9

Within the last month, I have encountered a number of problems involving xf86-video-modesetting (independent of the rest), upower, dbus and systemd (I still can't get OOM to log via systemd). Is there a modern handbook that describes these systems, how they are configured and how they interact and altogether, how a modern Linux desktop works? I am bewildered -- I have been using Linux for twenty years and I feel extremely lost.

Every documentation, tutorial, troubleshooting blogpost or forum discussion is suspect to be outdated. Consider the following:

Just for suspend, we went through, if I remember correctly, hal+pm-utils, ACPI+/sys/power/state (I do not know half of /sys for sure) and now, systemd+upower (at least I think it's upower that actually suspends).

For changing the speed of an intel CPU, we had speedstep, acpi-cpufreq and now pstate.

There's hwinfo and solid-hardware. I have no idea whether the two works from the same source and if not which one is better.

Alexej Magura
  • 4,356
  • 7
  • 26
  • 39
chx
  • 850
  • 7
  • 20
  • You realize this will be distro specific, if it exists at all. Would an answer that is distro specific be acceptable? – slm Aug 05 '13 at 11:48
  • I guess so. Basically, there's Ubuntu with Upstart and then there's everyone else who went systemd. I'm somewhat more interested in the latter. – chx Aug 05 '13 at 17:08

1 Answers1

2

As you pointed out many significative changes were introduced in linux organization on the last years, being the end of init scripts and systemd some of the major ones. As already pointed blogs, forums and even books are probably not as up to date as you would expect. In this cases I usually refer to the Archwiki as the packages in Arch are almost free of distro specific patches. Some interesting info about configuring the machine for everyday use can be found here. A good place to find accurate and fast information is irc being Freenode, specifically #linux, a place where you can find support for the majority of problems you will be facing in a moder linux desktop.

vfbsilva
  • 3,657
  • 3
  • 28
  • 42
  • Welcome to Unix & Linux Stack Exchange! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, [it would be preferable](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/8259) to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. – Braiam Aug 07 '13 at 21:36
  • That's bad news: I am running Arch Linux and I actually *edited* the Arch Wiki article on DisplayLink to bring it more up to date. I hoped there is some documentation I missed. Like, http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ for Bash vs the much more known tldp.org – chx Aug 08 '13 at 01:59