Installing An Arch Desktop

WARNING: Proceed carefully and verify everything until the author(s) of this article have had a chance to do so themselves.

Arch Linux is quite different from other distributions. It focuses on minimalism, ease of configuration, and keeping a hand-off approach. This can be daunting for those accustomed to other Linux distributions.

• Rather than maintaining fixed releases, Arch uses a rolling release system. There is no "Arch n.n"
• There is no branding whatsoever outside of the boot-up screen. And even then, it's only the unique way in which Arch brings up the system.
• The Arch installer presents only a base system. There are no pre-sets for common server types or desktop environments.
• Choices for piecing together your own system can be staggering.

One of the side-benefits from Arch's KISS approach is that it is relatively trivial to install Arch from an existing Arch system, including the installation ISO. For the sake of simplicity, this article will only cover the setup of an Arch system using LXDM and Compiz + Emerald. These are by no means the only choice for a desktop system.

Pre-Installation

Arch Install Scripts

If you are using the Arch Installation Media, the arch-install-scripts package is already installed. If you are installing from an existing installation, you can use pacman to install this script to the host machine.

pacman -Sy arch-install-scripts

The remmainder of this wiki article will assume that you have theses script installed.

Networking

By default, the Arch installation ISO will bring up and try to get a DHCP lease for all detected network devices. PXE boot will give the adapter an IP but no routing information. A fresh install of Arch does absolutely nothing with networking interfaces by default.

dhcpcd [interface]

If you do not use DHCP, you will have to use these commands to use static addressing:

ip addr [ip-address]/[net-mask] broacast [broadcast] dev eth0
ip route add default via $GTWY
ip link set dev $NDIF up

If you are using wifi, the Arch Installation Media has wifi-menu installed for easy CLI configuration of wifi.

Remote Setup Via SSH

If you are using the Arch Installation Media, you may want to use SSH to set up the machine remotely. The most common reason for this is so you can use another machine to look things up for you new installation, and so you can do other work while the Arch is being installed. If you are using an existing Arch system to set up another Arch system, there is no need for SSH.

By default, SSH will not allow password-less logins. The simplest fix is to run passwd and set one before enabling SSH

passwd && systemctl start sshd.service

Pacman Repository Selection

Once networking is up, you'll want to be sure you are using the fastest mirror. To do this, install reflector. You can safely skip upgrading pacman (for now -- this may change in the future.)

pacman -Sy reflector

You can now use reflector to automatically choose the fastest mirrors for you.

reflector -l 5 -c "[country]" --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Creating Target Filesystem

Use parted and/or fdisk to create the target partition(s) for your installation. Then format and mount the partition(s).

mkfs -t [fs-type] [device] && mount [device] /mnt/system

Swap Space

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/system/swapfile bs=1M count=[megabytes]
chmod 600 /mnt/system/swapfile
mkswap /mnt/system/swapfile
swapon /mnt/system/swapfile

Installing The Base System

 PKGS+=" base acpid dcfldd iotop ix ncdu parted rsync sudo tmux"               # General Utilities
 PKGS+=" dosfstools mtools ntfs-3g smbclient nfs-utis"                         # Filesystem Utilities
 PKGS+=" cpupower dmidecode hddtemp hdparm hwdetect lm_sensors lshw inxi smartmontools" # Hardware Utilities
 PKGS+=" dnsutils net-tools nfs-utils ntp openssh reflector whois wget"        # Network Utilities
 PKGS+=" arj lzop p7zip unrar zip"                                             # Compression Utilities

 pacstrap /mnt/system $PKGS

Configuring The Base System

fstab

genfstab -pL /mnt/system >> /mnt/system/etc/fstab
echo -e "/swapfile\tnone\tswap\tdefaults\t0 0" >> /mnt/system/etc/fstab

Host Name

echo [hostname] > /mnt/system/etc/hostname

Time Zone

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/[Country]/[City] /mnt/system/etc/localtime

NB: You can use [TAB] completion to help yourself out.

Hardware Clock

It is usually best to have the hardware clock set to UTC. If you aboslutely must have the hardware clock set to local time:

/etc/adjtime

0.0 0 0
0
LOCAL

Locale

cat << EOF > /mnt/system/etc/locale.conf
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_COLLATE=POSIX
EOF

cat << EOF > /mnt/system/etc/locale.gen
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
EOF

Console

cat << EOF > /mnt/system/etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=us
FONT=Lat2-Terminus16
EOF

Enabling [multilib] on 64-bit systems

[[ $(uname -m) == x86_64 ]] &&
sed -i ':a;N;$!ba;s/#\[multilib\]\n#/\[multilib\]\n/g' /mnt/system/etc/pacman.conf

Sudo

This will configure sudo to give members of the wheel group access and also configure it to request root's password instead of your own. (So you don't have to use a very strong password for your primary login and worry about it being an access point for hackers.)

sed -i 's/# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL/%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL/g' /mnt/system/etc/sudoers
echo 'Defaults rootpw' >> /mnt/system/etc/sudoers

NFS

echo -e "[nfs-ip]:/\t[nfs-mount]\tnfs4\tnoatime,user,exec,soft,timeo=14\t0 0" >> /mnt/system/etc/fstab

mkinitcpio

The default HOOKS should work fine. Just need to add the consolefont and keymap hooks.

sed -i 's/^HOOKS="(.*)"/HOOKS="\1 consolefont keymap"/g' /mnt/system/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

If you are using software RAID, you will also need to add the mdadm_udev hook.

sed -i 's/^HOOKS="(.*)autodetect(.*)"/HOOKS="\1autodetect mdadm_udev\2"/g' /mnt/system/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

makepkg

If you do not plan on compiling your own packages, you can skip this section.

