had in fedora :atolm all the way (actually, transparent atolm, a mod);

as for the system, i find it for now stable (about 1 week), just keep it with dist-upgrade and sid/experimental still enabled (i went with a mix of Greg E and autocrosser advises ) and it's working fine

[GregE]

I am about to embark on an experiment in lean green computing. I await delivery of an AMD E350 motherboard, specifically an ASRock E350M1/USB3 mini-itx with 4GB ram and a WD 2tb HDD. The total power draw of the entire box should be about 40w when running flat out and idling in the twenties. My monitor is a Viewsonic that runs at 32w. The issue for Gnome3 is the use of FGLRX. The open source video driver cannot yet compete with the AMD driver for power saving functions. But Gnome3 does not play nicely with FGLRX, at least not the last time I tried. I could put my Nvidia G210 in the pcie slot and run the Nvidia driver, but that is kinda odd on a AMD board with onboard graphics. On my current board with onboard ATI graphics the total system power is 10w less using Nvidia G210 and Nvidia driver, than with the open source driver and onboard ATI graphics. A new version of FGLRX that works with Gnome3 will solve all - I hope.

The new machine will also be as close to silent as a computer can get. I will start with onboard and open source driver and see what the power draw looks like.

The next step will be to get a small case and eventually an SSD.

[zerozero]

now you talk about drivers, there was one thing that really surprised me:
- in my fedora install, in this same box, i never installed the nvidia drivers and the shell was running fine, furthermore, with compiz i have effects (all the kind in fallback-mode);
- here in LMDE, until i installed the driver it did not even went to the shell, only fallback;

[autocrosser]

Yes--that was the way it always worked even back when I was Ubuntu-testing & testing G-S...must be a Debian thing.....

[GregE]

First stage complete. E350 installed and running with onboard video and open source ati driver. Sound and USB3 working, video woks well enough. 35w just looking at Gnome3 desktop, around 40w watching a YouTube video through Chrome.

Next step is to try fglrx, but that will have to be later. It is not super quiet, I can hear the little fan spinning. CPUFreq is saying it does not recognise any cpu throttling. More work required yet.

[xircon]

First stage complete. E350 installed and running with onboard video and open source ati driver. Sound and USB3 working, video woks well enough. 35w just looking at Gnome3 desktop, around 40w watching a YouTube video through Chrome.

Next step is to try fglrx, but that will have to be later. It is not super quiet, I can hear the little fan spinning. CPUFreq is saying it does not recognise any cpu throttling. More work required yet.

What is the output of:

Code: Select all

cat /etc/modules

I had to add:

Code: Select all

acpi-cpufreq

to the list to get my core i5 recognised.

Cheers

Steve

[GregE]

Using fglrx the system used the same amount of power in both idle and watching flash video, however the system was utterly borked. Icons missing, video remaining on screen after closing VLC and the quick launch extension just not appearing at all. I then added an Nvidia G210 and installed the Nvidia driver. Desktop idle increased to 40w and watching flash video sat at 47-48w. The system was absolutely stable. For Gnome3 the best option is Nvidia and I also have tried Intel on another system and that was fine. For ATI it is still that fglrx (11.6) just will not work with Gnome3

So for an ASRock E350M1/USB3 mini-itx the open source ati driver is the best option while running Gnome3. Any gaming would be pretty much impossible without abandoning Gnome Shell.

@xircon

Thanks for responding. Now that I have tested the video options I will try the acpi option.

[wlake]

I'm trying to install gnome shell on LMDE. Added the experimental and sid repos, but I have a lot of unmet dependencies. It seems to come back in particular to this one libmozjs4d. It doesn't seem to exist in any of the repos though.
For example
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome-shell : Depends: gjs (>= 0.7.11) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libgjs0b (>= 0.7.11) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmozjs4d (>= 2.0~rc1) but it is not installable
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[GregE]

@wlake

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libmozjs4d

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libmozjs5d

My system is 32bit and has both packages installed. Now I can only find 32 bit libmozjs4d in experimental. It should appear with an Iceweasel install.

Make sure you have main non-free and contrib for wheezy sid and experimental then do a sudo apt-get update

My system has been changed and rebuilt so many times it is hard to know where things came from or what is necessary.

