ArchLinux Notes Revision as of Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 20:30 UTC

[TOC]

Notes from installing the awesome ArchLinux on VirtualBox to use as a development machine at work.

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

# Ctrl+D to quit

# Create swap
mkswap /dev/sda1
swapon /dev/sda1

# Create filesystem
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

# Mount
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

# Boostrap
pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel

# Generate fstab
genfstab -U /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab

# Switch to the new filesystem!
arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Then do everything else the wiki asks you to do

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions

pacman -S virtualbox-guest-utils \
          virtualbox-guest-modules \
          virtualbox-guest-dkms

This is without an LTS kernel since I couldn’t be bothered. After installation, enable the service

systemctl enable vboxservice.service

Edit /etc/modules-load.d/virtualbox.conf to add these

vboxguest 
vboxsf
vboxvideo

Install X11 and Xfce4

pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xfce4 xfce4-goodies

At this point, running startxfce4 should show you a desktop. Reboot.

Starting X

cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc
echo -e "exec startxfce4" >> ~/.xinitrc

Modify ~/.xinitrc to remove all the xterm, xclock and exec lines and add this

exec startxfce4

Now, startx should work!

Install some extras

yaourt -S google-chrome numix-themes numix-circle-icon-theme-git ristretto evince2-light squeeze-git --noconfirm

Add a normal user

Who will be able to sudo and do things and set a password

useradd -m -g wheel user
passwd user

Can always change the name of this user later with usermod. Then use visudo to enable the wheel group. You’ll see a lot of artifacts if you don’t set EDITOR first

EDITOR=vim visudo

Yoghurt

Edit /etc/pacman.conf and add this

[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

Then,

pacman -Sy yaourt

Compiz (Maybe)

For Compiz,

yaourt -S compiz

To run compiz,

compiz --replace ccp

To get the Numix theme,

gsettings set org.gnome.metacity theme theme-name

Add that to “Session and Startup”. I had to kill it, not save the session, and log out. The default window manager is xfwm4.

The Trash Can

sudo pacman -S gvfs gamin

Sound

pacman -S alsa-firmware alsa-utils
alsactl init

Dock

Lots of options, but I like Docky and Plank. Went with Plank.

Dropbox

Install both the dropbox and dropbox-cli packages with yaourt. Some useful commands

# Get to your folder
cd ~/Dropbox

# See the overall sync status
dropbox-cli status

# See file status
dropbox-cli filestatus

# Set a proxy
dropbox-cli proxy manual http jhproxy1.phibred.com 8080

NetworkManager

A bit ‘heavy’ compared to netctl but I was tired of fighting with the corporate network.

pacman -S networkmanager network-manager-applet xfce4-notifyd

Enable the service (else you’ll get D-Bus errors when you run nm-applet)

systemctl enable NetworkManager.service    
systemctl start NetworkManager.service

Reboot and log back in. You’ll find the network manager in Applications -> Settings -> Network Connections

Verbose Boot

Modify GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub

CA Certificates

Copy certificates in PEM format and ending with a .pem extension to /etc/ssl/certs. Then, as root, run update-ca-trust.

Google Chrome didn’t seem to depend on the system store.

Linode Notes

Separating out partitions

I had separate disks for /var and /var/log.

Packages

Network

The pacman update will break networking due a
bug that may have been fixed in
systemd v228 (as of this writing). Oh well. The fix is easy. Create a file
like this
for the interface you see in ip link (will start with “en”)

# /etc/systemd/network/enp0s4.network
[Match]
Name=enp0s4

[Network]
DHCP=yes

Then enable the appropriate service and restart the node

systemctl enable systemd-networkd
reboot

Hostname

hostnamectl set-hostname nikhil.io

SSH

pacman -S openssh

Change default port in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and disable root login. Then
enable the “spawn on demand” ssh.socket service
and change the port to whatever you had earlier

# systemctl edit sshd.socket
[Socket]
ListenStream=12345

Enable the service and reboot to test if you can SSH

systemctl enable sshd.socket
reboot

Time and Date

timedatectl set-timezone America/Chicago

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. Don’t forget to enable the service

systemctl enable iptables.service

Package Management and other stuff

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

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)

Adding Mirrors

reflector will fetch the latest mirrors based on some criteria you provide
it (e.g. I want HTTPS and IPv6 only.) You can do this
online as well.

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.

References