multiple problems with dwm

[kronikpillow]

Hi luke, just today, i decided to go back to LARBS and try out this new setup that you uploaded recently, I have installed on Artix with runit ...

now, problems that I'm experiencing .... the terminal keeps randomly closing on me when I try to open some files ...

for example when I run ranger or lf and go to .config/lf folder, the terminal closes when I run vifm I can go to .config/lf folder but when i try to open any of the files inside the terminal closes when with all 3 file managers variants i go to .local/bin/cron the terminal closes same thing when I go to .local/share/larbs the terminal closes

dmwblocks is not running, when I try to invoke it manually i get the following error

cat: /tmp/recordingicon: No such file or directory
find: ‘/home/kronikpillow/.local/share/mail/*/INBOX/new’: No such file or directory
amixer: Unable to find simple control 'Master',0

sed: can't read /sys/class/power_supply/BAT?/capacity: No such file or directory
sed: can't read /sys/class/power_supply/BAT?/capacity: No such file or directory

then, I gitcloned your dwmblocks build to edit it and remove the battery and that recordingicon thing (what ever that is) and when I try to nvim blocks.h terminal closes ... do you have any idea why is this happening to me?

I have also tried to edit the files with nano, terminal keeps closing ... very very frustrating, I dunno what to do or how to debug this

I got other problems as well, but I will get to them once I solve this somehow

[LukeSmithxyz]

Oh, all of these problems are nearly certainly caused by a lack of proper installed font characters...

Can you show me fc-match mono? Did nerd-fonts-inconsolata install correctly?

[LukeSmithxyz]

Oh actually, looks like nerd-fonts isn't even in the progs.csv... Could you just show me what pacman -Q | grep ttf shows?

[kronikpillow]

sure bro ... pacman -Q | grep ttf ttf-font-awesome 5.11.2-1 ttf-inconsolata 1:2.0.0.1-3 ttf-joypixels 5.0.3-3 ttf-linux-libertine 5.3.0-4 and I have installed nerd-fonts-complete from the AUR

ttf-font-awesome was installed manually by me, I figured it could be a font issue as I saw that there are fonts like that in the config files, after installing ttf-font-awesome and nerd-fonts-complete, it seems to work now :)

I'll uninstall one then the other to see which one was breaking it

[LukeSmithxyz]

Alright, tell me what happens. I can probably give more specific fontconfig rules to avoid this kind of problem.

[kronikpillow]

I removed the ttf-font-awesome and lf and dwmblocks files work, which means for those files the nerd-fonts were the problem, but going the .local/share/larbs/emoji file still crashes the terminal, and when I press mod+` it is very slow and sluggish compared to how it used to be, digging in further, I noticed that ttf-symbola was not installed

I get the following error when I try to install it with yay ==> ERROR: Failure while downloading http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola.zip Aborting...

any replacement for Symbola? or maybe manually install the font?

[kronikpillow]

the second problem I'm having atm is with the .asoundrc that is provided by LARBS, I have a professional M-Audio Delta 66 sound card, which is now a legacy sound card (not that it matters) and when I was using PulseAudio on Arch (which for some reason has serious problems on Artix) all I had to do to get my sound working was to open up alsamixer and unmute / raise volume on DAC & DAC1 channels, which are 2 mono channel, DAC is the left and DAC1 is the right channel, I need to "downmix" or "upmix" or "dmix" those 2 channels in to 1 stereo "master" channel, which doesn't even exist on my sound card. I do have a hardware mixer Xenyx502, but I want to be able to use software mixing as well, as I have dismantled my audio studio and mainly use the soundcard only for playback as my integrated Intel sound card is fried and doesn't work...

when I open up alsa, it seems to default to the NVIDIA Graphics Card HDA soundcard which I don't use: screenshot 1

when I press F6 it presents a menu with -default, 0 HDA Nvidia, 1 M Audio Delta 66: screenshot 2

then I go down to the M Audio Delta 66, and raise the volume on DAC and DAC1 to -18.50 dB gain, and nothing happens ... screenshot 3

