Antergos : A New Frontier

Who knew that distro hopping would be such a never ending process! Any new distro that shines bright among others quickly catches my attention and I am tempted to try it out.

I had always wanted to try Arch since quite some time and while I consider myself as a fairly advanced linux user, the manual process of installing Arch has really intimidated me for the longest time. To get over Arch installation I tried my hands at Manjaro and even Archbang but never got to using them longer than a couple days. But I always had that craving for a rolling release and was left wanting for more.

This is when Antergos caught my eye. From the reviews that I read, it is a purer version of Arch than Manjaro, since it uses Arch repositories and does not add any of its own. This means all the upstream goodies in Arch are available with it. Antergos also makes it very simple for new and seasoned users alike to install a Arch based system and comes with a variety of desktop environments to choose from. It is also available in two types of installable iso files. One is a full fledged gnome 3 live cd while other is a minimal iso which has enough packages to start the live session and then the user can choose to install packages and desktop environment of his choice.

I put my faith in the full installer and chose the Gnome desktop environment. The installation was smooth and the only care I had to take was install it to a 32 GB pen drive with relevant root and swap partitions. This external pen drive is the only storage option I have for my laptop ever since its HDD got busted. For some time I was using Portues installed on this pen drive and for the sake of an Arch based linux distro I decided to forego my Porteus setup and do a full distro install on the external pen drive. The install process is pretty much the same except that care needs to be taken to install the linux boot loader on the pen drive ‘/dev/sdb’ in my case. Antergos does require an active internet connection during installation since this is when it also tries to download and install the latest packages. In that sense installing from the full live cd makes sense, since it does not have to install huge number of packages later. On a slow internet conection this can be quite cumbersome. I think I had a power nap couple of time before the installation was successfully complete. I now have an up-to-date Arch based installation on my laptop in the form of Antergos.

Antergos was definitely unchartered territory for me. But the dev folks have done a great job at putting together a friendly Arch system which has great aesthetics. The look and feel of gnome DE is great and I could not help but think why I didnt jump onto it before. I have moved from Pantheon DE to LXDE to MATE, and that progression was from good to worse. I always thought maybe I was making some compromise along the way partly due to aging hardware. Starting to use gnome 3 again was great. Its a fantastic DE with nifty features that work well on my old laptop. I do not experience any lag and with a modest 2.5 GB RAM, I would safely bet that this Antergos setup is not that resource hundry.

The installed softwares are the usual bunch. Nothing extra ordinary, but enough for all daily basic computing needs. It has an ebook reader, a pdf reader, video player, audio player, chromium browser, pidgin chat client and the usual photo viewer and screenshot applications. All the essesntials for a workable linux distribution are in place. Any additional softwares can be found on the AUR repositories using the package manager to add and remove softwares. This is very similar to using the synaptic package manager and does not confuse me at all. No sooner I was already comfortable adding and removing softwares that I wanted. I might consider installing gimp and libre office later. A pro tip here is to remove all the unwanted software so that the rolling release updates are easy on the downloads. If there are packages you would rarely use just get rid of them and spare yourself the pain of downloading updates. A rolling release means your system will always be up to date with bleeding edge versions of the softwares and so the updates should be for the packages that you use and not the ones which are just there since you didnt bother to do anything about it.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As I tinker more with Antergos, I find myself on my way to finally using an Arch based rolling release distro. Only time can tell how faithful I have been to using this linux distro before making my way to the next. For now it is great and I like what I see.

Unleash the power of Sublime Text

A while back, I evaluated Sublime Text and its suitability for code development; be it simple scripting in Unix or Python or some basic code development in Java. It is indeed a powerful editor with support for lot of languages like HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Ruby and I could go on. Though not a full fledged IDE, it still packs enough punch to get by your development needs. And which is why I am revisiting the latest version of Sublime. The current version under evaluation is Beta 3 Build 3103.

The real power of Sublime lies in the extensible packages that users can install and make it more productive. Its not just about editing your code any more, but with aid of useful and productive add ons you can make the best of your coding work flow all while working within Sublime. This article aims to discuss these things and how you can unleash the hidden power of Sublime Text.

The first thing to do after downloading the latest version of Sublime Text 3 is to install the package control plugin which allows you to quickly find and install other plugins. After successful installation, the installation menu can be activate by pressing [Ctrl + Shift + P] and typing install in the text box. Package control has a list of repositories which it looks up and lists several plugins to choose from. Search and install the plugin that you like from here.

Package Control gives you access to numerous themes and color schemes which you can install to change the default look and feel of your Sublime. I went ahead with the Soda Light theme and Cobalt color scheme. The colors go well with my Openbox themes on LXDE. Other cool themes worth checking are Minimal, Seti-UI, Spacegray and Brogrammer among others. The sheer number of color schemes and themes for Sublime Text is as ever increasing one, so go ahead and tweak it to your heart’s content.

Another worthy upgrade to do is install the Sidebar Enhancement plugin. This gives more options to the user when using the right click menu on the side bar where all files are visible under their folders.

After some cosmetic changes, I am going to turn towards code development. For your html coding needs Emmet is an excellent plugin. It allows for auto completion of tags which makes editing a breeze. That along with smart editing short cuts of sublime will make for improved productivity for front end coding.

Bracket Highlighter is a cool plugin which quickly tells you position of the closing brackets and displays this information in the gutter besides the lines numbes. That way it is easy to locate locate relevant code in json, java, javascript, html and many more.

One of my purposes to using Sublime is coding in Java and while I could write java code in a notepad application as well, it helps to have some auto completion features and project management. I installed JavaIME for this and also Javatar plugins. Both provide sufficient features to get by coding in Java. These arent a replacement for any IDE by any means, but having these plugins help a lot.

And I think these can be better complimented by plugins for maven so that you can build the project within the Sublime window rather than going to the terminal everytime. Maven plugin also adds useful shortcuts to the side bar enhancement menu which can help manage project workflow from the UI.

No developer can live without some kind of version control. Luckily you have good support for both git and svn. For git, GitSavvy gives all the power of git from within the sublime menus. And for svn, I found tortoise svn plugin very useful on windows platform. It just needs to know the location of locally installed tortoise executable and the plugin then delegates the svn commands to the tortoise executable. While using git, GitGutter is another useful plugin, which promptly highlights the changes in the current file against the last checked in changes. This makes it easy to identify changes and commit them while you are working with the files.

I guess this is where I stopped for a while and looked back at how all these plugins can fit well in your workflow. Assume you are working on a java project, you could quickly create an empty maven project outside of sublime using archetypes. Open that folder with sublime and you have a project structure to work with, use Javatar plugin to configure the java build paths and source folders. Use maven as your build system, so that you can build and package your java project. After making source code changes, you could use either git or svn to do appropriate source control of your project.

With these plugins installed, Sublime Text definitely transforms into something more than a text editor. It makes your workflow more stream lined and gets you going with the awesome code that you want to develop. Who knows, with enough familiarity of all the unleashed power of Sublime,  you could just kiss your favorite IDE good bye.