[zerozero]

wlake, i hope this helps

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amadeu@lmde-test ~ $ apt-cache show libmozjs4d
Package: libmozjs4d
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 3604
Maintainer: Maintainers of Mozilla-related packages <pkg-mozilla-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Source: iceweasel (4.0.1-4)
Version: 2.0.1-4
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5), libffi5 (>= 3.0.4), libnspr4-0d (>= 1.8.0.10), libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1)
Description: The Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript library
 This library provides the embeddable JavaScript/ECMAScript engine from
 the Mozilla project (used among others by the Mozilla, Epiphany, Firefox
 browsers as well as by the iPlanet WebServer).
Homepage: http://www.mozilla.org/js/

amadeu@lmde-test ~ $ apt-cache policy libmozjs4d
libmozjs4d:
  Installed: 2.0.1-4
  Candidate: 2.0.1-4
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.1-4 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
amadeu@lmde-test ~ $ inxi -r
Repos:     Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list
           deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
           deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
           deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
           deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free
           deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
           deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
           deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
amadeu@lmde-test ~ $


[GregE]

My AMD E350 Mini-ITX is now up and running. The correct CPU governor is Powernow, but I needed a 3.0 kernel to make it work. That is odd given a live Ubuntu 11.04 CD worked without config. Anyway I now have on-demand and three selectable frequencies. It took a lot of cleaning up to remove fglrx and nvidia drivers, but now I am back on opensource ati with Gallium3D.

This setup runs LMDE and Gnome-Shell fine for general use. Web browsing, LibreOffice, Picassa etc all work fast enough on a box that rarely exceeds 40w, most of the time it sits at 37w. It would be useless for any gaming or serious OpenGL application until drivers mature. If you follow Phoronix you will know that the Linux kernel has had some significant power usage issues after 2.6.35, so I await kernel 3.1 or 3.0.1 with some interest when hopefully those issues will finally be addressed.

Now for a smaller case and more efficient power supply.

[autocrosser]

Watch out everyone---I just had a b0rk with updates within the last 2 hours...G-S is partly starting & then bombing out....I'm looking into what caused it on my system...so I would excercise caution in updating today & tomorrow....

[zerozero]

tks for the heads-up autocrosser
fortunately then yesterday i didn't update the shell

[wlake]

@wlake

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libmozjs4d

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libmozjs5d

My system is 32bit and has both packages installed. Now I can only find 32 bit libmozjs4d in experimental. It should appear with an Iceweasel install.

Make sure you have main non-free and contrib for wheezy sid and experimental then do a sudo apt-get update

My system has been changed and rebuilt so many times it is hard to know where things came from or what is necessary.

Thanks for your reply. You get a hit for libmozjs4d at the packages site but if you try to download it, then it's not there. This is what I get for iceweasel, no 4.0
sammy@sam-lmde /etc/apt $ sudo apt-cache policy iceweasel
iceweasel:
Installed: 6.0~b2-1
Candidate: 6.0~b2-1
Version table:
*** 6.0~b2-1 0
500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental/main i386 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
5.0-4 0
500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ sid/main i386 Packages
3.5.19-3 0
990 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing/main i386 Packages
990 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy/main i386 Packages

Very puzzling.

[wlake]

wlake, i hope this helps

Code: Select all

amadeu@lmde-test ~ $ apt-cache show libmozjs4d
Package: libmozjs4d
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 3604
Maintainer: Maintainers of Mozilla-related packages <pkg-mozilla-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Source: iceweasel (4.0.1-4)
Version: 2.0.1-4
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5), libffi5 (>= 3.0.4), libnspr4-0d (>= 1.8.0.10), libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1)
Description: The Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript library
 This library provides the embeddable JavaScript/ECMAScript engine from
 the Mozilla project (used among others by the Mozilla, Epiphany, Firefox
 browsers as well as by the iPlanet WebServer).
Homepage: http://www.mozilla.org/js/

amadeu@lmde-test ~ $ apt-cache policy libmozjs4d
libmozjs4d:
  Installed: 2.0.1-4
  Candidate: 2.0.1-4
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.1-4 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
amadeu@lmde-test ~ $ inxi -r
Repos:     Active apt sources in file: /etc/apt/sources.list
           deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
           deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
           deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
           deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free
           deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
           deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
           deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
amadeu@lmde-test ~ $


Thanks for your reply.
This is what I get
sammy@sam-lmde /etc/apt $ sudo apt-cache policy libmozjs4d
libmozjs4d:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: (none)
Version table:
I'll have to look around some more.

[zerozero]

this is just a wild guess, but here it goes: since i installed the shell (2 weeks ago), iceweasel was updated from v.4.* to v.6.*, so i assume this lib is no more in the repos;
now if it is a dep to any other lib, you might have found a problem there

[GregE]

@Wlake

On the Mepis site both 32 and 64 bit packages ver 2.0.1-1 of libmozjs4d - 2.0.1-1mcr85+1

http://main.mepis-deb.org/M85packages.html

Worth a try