[gentoo-user] fluxbox without xorg-server? How do you start X?

[Mark Knecht]

Just curious. The fluxbox ebuild doesn't emerge xorg-server which
means I now have a machine with fluxbox emerged but I don't know how
to start it as there is no xstart on the machine.

What would be the lightest way to get X running right now? man
startfluxbox suggests fluxbox can be started from .xsession if I use
xdm and xdm doesn't seem to require very much be emerged so I'm doing
that now.

The purpose of this experiment is that if I get X going then I have a
chance of seeing whether the the Open Source ati-driver TV feature out
actually works for my 9100 IGP chipset.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

[Jacob Todd]

You need to emerge xorg-server.

Post by Mark Knecht
Just curious. The fluxbox ebuild doesn't emerge xorg-server which
means I now have a machine with fluxbox emerged but I don't know how
to start it as there is no xstart on the machine.
What would be the lightest way to get X running right now? man
startfluxbox suggests fluxbox can be started from .xsession if I use
xdm and xdm doesn't seem to require very much be emerged so I'm doing
that now.
The purpose of this experiment is that if I get X going then I have a
chance of seeing whether the the Open Source ati-driver TV feature out
actually works for my 9100 IGP chipset.
Thanks in advance,
Mark

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Jacob Todd
You need to emerge xorg-server.

I'm about half way through now.

Thanks,
Mark

[Mick]

Post by Mark Knecht

Post by Jacob Todd
You need to emerge xorg-server.

I'm about half way through now.

Isn't it correct to say that you just need to emerge x11-base/xorg-x11, which
will pull in x11-base/xorg-server by default (unless you have some fancy USE
flags setup).

[Neil Bothwick]

Post by Mick
Isn't it correct to say that you just need to emerge x11-base/xorg-x11,
which will pull in x11-base/xorg-server by default (unless you have
some fancy USE flags setup).

It will also pull in a shedload of dependencies, being a meta
package,something that is not likely to appeal to the typical
Fluxbox user.

[Mick]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Mick
Isn't it correct to say that you just need to emerge x11-base/xorg-x11,
which will pull in x11-base/xorg-server by default (unless you have
some fancy USE flags setup).

It will also pull in a shedload of dependencies, being a meta
package,something that is not likely to appeal to the typical
Fluxbox user.

Hmm ... I must have been doing this wrong then? 8-/

What's the 'right' way of installing Xorg on a machine that runs FB as a WM?

[Neil Bothwick]

Post by Mick
What's the 'right' way of installing Xorg on a machine that runs FB as a WM?

Install xorg-server, anything else that's needed will be installed as a
dependency of xorg-server or your client software. The xorg-x11 meta
package was,AFAIR, created for backwards compatibility for old ebuilds
that still depended on the old monolithic package.

[Mick]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Mick
What's the 'right' way of installing Xorg on a machine that runs FB as a WM?

Install xorg-server, anything else that's needed will be installed as a
dependency of xorg-server or your client software. The xorg-x11 meta
package was,AFAIR, created for backwards compatibility for old ebuilds
that still depended on the old monolithic package.

Oh I see, thanks for this! I had it the other way around in my head.

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Mick
Isn't it correct to say that you just need to emerge x11-base/xorg-x11,
which will pull in x11-base/xorg-server by default (unless you have
some fancy USE flags setup).

It will also pull in a shedload of dependencies, being a meta
package,something that is not likely to appeal to the typical
Fluxbox user.
--
Neil Bothwick

Exactly. My use of fluxbox on this machine was to test that X is even
working over S-Video. (It is.) My goal after that was to emerge MythTV
again and try running that. That causes X to crash for MTRR problems
so that would be today's goal. This didn't used to happen with my old
kernel and the fglrx driver so probably I haven't configured the
kernel correctly?

With xorg-server & fluxbox emerged I only needed about 20 packages to
get Myth installed so I agree that xorg-x11 pulls in a bunch of stuff
I probably don't need.

I would have emerged xorg-x11 if I hadn't been reading through the
xorg config guide once again and seen that this was an option. I'm not
sure the other stuff is big, but it's a lot of packages.

- Mark

[Grant Edwards]

Post by Mark Knecht
Exactly. My use of fluxbox on this machine was to test that X
is even working over S-Video. (It is.) My goal after that was
to emerge MythTV again and try running that.

Anybody running MythTV can't be too concerned about bloat. Myth
requires X11 and Qt even for a headless backend server.

[Mark Knecht]

Post by Grant Edwards

Post by Mark Knecht
Exactly. My use of fluxbox on this machine was to test that X
is even working over S-Video. (It is.) My goal after that was
to emerge MythTV again and try running that.

