I finally got around installing a linux distro on my new notebook. After carefully choosing the easiest and the lightest one, I chose arch. Of all distributions arch linux has one of the best wikis available, an awesome package manager and an active community.
Installation
The installation process is smooth. If you only have the wireless available (no eth), don't forget to choose wireless_tools package from base-devel, as you won't be able to configure wireless without it.
Setting up wireless
Refer to wireless wiki, network wiki for a DHCP setup:
ifconfig wlan0 up # activate the kernel interface
iwconfig wlan0 essid "MyEssid" key 1234567890 #WEP encrypted
dhcpcd wlan0
Add this to /etc/rc.conf
under the NETWORKING
:
wlan0="dhcp"
INTERFACES=(wlan0)
Network profiles
When you'll get tired of setting up connection manually every time you start up your box and think about putting the ifconfig
stuff in a start up script - don't do that. The standard way to set up a network is through the netcfg
utility/daemon. You need to set up a profile which will reside in /etc/network.d
and add the net-profiles daemon
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng !network hal netfs net-profiles crond pcm)
and the network profile name (under NETWORKING
)
NETWORKS=(profile-in-rc.d/network)
to you rc.conf
(note that I have disabled the network
daemon for some reason, not really sure why though). To be honest, I could not get netcfg
to successfully connect using my profile for the first week. It fixed itself after a system update some time later.
Tips
- If you ever need to restart network do:
/etc/rc.d/network restart
Setting up X
Refer to xorg wiki:
pacman -S xorg
pacman -S nvidia # if you have an nvidia card
nvidia-xconfig # creates an /etc/X11/xorg.conf
pacman -S acpid # ([power management](http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acpid))
add hal
and dbus
to DAEMONS
in /etc/rc.conf
and you're good to go.
Tips
- When I tried to run X for the first time - I would get locked out and had to hard-reboot the box. However, it wasn't really dead as I figured out later. If you ever get into what looks like a lock out, try
ctrl+alt+F1/2/..
which will bring up another TTY screen.
Setting up WM
I chose xmonad (arch wiki). The process is fairly straightforward, just proceed as described in wiki. The only problem I have encountered was the freetype lib which wasn't installed. Easily fixed by
pacman -Ss freetype && pacman -S extras/libxft
Tips
If you get a blank screen and your /var/Xorg.0.log
is empty - probably xmonad has started without errors. It's a minimal window manager, so don't expect much eye candy. Use Meta+S+Enter
to open a terminal and read a wiki from there.
If you ever run into troubles while upgrading or installing any graphical packages look here.
If you find yourself staring at your keyboard, unable to figure out what to press in order to switch to another window/desktop or open another console - use this vi-style reference.
You also might want to have a status bar. There are two competitors currently: xmobar and dzen, latter being more feature-rich and sophisticated. That's why I chose the former one. Its setup is straightforward as: pacman -S xmobar and following the xmonad guide on adding a statusbar.
xmonad 0.9.1 has a problem with playing HTML5 video tags in full screen.
Setting up sound
Sound is managed by ALSA. I don't know what it is for sure, so I'll leave it to your imagination. To get it up and running you need
pacman -S alsa-utils
alsaconf
aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front\_Center.wav
If you can't hear the pleasant voice, consult the oracle.
Setting up touchpad
See Touchpad Synaptics. According to the wiki, you only need to
pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics
However, it didn't work for me without a restart.
General Tips
- If shutdown doesn't shut down - use
poweroff
. In my case shutdown
didn't work, no matter what I tried: all of the shutdown
options, apci modes, e.t.c. After a search through arch forums (which resulted in zero topics matching the symptoms I've been having) and a dozen tries I just gave up and tried the poweroff
which worked like a charm.
Applications
Arch is a lean distro, it even has it's user selected "Lean and Mean of the Year" list of applications found somewhere in the forums section.
File manager
Definitely vifm
. However, installing vifm
is not as straightforward as other packages as it isn't yet in the official arch repo (as of 2010-02-16). First you need to get the 'arch build system' (abs
)
pacman -S abs
then the base-devel group
pacman -S base-devel
create a directory for unofficial package builds and get the package
mkdir ~/builds && cd ~/builds && wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vifm-git/vifm-git.tar.gz
build the package
tar -xvf vifm-git.tar.gz && cd PKGBUILD && makepkg -s
install the resulting tar
pacman -U [the tar.gz file built by makepkg]