My Arch Linux Journey

Motivation

I have dinked around with computers for a long time. My preferred daily driver is a Mac (I've used Macs since 1991), and I've used Windows at work a lot throughout the years, but I've always had a latent interest in Linux. I've installed Ubuntu on several occasions in the past to play around with something, but I typically ended up back on my Mac because Linux didn't offer me any practical advantages.

I've recently noticed a surge in Linux discussion in the corners of the internet I tend to observe, and saw a lot of it was about Arch Linux. Arch is not new, but my impression was that it was primarily for folks that want to kit-bash their own system, so I assumed it was beyond my capabilities. However, my interest was piqued, so I started poking around and almost immediately stumbled upon Omarchy. Neat. This seemed to fit right into this whole renaissance of “old” technology I've also noticed has been gaining momentum (for example, VFC Midwest).

As a quick aside, I used to spend a lot more time doing hobbyist-type projects on computers, but because I work in technology, I slowly began to drift away from computing for fun. I estimate I'd entirely dismissed computers as a hobby for at least the last five years. Some of it was due to work fatigue, and some was the stark realization that the tech world was moving faster than I could ever keep up. Why bother? Poor attitude, I know, but I think this “hiatus” put me in a good position to realize a couple of things:

I don't need to be a 10x developer to find value in even the smallest of computing projects.
There's still a lot of cool stuff that can be done with old computers.

I have to thank a friend of mine with an extensive vintage computer collection for inspiration—this man attends a Tandy-specific computing con every year, if that tells you anything.

Anyway, after I got over the googly-eyed wonder of Omarchy, I realized I didn't want another plug-and-play solution that I'd spend an afternoon setting up and never use again. I wanted to really learn. That's when I decided to go with Arch.

Below is a summary of the steps I took to get it installed on my particular system. There was a lot of trial and error, but the process was surprisingly smooth. I'm still chipping away at it, so while I have a functional system, I'm still figuring out a good workflow and getting various tools installed to improve the UX.

Setup

I started with the Arch Installation Guide, which is generally the best resource to get through the installation.

Downloaded the Arch ISO.
Created a bootable USB flash drive with Rufus on Windows.
Since my UEFI/BIOS wasn't cooperating with an on-the-fly boot disk selection, I set boot priority in the BIOS to the flash drive first.
Pinged google.com to make sure the network was working (amazingly, it was).
Partitioned the dedicated drive, using fdisk /dev/the_disk_to_be_partitioned following the recommended scheme (see Table 1).
Formatted
```
/
```
and
```
/boot
```
with mkfs.ext4 /dev/partition_name.
Formatted swap with mkswap /dev/swap_partition.
Mounted the volumes, e.g. mount /dev/root_partition /mnt.
Enabled swap, e.g. swapon /dev/swap_partition.

Mount Point	Partition	Partition Type	Suggested Size
/boot	/dev/efi_system_partition	EFI system partition	1 GiB
[SWAP]	/dev/swap_partition	Linux swap	At least 4 GiB
/	/dev/root_partition	Linux x86-64 root (/)	Remainder of the device. At least 23–32 GiB.

My drive was called “sda”, so I used:

```
/dev/sda1
```
as
```
/boot
```
(2 GB)
```
/dev/sda2
```
as
```
swap
```
(8GB)
```
/dev/sda3
```
as
```
/
```
(Remaining Space)

Installation

Installed base software with pacstrap: pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware nano amd-ucode fsck man-db man-info

I ended up trying to install several other packages that were either not available or for which I had the wrong name. For example Network Manager is “networkmanager”, but I didn’t know that (I ended up installing it later).
pacstrap can be invoked any time you're booted off the live install system to install additional hardware to your root volume.

I went through the config steps, but I think I forgot to generate the
```
fstab
```
or I did something wrong. I'll mention this later.
Installed GRUB as a boot loader: grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=esp --bootloader-id=GRUB. I read it doesn't play nicely with Windows (and in fact, it doesn’t recognize my Windows disk for some reason yet), but I’ve used it before so decided to use it again.

Launch

At this point, I rebooted, but because I didn't set up GRUB to use secure boot, I had to disable it in the UEFI/BIOS. The good news is that Arch booted successfully. There were two bits of bad news:

The boot seemed unusually slow.
I couldn’t connect to the internet.

