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POST INSTALLATION

In post installation we will be using a lot of sudo. I'm not responsible if you broke your newly installed system.

Connect to the internet

We will be downloading stuff so we need an internet connection! So set-up your connection first!

Check for Updates

It's recommended to check for updates first before installing anything so:

pacman -Syu

Display Server and Protocol

We need to install a display server, a protocol or both. Normally, your desktop environment or window manager of choice will automatically install these as a dependency. But for this guide's sake we will install X server:

pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xrdb xorg-xinit xorg-xrandr xorg-xev xorg-xdpyinfo xorg-xprop

If you're planning to use a window manager like awesome, bspwm or i3, you should install X. While if you're planning to use sway, then wayland it is. If GNOME, you can install both. Again, your environment of choice will automatically install these as its dependencies.

Video Drivers

After installing the graphical server, we need to install the video drivers. I'm only using an integrated AMD graphics card.

For AMD graphics. Read the arch wiki on ATI before procedding any futher.

pacman -S xf86-video-ati vulkan-icd-loader libvdpau-va-gl

For Intel Graphics. Read the arch wiki on Intel

pacman -S xf86-video-intel vulkan-intel vulkan-icd-loader libva-intel-driver

Add your (kernel) graphics driver to your initramfs. For example, if using ati add radeon:

vim /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

Then add radeon to the MODULES:

MODULES=(radeon ...)

Generate the mkinitcpio file:

mkinitcpio -p linux-lts

Audio Drivers

pacman -S alsa-utils pulseaudio-alsa pulseaudio-bluetooth pulseaudio pavucontrol

File System Tools

File system tools

pacman -S unrar unzip p7zip unarchiver gvfs-mtp libmtp ntfs-3g \
android-udev mtpfs xdg-user-dirs

xdg-user-dirs is a tool to help manage "well known" user directories like the desktop folder and the music folder. This will be automatically run on your next log in. Though you can manually generate XDG user directories by:

xdg-user-dirs-update

Git

If you didn't include git on pacstrap earlier, it's time to install it now. This tool will come in handy later:

pacman -S git

AUR Helper

The "later" is now, old man. We will now install an AUR helper, yay.

Clone yay-bin from the AUR using git.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git
cd yay-bin/
makepkg -sri

Missing Kernel Modules

If you noticed, there's a warning message while running mkinitcpio -p linux, fix this by installing these firmwares:

yay -S wd719x-firmware aic94xx-firmware --removemake --noconfirm
mkinitcpio -p linux-lts

Desktop Environment and Window Manager

Install your preferred desktop environment or window manager.

I'm an alacritty and bspwm guy.In this guide, I'll include a guide to set-up both alacritty and bspwm.

  • Alacritty

    • I always prefer to setup alacritty together with alacritty-themes. This enables me to change up alacritty's themes from time to time
yay -S alacritty alacritty-themes

  • Binary Space Partitioning Window Manager(bspwm)

    • I install bspwm together with sxhkd that serves as the X hot key daemon.

      sudo pacman -S bspwm sxhkd

    • Picom as the compositor:

      sudo pacman -S picom

    • Rofi as the application launcher:

      sudo pacman -S rofi

Terminal Emulator

After installing an environment, we need a terminal emulator. Every linux user's first partner. Note that we're still on the TTY.

  • Install your preferred terminal emulator.

    I'm an alacritty guy. In this guide, I'll include a guide to set-up alacritty

  • Alacritty

    • I always prefer to setup alacritty together with alacritty-themes. This enables me to change up alacritty's themes from time to time:

      yay -S alacritty alacritty-themes

GTK

GTK, or the GIMP Toolkit, is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

If not yet installed:

pacman -S gtk3

Install GTK engines

pacman -S gtk-engine-murrine gtk-engines gnome-theme-extra

File Managers

KDE's dolphin is the best file manager in the Linux world, imho. So I always use this no matter what environment I'm using. We will also install nnn, a CLI-based file manager.

