ArchLinux Notes Revision as of Monday, 28 December 2015 at 17:19 UTC

[TOC]

Installation

Downloaded the ISO (2015.12.01) and
set up an “Other 64-bit” VM in VMWware Fusion 8 on OS X El Capitan. Wired
networking was working at bootup. The Arch beginner’s guide was very clear and helpful.

Chose to create a very simple GPT partition scheme using parted.

parted /dev/sda

# Make a GPT partition table
mklabel gpt

# Create a 512GiB EPI System Partition (ESP)
mkpart ESP fat32 1MiB 513MiB

# Make it bootable
set 1 boot on

# Create 2GiB swap
mkpart primary linux-swap 513GiB 2513GiB

# Use the rest for root
mkpart primary ext4 2513GiB 100%

This did not work :( the VM was unable to boot up. Tried BIOS/MBR instead. Created

parted /dev/sda

# Make a GPT partition table
mklabel msdos

# Create 2GiB swap
mkpart primary linux-swap 1MiB 2GiB

# Use the rest for root
mkpart primary ext4 2GiB 100%

# Make root bootable
set 2 boot on

Firewall

Adapted an old
project and things work as expected.

Package Management

Official Repos

pacman is meat and potatoes of package management from ‘official’ sources.
Like CentOS/Red Hat, here’s “base”, “extra”, and “community”. Packages get
here in a highly vetted way. The
wiki is a great handbook.

# Search for stuff
pacman -Ss node

# Install stuff
pacman -S nodejs

# Remove stuff and deps (if not needed by other stuff)
pacman -Rs nodejs

# Clean cache
pacman -Scc

# Upgrade whole system
pacman -Syu

Some basic packages

pacman -S ack bash-completion git htop libxml2 \
          libxslt nginx openssh php-fpm postfix \
          dovecot python rsync supervisor vim wget

Unofficial Repo

For everything else, there’s the Arch User
Repository (AUR) which has nearly 30,000 (!)
packages. The usual caveats of non-official sources apply here. To install
anything, get a PKGBUILD file for the package, then

# Make the package with deps and remove them after successful build
makepkg -sr

# Generates a .tar.xz file. Install with pacman
pacman -U package.tar.xz

# Short form
makepkg -sri package.tar.xz

Important: You can’t run any makepkg commands as root!

And then there’s Yaourt which provides
a unified interface to pacman and the AUR. Install it like any other
package

# Be clean
mkdir tmp && cd tmp

# Install package-query as a dep
curl -o package-query https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/PKGBUILD?h=package-query
makepkg -sri -p package-query

# Install yaourt
curl -o yaourt https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/PKGBUILD?h=yaourt
makepkg -sri -p yaourt

All done!

$ yaourt -Ss pyenv
aur/pyenv 20151222-1 [installed] (3)
    Simple Python version management
aur/pyenv-virtualenv 20151103-1 [installed] (0)
    pyenv plugin to manage virtualenv (a.k.a. python-virtualenv)

Other Notes

/tmp size

This is set to a small, fixed size which is a good thing.
To install stuff, read the docs about some way to set the temporary folder. For
example, pyenv allows you to export $TMPDIR before installation. I use
/var/tmp

TMPDIR=/var/tmp pyenv install 3.5.1

However, this can be a little annoying. systemd is the one that creates this
mount (since I couldn’t find it in /etc/fstab… since I created it
myself with genfstab!) with this

/usr/lib/systemd/system/tmp.mount

One option would be to rename. A better one would be to simply mask it

systemctl mask tmp.mount

Setting /tmp to a fixed size is still good. But it seems to use half the
RAM; with my VPS box, this is untenable. Since I get tons of storage (and
very little memory), I resorted to creating a 5-10GiB partition just
for /tmp.