8.5 KiB
| title | date | draft | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notes from a first ever Arch Linux installation | 2020-06-29T16:12:37+02:00 | false |
|
After four years of using Ubuntu full-time on my laptop, I felt like dropping out of the Canonical feature churn and testing out a more lightweight Linux distribution. I probably spend 90% of my computer time in either a web browser or a terminal session, and I definitely don't need Gnome, snapd, or any of the other Ubuntu bells or whistles to make this a comfortable experience.
So I decided to dive in and give Arch Linux running XFCE a try. So far I'm really liking the minimal approach and the opportunity to get a bit closer to the underlying operating system, although I can confirm that Arch features some of the annoyances of Ubuntu (spoiler: Bluetooth sucks in particular 😕).
Here are some notes.
Installation of Arch
I start by flashing the Arch ISO image onto a USB drive, which then booted into Arch's live setup environment on my new box just fine.
Arch comes without a graphical installer, so a command-line installation is unavoidable. This gist contains the basic instructions to set up an encrypted Arch installation using LVM on an NVME machine.
The original Gist is updated frequently and worth checking too but at the time of writing is missing several essential packages from the pacstrap command, including mkinitcpio, lvm2, dhcpcd (seemingly essential to connect to the internet when booting from the newly-installed OS, see below) and linux (the Linux kernel, doh).
Rebooting and enabling networking
Then I rebooted. Unfortunately it was immediately clear that no internet connection was available, despite it having worked fine in the live installation environment, and ethernet being physically connected.
The problem was that dhcpcd hadn't been installed during the pacstrap phase, and starting the installation from scratch seemed the easiest option. After reinstalling with dhcpcd included, it was necessary to:
sudo systemctl enable dhcpcd
sudo systemctl start dhcpcd
sudo dhcpcd eno1 # check `ip a` for interface name
After this, the ethernet connection immediately became available.
Installing XFCE
XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment for Unix-y machines. Installing is trivial:
sudo pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies xorg
Making XFCE start automatically on boot required two config files (source).
Firstly $HOME/.xinitrc:
#!/bin/bash
exec startxfce4
and at the end of .zshrc (or .bashrc):
if [ $(tty) == "/dev/tty1" ]; then
startx
fi
Note: there's probably a better way to do this using systemd but I haven't figured it out yet.
Getting Bluetooth to work
Firstly
sudo pacman -S bluez bluez-utils
sudo systemctl enable bluetooth.service
sudo systemctl start bluetooth.service
Then run bluetoothctl and use the following approximate sequence of steps:
power on
agent on
scan on
pair <device ID>
Despite the underlying bluez implementation being identical, my first impressions of Bluetooth support on Arch were much better than Ubuntu and everything seemed to work just nicely. But unfortunately after a few days my Bluetooth mouse mysteriously decided to stop being detected as an input device despite seemingly being successfully paired. 😱
For now I'm falling back to a wired mouse and I'll update this blog if I figure out what's going wrong.
Install a web browser
🤷
# and/or firefox-developer-edition
sudo pacman -S firefox
Getting hibernate to work
Getting hibernation to work properly on Linux has been a source of much fun in the past and this time around was no exception.
At first I experienced consistent instantaneous wakeup from hibernation. After checking journalctl this turned out to be caused by a PCI USB extension board that I'd damaged slightly while removing the internal packaging from the computer post-transit. After physically detaching this useless board completely from the machine, the instantaneous wakeup was fixed!
However, the box still failed to resume from hibernation, sticking on a black screen shortly after the disk encryption password phase. This required a bit more tracking down, but further careful examination of journalctl revealed that the open source Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards were spewing some suspicious logs during the hibernate phase. For example:
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: ------------[ cut here ]------------
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: timeout
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 140 at drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nvkm/engine/disp/cursgv100.c:31 gv100_disp_curs_idle.isra.0+0xd7/0xf0 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: Modules linked in: mousedev uhid rfcomm cfg80211 cmac algif_hash intel_rapl_msr algif_skcipher 8021q snd_sof_pci af_alg garp snd_sof_intel_byt mrp snd_sof_intel_ipc intel_rapl_common stp bnep llc snd_sof_intel_hda_common snd_soc_hdac_hda sn>
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: rfkill ecc cec apple_mfi_fastcharge snd_timer rc_core snd mei_me syscopyarea mei sysfillrect soundcore sysimgblt fb_sys_fops intel_pch_thermal ie31200_edac wmi evdev mac_hid drm crypto_user agpgart ip_tables x_tables hid_apple hid_generic >
<snip>
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: Call Trace:
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nvkm_object_init+0x3e/0x100 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nvkm_object_init+0x6f/0x100 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nvkm_object_init+0x6f/0x100 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nvkm_object_init+0x6f/0x100 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nvkm_object_init+0x6f/0x100 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nouveau_do_resume+0x29/0xd0 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: nouveau_pmops_resume+0x60/0x90 [nouveau]
Jun 29 08:16:24 rob-arch kernel: ? pci_legacy_resume+0x80/0x80
As with all software I would much prefer to choose the FOSS option for NVIDIA drivers if possible, but the convenience of working hibernation is too much of a pull so I did quick sudo pacman -S nvidia (see here for more details) and rebooted. This time, the box both hibernated and resumed successfully 🎉
However, be warned that hibernation and Bluetooth also didn't play well together out of the box, and Bluetooth needed restarting manually after most resumptions. I suspect the right approach would be to add systemd hooks to either bluetoothctl power off/on or even unload the bluetooth module during the hibernate/resume cycle. However, I didn't bother to try this yet.
Slow mirrors
It might be random but the Pacman mirrors chosen by my system were very slow (averaging 250k/s download speed for all packages).
As per the Arch Wiki, this can be fixed by installing the pacman-contrib package and then using the contained rankmirrors script:
# change country=ES to something appropriate:
curl -s "https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/?country=ES&protocol=https&use_mirror_status=on" | sed -e 's/^#Server/Server/' -e '/^#/d' | rankmirrors -n 5 -
The output of this command can be used to replace /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist (backing it up first naturally). After doing this, package download speeds average several MB/s.
Pacman
I was slightly intimidated by Pacman after becoming so comfortable with apt-get over the years, but I can confirm that it quickly becomes a friend. Better still, the package support is excellent and PPAs don't exist! For example pacman -S docker-compose works perfectly out of the box, with no need to install or manage PPA keys Ubuntu-style.
Other bits
A handful of other softwares that I've installed so far: