number 9

One thing I really need in any OS is support for the Dvorak keyboard layout.
I had pretty bad RSI a few years back and it flares up after any
length of time on a QWERTY layout.

I can’t change the Xserver config because other people use the laptop (besides, I couldn’t find it. Turns out there isn’t an xorg.conf on Solaris by default – it guesses your settings at X startup).

Solaris GNOME Java Desktop System doesn’t have an option to
change your keyboard layout. In any case, I was using CDE to save memory
(I’ll save my switch to dwm for another post).

xmodmap to the rescue

Here is my best effort -
load it with a straightforward ’xmodmap .dvorak.sun’ and it’ll last til you exit your
X session.

If you want every CDE login to use this keymapping, stick

  # save the existing keymapping
  xmodmap -pke > $HOME/.qwerty.sun
  xmodmap $HOME/.dvorak.sun

at the end of $HOME/.dtprofile.

You can just ‘xmodmap $HOME/.qwerty.sun’ (or kill the X session) to revert to your old bindings.

/j2ee/bin/asupgrade kept insisting
DISPLAY wasn’t set.
I hanen’t installed X on this box so that’s hardly suprising.

To get X11 forwarding working, I had to add a few packages:

vera # pkginfo -d . SUNWxwfsw SUNWxwice SUNWxwrtl SUNWxwplr SUNWxwplt
system      SUNWxwfsw X Window System platform required font software
system      SUNWxwice X Window System Inter-Client Exchange (ICE) Components
system      SUNWxwplr X Window System platform software configuration
system      SUNWxwplt X Window System platform software
system      SUNWxwrtl X Window System & Graphics Runtime Library Links in /usr/lib
vera # yes | pkgadd -d . SUNWxwfsw SUNWxwice SUNWxwrtl SUNWxwplr SUNWxwplt

After all that, it turns out

1. asupgrade doesn’t do what I thought it did
2. I could’ve just used /j2ee/bin/asupgrade—console

Ho hum

I am sick of GNOMEs bullshit.

Setantae recommended wmii -
I glanced at it a while back but mistook it for a ratpoison clone.
Ratpoision didn’t play nice with GIMP and the ‘1 app per desktop’ model meant you were forever switching views.

wmii is a lot nicer: sane default layouts, easy adjustments, and it uses 9P for IPC (the ruby wrapper is the icing on the cake). It’s < 10000 lines of code, which makes it the Camping of window managers.

First, I stopped using network manager (I hardly ever connect to different WLANs) and went back to a system-wide WPA setup .
All I neeeded was to set a DVORAK layout at login and I’d be happy.

Sadly, GDM contracted the Open Source disease of reimplementing everything. It doesn’t read ~/.xsession, instead using system-wide ‘foo.desktop’ files. As if this hadn’t all been solved when I was 10.

I would skip a display manager altogether, but other people use the box and I’d like to be a good neighbour.
This seems to work without needing to hack around in /etc/X11 :

$ sudo apt-get install wmii
$ # logout, choose 'wmii' session at GDM and log back in
$ cd
$ cat > .dmrc
[Desktop]
Session=custom
$ cat > .xinitrc
 setxkbmap dvorak&
 # add your own stuff here
 exec wmii
$ ln -s .xinitrc .xsession