Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Source

New hardware always has the effect that everything else suddenly feels slow and outdated. After experiencing the ease and effortlessness with which my desktop handles everything I throw at it, my notebook (a Fujitsu Lifebook AH530) running OpenSuse 12.3 felt unresponsive and sluggish. Instead of updating to OpenSuse 13.1, I decided to install Archbang, a distribution I always wanted to run on one of my systems. Similar to Crunchbang which runs on my Mini, Archbang offers an Openbox powered desktop which is about as lightweight and snappy as it gets.

Archbang, however, is even more frugal and spartan than Crunchbang. For example, there's no out-of-the-box support for Bluetooth devices.

The Archlinux Wiki has detailed instructions as to the configuration of a Bluetooth mouse:

systemctl start bluetooth
systemctl enable bluetooth
bluetoothctl
 [bluetooth]# list
  Controller <cmac> BlueZ 5.5 [default]
 [bluetooth]# select <cmac>
 [bluetooth]# power on
 [bluetooth]# scan on
 [bluetooth]# devices
   Device <mmac> Name: Bluetooth Mouse
 [bluetooth]# trust <mmac>
 [bluetooth]# pairable on
 [bluetooth]# pair <mmac>
 [bluetooth]# connect <mmac>

After that, you only need to create a new udev rule to activate the mouse upon a reboot:

vim /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules
# Set bluetooth power up
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="hci0", RUN+="/usr/bin/hciconfig hci0 up"

All that works well until I suspend the session by closing the lid of the laptop. After that, the bluetooth mouse is inactive until I reboot the system.

Turns out that other people using Arch have the same problem. They even file bug reports. Well, what's more, people using other distributions have this problem too, and they fill out reports on the respective (Ubuntu, Fedora) platform as well.

There's even a fix, but for reasons I don't understand it didn't even make it into the recently released 3.12. What a bummer. Update: The fix has been included in 3.12.4. 😊

Apart from this, everything's just perfect. In the spirit of the distro, I try to use lightweight applications. For example, I use aarchup, guake and geany instead of yapan, kuake and texmaker or kile. Other than that, I just moved tint2 to the top and changed the conkyrc, but I even kept the wallpaper.

Desktop screenie