Category Archives: PlanetHantsLUG

Arch Linux, XFCE, and UK Keyboards

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I know Arch Linux doesn't hold your hand like other distros do, but I think it could make setting the keyboard layout easier.

Firstly, set the locale in rc.conf:

    ...
    KEYMAP="uk"
    LOCALE="en_GB.UTF-8"
    ...

and then reboot.  Reboot?  Surely there's a better way, but I don't know what it is.

Edit /etc/locale.gen to uncomment the ones you want to use — en_GB.UTF-8 and en_GB in my case.

Then you can run

    # locale > /etc/locale.conf

For 'normal' sorting of ls listings etc., edit /etc/locale.conf and set

    LC_COLLATE="C"

That should sort things out on the console.

For XFCE, it's tricky because the Applications Menu / Settings / Keyboard seems to be ignored.  So refer to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Setting_Keyboard_Layout_With_Hot-Plugging and add this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

    Section "InputClass"
        Identifier             "Keyboard Defaults"
        MatchIsKeyboard        "yes"
        Option                 "XkbLayout" "gb"
    EndSection

and restart X.

Arch Linux — updating Perl from 5.14 to 5.16

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Recent updates (in June 2012) to Arch Linux replaced Perl 5.14 with 5.16.

Imagine my surprise when Perl scripts (including cpanp) suddenly stopped working.

I asked about the problem on PerlMongers and the Arch Linux forum, and did the following to solve it:

  • Delete all files under /usr/bin/site_perl, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl and /usr/share/perl5/site_perl to remove the duplicates installed by the cpan shell.
  • Rebuild all AUR packages that contain perl XS modules. This will print them out: 
    sudo pacman -Qml | awk '/_perl/auto/.+.so$/ { print $1 }' | uniq

    (There weren't any on my system.)

  • Reinstall perl-cpanplus-dist-arch
  • Run cpanp to install the Perl modules that aren't available on Arch or AUR, for example: 
    sudo cpanp -i Math::Combinatorics

Which seems to have done the job.

Static ddrescue

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GNU ddrescue is an excellent tool for recovering files from failing hard disks.

The source code can be downloaded and is easy to compile.  But it's most useful if statically-linked, creating a Linux executable file that can run on its own without extra libraries — from a live CD for example.

To create a statically-linked version, run this instead of the usual ./configure:

./configure LDFLAGS=-static --no-create

Then run make in the normal way.