Arch Post-Install
These are my post-installation notes, basically describing the steps I took to set up major elements of my system running arch linux. Also, if I encountered any problems or issues, I note them. All of this is done after installing the distribution. The original installation is very minimal, so these notes describe my progression towards a more robust system.
I originally made these for my own records and had them in text files, but I decided to organize them and post them here for posterity and in case anyone else could use them. Also, some of it is incomplete, as I originally focused only on the points that would be important to me in the future. I will try to expand on these over time. Much of this is pretty terse, and a some linux and bash experience is assumed.
Much of the information is learned and collected from various sources. Where possible, I try to provide links to sources with more information that may be of use.
Again, keep in mind that many of the choices were made to accommodate my own hardware, preferences, and uses for this system, so anyone following these notes may have to adapt them for their own needs.
Feel free to add your own adaptations, notes, additions, or corrections to this page.
--Thomas 00:27, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
Contents |
General Post-Install Preparations
Pacman Prep
- Synchronize and Refresh pacman repositories, just to make sure pacman is working and ready...
# This gave me an error about repositories the first time because no mirrors were commented in /etc/pacman.d/mirrors pacman -Sy
- Update all installed packages...
pacman -Syu
AUR
Prepping AUR support for easily installing user packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR) using yaourt.
- Install all the necessary prerequisites
pacman -Sy base-devel
- Install yaourt to simplify and automate AUR tasks
wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz tar -xvzf yaourt.tar.gz cd yaourt # (double-check the contents of the pkgbuild and yaourt.install files) # make the package makepkg # install it with pacman pacman -U yaourt-whatever
Following this, because yaourt does everything pacman does, uses identical syntax, and adds AUR support, I wanted to just use yaourt as a pacman replacement, so I created a bash alias named pacman that pointed to yaourt (pacman is easier to remember).
Important: For all of the following notes, I say pacman, but I am actually using yaourt. Again, the syntax is the same for both commands, so this should only be an issue for anyone not using yaourt when installing AUR packages (pacman will just say it can't find it).
Packages
These are packages that you're likely going to want anyway, so you might as well install them now. I've tried to keep this to the simple tools, as bigger software packages like xorg will have their own sections, and may not even be wanted for all systems.
pacman -S vim hwd inetutils lsof mc
- vim
- vi improved, text editor
- hwd
- hardware detect, provides information about your hardware
- inetutils
- common basic networking programs, like ping.
- lsof
- list open files
- mc
- Midnight Commander, a command line file browser/manager
Hardware
Video
pacman -Ss xf86-video
Determine which card is in your machine, install hwd (pacman -S hwdetect) or community/lshw:
hwd -s
I have ATI, so I install extra/xf86-video-ati
pacman -S xf86-video-ati
You'll probably also want to pick up DRI config, a helpful configuration tool.
pacman -S driconf
Audio
Setting up Audio with OSS
pacman -S oss
Add your user to the audio group
gpasswd -a user audio
start the audio daemon
/etc/rc.d/oss start
You'll also want to add oss rc.conf to have it started automatically at started.
More to come...
- See also:
Disks and Media
DVD
Using hal and dbus
Make sure you add the user to the optical group.
gpasswd -a user optical
Using autofs
Install autofs for automatically mounting media, then libs for reading, writing, and decoding the media.
pacman -S autofs libdvdread libdvdcss libdvdnav
NTFS Volumes
pacman -Sy ntfs-3g
Add user to the storage group
gpasswd -a tmw storage
More to come...
X-Windows
pacman -S xorg
More to come...
Networking
More to come...
Samba
More to come...
Auto-Mounting Samba Volumes
More to come...
Awesome Window Manager
More to come...
Wine
Even when running a 64 bit OS, use 32 bit Wine for now.
pacman -S bin32-wine cabextract
- Set up wine for best compatibility by putting it in Window 2000 mode and disabling window decorations, and optionally, window manager control.
This can all be done using the winecfg tool that comes with Wine.
VC Runtime Libraries
Many programs require these libraries.
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks sh winetricks vcrun2005 sh winetricks vcrun2005sp1
.NET
For .NET apps, you may need to make a few registry changes
wget http://pub.kxd.cc/ddo/freebsd/fakeNET11.reg regedit fakeNET11.reg
LotRO
If you want to play The Lord of the Rings Online on Linux with Wine...
- Follow all of the preceding steps for setting up wine with winetricks and .Net support.
- With my ATI card, I had to use driconf to force enabling of S3TC Texture Compression.
- Get the files. I just copy these from a known working installation on another PC.
- Install lotrolinux an alternative launcher for the game written in python.
pacman -S python pyqt wget http://www.lotrolinux.com/PyLotRO-0.1.11.tar.bz2 tar -vjxf PyLotRO-0.1.11.tar.bz2 cd PyLotRO-0.1.11 sudo ./setup.py install