First to tackle the internet issue because I wouldn't be able to install anything with pacman otherwise (aside from using pacstrap). Fortunately, I found this: https://linuxvox.com/blog/arch-linux-network-ip/. I booted off USB, installed networkmanager with pacstrap, and then the network config was trivial:
- sudo systemctl start NetworkManager
- sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager†
Next, I installed zsh, and found this nice little guide to set the default shell and install PowerLevel10k: https://davidtsadler.com/posts/arch/2020-09-07/installing-zsh-and-powerlevel10k-on-arch-linux/.
I was also interested in dwm from suckless.org after watching a lot of Bread on Penguins, and followed another guide from the same author to get it, dmenu, and st installed: https://davidtsadler.com/posts/arch/2020-08-17/installing-st-dmenu-dwm-in-arch-linux/.
Next, I tackled the slow boot issue. Arch is configured to quiet boot by default so I had no idea what might be happening. Fortunately, I found this useful thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=308506. My problem was exactly the same as the OP's, so fixing the swap partition's UUID in the
```
fstab
```
was the key. This is why I'm not sure whether I configured this properly during installation.

Tailoring

I installed qutebrowser, again following the lead of Bread on Penguins.
Set up dual monitors using xrandr: xrandr --output DP-1 --primary --auto --output DP-3 --auto --right-of DP-1.
Decided to install LibreWolf for general browsing. It's a little easier for me to navigate for now instead of qutebrowser.
Installed pass as a command line password manager, which required me to generate GPG keys. I'm not sure whether I'll stick with this long term, but it'll at least allow me to easily keep a few passwords handy for now and copy them to the clipboard for use.
Patched dwm successfully with the functionalgaps patch to improve the aesthetics of the tiled windows. This was my first time applying a .diff file, and is as simple as downloading the
```
.diff
```
file and running patch < path/to/patch-file.diff in the dwm folder. After that, a sudo make clean install failed because I discovered suckless patches wisely update the
```
config.def.h
```
file instead of the user-edited
```
config.h
```
file, so my config didn't contain some necessary definitions from the patch. Fortunately, I haven't don't any customization, so I was able to copy the default on top of my config and then built successfully.
I had installed feh a while ago but hadn't tried using it to set the background (though I did snag a few background images at some point). It turns out, it's pretty trivial: feh --bg-fill /path/to/image and it set the background on both monitors. It's possible to set the monitors independently, but I like the same image on both monitors. The next challenge was to get the background to persist, which required me to create a
```
.fehbg
```
file in my home directory with essentially that same command and include a line in my
```
.xinitrc
```
to call it when starting up Xorg. It didn't work initially, but I eventually figured out that I needed to have the call to run my window manager last in the
```
.xinitrc
```
file for it to work properly.
With the background set, I wanted to play with pywall to set some system colors. This also works pretty easily, though to get this working system-wide is going to take more work. A simple wal -i /path/to/image will at least set the terminal colors to a palette that matches the background. I tried some simple scripting to get the background set with a selection menu and then set the colors with
```
wal
```
, but I'm only partially successful. I'll have to get back to it later. UPDATE: I realized that pywal will use feh if it's installed, so I don't need to use feh separately&emdash;just make the call to
```
wal
```
and feed it the file, and it sets the background and terminal colors. I just need to figure out the best way to make it persist.
At some point along the way, I didn't fully set my locale so I would see errors stating my locale was not supported after running some commands. Checking locale showed I was missing some things like
```
LC_TYPE
```
and
```
LC_ALL
```
. I dug around and found the
```
/etc/locale.gen
```
file (after reading through some forums), edited it to uncomment the line for en_US.UTF-8, and then ran locale-gen to regenerate my locales. All is good now...just not entirely clear why this was necessary in the first place.
I just realized today that at some point I had installed yay. I'll have to make a note about that, because it's compiled from source.

More to come...

†Note: to be fair, I did try editing some network config files prior to this following some instructions on a site I didn't keep notes on so I can't reference it here. It's possible something I did there helped, but nothing worked until I got NetworkManager installed and enabled.