Category Archives: ArchLinux

GnuCash on Arch Linux

The version of GnuCash in Arch Linux, although up-to-date, is not compiled to use the webkit library, so formatting of reports such the tax invoice is very basic: it doesn't use the fonts that can be selected in the report options.

It's easily fixed though:

  1. sudo pacman -S abs webkitgtk2
  2. sudo abs
  3. copy /var/abs/extra/gnucash to a suitable place, such as ~/abs/
  4. cd ~/abs/gnucash
  5. add the option '–with-html-engine=webkit' to the PKGBUILD file after the line beginning with './configure'.  Or apply this patch:
    — PKGBUILD~    2012-11-20 16:49:51.048534626 +0000
    +++ PKGBUILD    2012-11-20 16:49:54.015211392 +0000
    @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
    -# $Id: PKGBUILD,v 1.1 2012/11/20 05:03:00 chris Exp chris $
    +# $Id: PKGBUILD 165143 2012-08-11 18:49:18Z eric $
     # Maintainer: Aaron Griffin <aaron@archlinux.org>
     # Contributor: Mark Schneider <queueRAM@gmail.com>
     
    @@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
     build() {
       cd "${srcdir}/${pkgname}-${pkgver}"
       ./configure –prefix=/usr –mandir=/usr/share/man –sysconfdir=/etc
    +    –with-html-engine=webkit
         –libexecdir=/usr/lib –disable-schemas-install –enable-ofx –enable-aqbanking
       make
     }
  6. makepkg
  7. sudo pacman -U *.xz

Arch Linux, XFCE, and UK Keyboards

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

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.