The first thing to do to optimize compiled code is to specify that we're using the PC architecture.

sed -i 's/-unknown-linux-gnu/-pc-linux-gnu/g' /mnt/system/etc/makepkg.conf

Next, allow GCC to auto-detect CPU features.

sed -i 's/-march=\S* -mtune=generic/-march=native/g' /mnt/system/etc/makepkg.conf

Lastly, take advantage of SMP if available.

sed -i 's/#MAKEFLAGS="-j."/MAKEFLAGS="-j[cores + 1]"/g' /mnt/system/etc/makepkg.conf

Networking

DHCP

The easiest way is to just rely on DHCP

 arch-chroot /mnt/system
 systemctl enable dhcpcd
 exit

NetworkManager

If you're using a laptop or other computer with no guaranteed connection, you may prefer Network Manager

 pacstrap /mnt/system networkmanager
 arch-chroot /mnt/system
 systemctl enable NetworkManager
 exit

Network Manger works best with a complimentary GUI applet.

netctl

For ethernet connections that connect to a local LAN that does not have an internet connection

cp /mnt/etc/netctl/examples/ethernet-static /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-ethernet
sed -i "s/^ADDR=.*/ADDR='[ip-address]'/g" /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-ethernet

If your ethernet connection can connect to the internet

sed -i 's/^GATEWAY=.*/GATEWAY="[gateway-address]"/g' /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-ethernet
sed -i 's/^DNS=.*/DNS=\("[dns-address]"\)/g' /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-ethernet

Otherwise:

sed -i 's/^GATEWAY=/#GATEWAY=/g' /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-ethernet
sed -i 's/^DNS=/#DNS=/g' /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-ethernet

For network connections that connect to a wireless AP

cp /mnt/etc/netctl/examples/wireless-wpa-static /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-wireless
sed -i 's/^GATEWAY=.*/GATEWAY="[gateway-address]"/g' /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-wireless
sed -i 's/^DNS=.*/DNS=\("[dns-address]"\)/g' /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-wireless
sed -i "s/^ADDR=.*/ADDR='[ip-address]'/g" /etc/netctl/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-wireless
sed -i 's/^ESSID=.*/ESSID='[esid]'/g' /etc/network.d/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-wireless
sed -i 's/^KEY=.*/KEY='[wpsk]'/g' /etc/network.d/$(cat /mnt/system/etc/hostname)-wireless

Finally, to enable the network connection(s) at boot time:

 arch-chroot /mnt/system 
 netctl enable [profile]
 exit

Generate initramfs

 arch-chroot /mnt/system
 mkinitcpio -P
 exit

Boot Loader

Sylinux

 pacstrap /mnt/system syslinux
 arch-chroot /mnt/system
 syslinux-install_update -iam
 exit

Grub

 pacstrap /mnt/system grub
 arch-chroot /mnt/system
 grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
 grub-install [device]
 exit

Daemon Setup

 arch-chroot /mnt/system
 for daemon in acpid cronie smartd ntpd nfs-wait-online lm_sensors spupower cups; do
 systemctl enable $daemon
 done

Finish System Setup

umount /mnt/system
reboot

Post-Installation

Sensors

Sensors cannot be configured in chroot. It must be done once the target installation machine has booted the new system.

sensors-detect

GUI Configuration

GTK Themes

The defaults are not going to be pretty outside of the GNOME desktop environment. You may want to install some packages and set some defaults for GTK.

echo 'gtk-theme-name="Clearlooks"
gtk-icon-theme-name="elementary"
gtk-font-name="Droid Sans 10"' > ~/.gtkrc-2.0

echo '[Settings]
gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme = false
gtk-theme-name = Clearlooks-Phenix
gtk-icon-theme = elementary' > ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

Fixes

Nautilus Video Previews

The default setting for Nautilus is to use the GStreamer backend for previews. However, if you don't have the full-fledged GNOME desktop, nothing is set up. Instead of trying to mess around with GStreamer plugins, you can use ffmpegthumbnailer.

Make use you have the requirements

pacman -Sy --needed gconf ffmpegthumbnailer

Now run this script (can be copy-pasted into a terminal):

VIDEO_EXTENSIONS="video@flv video@webm video@mkv video@mp4 video@mpeg \
video@avi video@ogg video@quicktime video@x-avi video@x-flv video@x-mp4 \
video@x-mpeg video@x-webm video@x-mkv application@x-extension-webm \
video@x-matroska video@x-ms-wmv video@x-msvideo video@x-msvideo@avi \
video@x-theora@ogg video@x-theora@ogv video@x-ms-asf video@x-m4v"

THUMBNAIL_COMMAND="/usr/bin/ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f -t 10"

for i in $VIDEO_EXTENSIONS; do
   gconftool-2 -s "/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/$i/command" -t string "$THUMBNAIL_COMMAND"
   gconftool-2 -s "/desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/$i/enable" -t boolean 'true'
done

Pacman Cleanup

To clear out orphaned packages (useful for purging stuff needed to build but not run AUR packages):

pacman -Rcss $(pacman -Qtdq)

To clear the cache of all packages save the ones that are currently installed on the machine:

pacman -Sc