I have never used pure alsa before, so I dunno how to do this, I've been reading the Arch Wiki ALSA section, I have tried multiple solutions provided there, and none of them work

the output of cat /proc/asound/modules is: 0 snd_hda_intel 1 snd_ice1712

the output of speaker-test is: speaker-test

speaker-test 1.2.1

Playback device is default Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels Using 16 octaves of pink noise ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1089:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory

....

the only way I was able to get my sound card to work is if I had this in my .asoundrc

defaults.ctl.card 1; defaults.pcm.card 1;

but with it, I have no control of the outputs through the Raise/Lower/Mute Volume keys on my keyboard, and the dwmblocks isn't displaying it either, as the Master channel doesn't exist, the 2 channels it uses are 2 separate mono channels, that I would need somehow to link or mix to a "dummy master channel" which used to be PulseAudio .....

any idea how I can achieve this? :)

[kronikpillow]

I have found this configuration asound.conf used it, and it works, then i found this How to use softvol to control the master volume Softvol and followed the tips there and examples, and came up with this

pcm.softvol { type softvol slave { pcm "aout" } control { name "Master" card 1 } }

pcm.!default { type plug slave.pcm "softvol" }

but now I have 2 master channels (1 for the NVIDIA HDMI Graphics card, and 1 for the M-Audio Deta 66 card) and now the dwmblocks bar has 2 volume bars at 100%, and when I reduce or increase volume with the keyboard the volume doesn't change at all .. I'm lost, I have no clue about C, or how to properly setup dwmblocks to work with my alsa setup and to display only the master channel of the Delta 66 card and to actually work with it

output of amixer controls | grep Master is numid=29,iface=MIXER,name='Master' ... it only shows 1 master channel, so I don't get it

[kronikpillow]

and 3rd problem Im having is, ncmpcpp isn't playing sound at all, while if i run a song with ranger it plays in the terminal with no problems

[LukeSmithxyz]

Okay. The volume controls in LARBS are set to adjust the Master by default. I suppose I can make them refer to an environmental variable to allow more streamlined changes.

The ncmpcpp problem is a problem with mpd. Check the mpd config and you'll have to adjust its default output to the new one. Again, there might be a way to make it refer to some user-defined default.

I'll check into all this when I can. Yes, ALSA can be a big pain because here is literally no good documentation for this basic feature of the operating system anywhere. If it proved too difficult to make work on many people's systems, I'll have LARBS ship with pulseaudio.

[kronikpillow]

well PulseAudio is a option definitely, but I can't seem to get it working properly on Artix, out of no reason sound stops working at various times, and sometimes right after a reboot, it doesn't work at all, then I reboot again and it works, I launch up ncmpcpp and the sound is pitched down and plays at a slower rate, until I go to youtube to play some song, then the pitch goes back to normal, and all of a sudden music from mpd is working properly .... So I figured since I'm using Artix, and honestly don't plan to switch back to systemd, that figuring this out is worth my trouble :) so I did, a Lil thx to your help, a Lil thanks to the internet ...

I managed to get it working ... what I did was blacklist snd_hda_intel to disable the NVIDIA HDMI audio, then I played around with the settings from those links I linked in the previous post and got the following result: KP's .asoundrc

now I have a master channel, and the buttons on the keyboard are working, the only thing that I am bothered now about is that in the bar next to the volume icon I have 2x 100% indicator, check out the screenshot

regarding ncmpcpp/mpd now that I successfully created a Master channel, I'm assuming it should work, but it still doesn't ... could you give me a snippet on how to set the default output? .. but wait, when i run ranger and go to a mp3 file, it opens in my terminal and plays sound, doesn't that mean that mpd is working?

also regarding the symbola font problem, i found a ttf-symbola v12.0.0 package in a unofficial arch repository, downloaded it, and installed it manually :)

[LukeSmithxyz]

Well ttf-symbola should be installed by LARBS by default... I suppose something went wrong, but it's in the progs.csv.

Okay, good on the audio issue. That's a typical problem; the issue is me making it usable for the masses without them all having to figure it out...

[kronikpillow]

the aur package ttf-symbola is broken, it returns a download error on the Symbola.zip as it is non existent on the host where the PKGBUILD points to

so ... how do I get rid of the 2nd volume bar in the dwmblocks? and I'm still unable to make ncpmcpp work