Anybody running MythTV can't be too concerned about bloat. Myth
requires X11 and Qt even for a headless backend server.
--
Grant

Not too concerned, but less is better. Why install all the xorg-x11
stuff when it's not needed?

[Neil Bothwick]

Post by Grant Edwards
Anybody running MythTV can't be too concerned about bloat. Myth
requires X11 and Qt even for a headless backend server.

You only need the X libs, not the server. But anyone running a MythTV
backend will have plenty of disk space anyway, so an extra few MB of libs
that are unused after initial setup is hardly the end of the world :)

[Grant Edwards]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Grant Edwards
Anybody running MythTV can't be too concerned about bloat. Myth
requires X11 and Qt even for a headless backend server.

You only need the X libs, not the server.

True.

Post by Neil Bothwick
But anyone running a MythTV backend will have plenty of disk
space anyway, so an extra few MB of libs that are unused after
initial setup is hardly the end of the world :)

It still grates on the engineering nerve a bit. ;)

[Neil Bothwick]

Post by Grant Edwards

Post by Neil Bothwick
But anyone running a MythTV backend will have plenty of disk
space anyway, so an extra few MB of libs that are unused after
initial setup is hardly the end of the world :)

It still grates on the engineering nerve a bit. ;)

A curses setup program should please the frugal engineers, or would you
prefer to alter the MySQL table files with a hex editor? ;-)

[Grant Edwards]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Grant Edwards

Post by Neil Bothwick
But anyone running a MythTV backend will have plenty of disk
space anyway, so an extra few MB of libs that are unused after
initial setup is hardly the end of the world :)

It still grates on the engineering nerve a bit. ;)

A curses setup program should please the frugal engineers, or would you
prefer to alter the MySQL table files with a hex editor? ;-)

I usually do one of three things:

1) Type SQL commands.

2) Use Mythweb.

3) Run the setup program so that it displays on a different
machine.


That last option is clumsy, since it takes forever to start up,
is sluggish once it is running, and I find the UI used by the
setup programs to be obtuse: arrow, and enter keys never do
what I expect them to (and I've been using Myth for 6+ years
now).

I think running the setup programs on the server is the wrong
approach entirely.

If I want a GUI setup program, I'd rather run it on a "normal"
desktop/latpop machine with a decent resolution and a mouse.
They've invented this thing called a "network" that lets a UI
program on one computer talk to a database on another. It's
pretty cool.

Trying to do a GUI on a machine with a "desktop" that's 500x350
pixels and has no mouse/keyboard is always going to produce
miserable results with widgets ending up completely off screen,
unreadable fonts, and strings clipped to the point of being
unintelligible. And indeed that's what you get get when you
install MythTv an NTSC display with a normal amount of
overscan.

There was another MySQL table-editor UI that I tried
once-upon-a-time, but it was pretty hard to get up and running,
and not much easier than using 1) and 2).

[Neil Bothwick]

Post by Grant Edwards

Post by Neil Bothwick
A curses setup program should please the frugal engineers, or would
you prefer to alter the MySQL table files with a hex editor? ;-)

1) Type SQL commands.
2) Use Mythweb.
3) Run the setup program so that it displays on a different
machine.
That last option is clumsy, since it takes forever to start up,
is sluggish once it is running, and I find the UI used by the
setup programs to be obtuse: arrow, and enter keys never do
what I expect them to (and I've been using Myth for 6+ years
now).

You can't do stuff like channel scanning with the first two, so running
mythtv-setup over SSH is the only option, which means you need qt3 and X
libs on a headless server :(

[Grant Edwards]

Post by Neil Bothwick
You can't do stuff like channel scanning with the first two,
so running mythtv-setup over SSH is the only option, which
means you need qt3 and X libs on a headless server :(

I know. Making channel-scanning a separate text-mode
application similar to mythfilldatabase would solve that
problem. The thing I find truly odd about MythTv is that is
_is_ split up into frontend-UI-player and backend-server yet
the backend is so distinctly ill-suited to be installed on a
"server" type machine.

This time around, I'm installing the backend on a normal
"desktop" machine that's already going to have an X server, but
it's probably going to be the only app that requires Qt3.

I should try out Freevo some day. It's written in Python, so
it should be more stable than MythTv. But, it doesn't support
my tuner yet, and it doesn't appear to support a separate
backend with multiple frontends.

[Grant Edwards]

Post by Grant Edwards
I should try out Freevo some day. It's written in Python, so
it should be more stable than MythTv. But, it doesn't support
my tuner yet, and it doesn't appear to support a separate
backend with multiple frontends.

I take that back -- I just checked the web-site and it does
support separate backend/frontend machines. Hmm...