  • ensure you read the nnn wiki.
pacman -S dolphin dolphin-plugins kde-cli-tools ranger

To generate thumbnails, I'll also install these:

  • kdegraphics-thumbnailers: Image files and PDFs
  • kimageformats: Gimp .xcf files
  • qt5-imageformats : .webp, .tiff, .tga, .jp2 files
  • kdesdk-thumbnailers: Plugins for the thumbnailing system
  • ffmpegthumbs: Video files (based on ffmpeg)
  • raw-thumbnailer: .raw files
  • taglib : Audio files
pacman -S kdegraphics-thumbnailers kimageformats qt5-imageformats kdesdk-thumbnailers \
ffmpegthumbs raw-thumbnailer taglib

Enable preview showing of required file type in Settings > Configure Dolphin... > General > Previews.

There's a lot more thumbnail generators that can be found from the AUR (like a generator to create a thumbnail for APK files), but I don't really use them.

CLI-based Text Editor

'Nvchad' is my prefered choice for an IDE. Read the NVchad documentation before installation.

Ensure you have installed neovim before you can install Nvchad.

sudo pacman -S neovim

GUI-based Text Editors

vim is my text editor of choice, but sublime Text 3 is my go-to GUI text editor as it's lighter than the bloated chromium-based counterparts like atom and vscode.

yay -S sublime-text-dev

Note that Sublime is not "free" and needs a license.

Web browsers

Brave-browser is my trusted web browser.

yay -S brave-bin

Reboot then Login

The system's fully functional! You can now login to you system with all the configuration we've done so far.

reboot

Extras

Power Management for Laptops

TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux without the need to understand every technical detail. This is for laptops.

Install and enable it now:

pacman -S tlp
systemctl enable --now tlp.service

Install upower, acpid and acpi_call:

pacman -S acpid acpi_call upower

Enable acpid

systemctl enable acpid.service

Firewall

We'll use Uncomplicated Firewall or ufw for short.

  1. Install the ufw package. Start and enable ufw.service to make it available at boot. Note that this will not work if iptables.service is also enabled (and same for its ipv6 counterpart).

    pacman -S ufw

  2. Configuration

    Here's some basic configuration. A very simplistic configuration which will deny all by default, allow any protocol from inside a 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.255 LAN, and allow incoming Deluge and rate limited SSH traffic from anywhere:

    ufw default deny
ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/24
ufw allow Transmission
ufw limit ssh

  3. The next line is only needed once the first time you install the package:

    ufw enable
systemctl enable --now ufw.service

Adding other applications. The PKG comes with some defaults based on the default ports of many common daemons and programs. Inspect the options by looking in the /etc/ufw/applications.d directory or by listing them in the program itself:

ufw app list

Fonts

Improve fonts.

Install these fonts. Inter will be my system font no matter what the environment.

sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu ttf-liberation noto-fonts noto-fonts-emoji inter-font ttf-roboto

Additional fonts to support Asian characters

sudo pacman -S noto-fonts-cjk noto-fonts-extra

Enable font presets by creating symbolic links:

ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d
ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d
ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d

The above will disable embedded bitmap for all fonts, enable sub-pixel RGB rendering, and enable the LCD filter which is designed to reduce colour fringing when subpixel rendering is used.

For font consistency, all applications should be set to use the serif, sans-serif, and monospace aliases, which are mapped to particular fonts by fontconfig.

Create /etc/fonts/local.conf, then add:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
	<match>
		<edit mode="prepend" name="family">
			<string>Inter</string>
		</edit>
	</match>
	<match target="pattern">
		<test qual="any" name="family">
			<string>serif</string>
		</test>
		<edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same">
			<string>Noto Serif</string>
                </edit>
	</match>
	<match target="pattern">
		<test qual="any" name="family">
			<string>sans-serif</string>
		</test>
		<edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same">
			<string>Noto Sans</string>
		</edit>
	</match>
	<match target="pattern">
		<test qual="any" name="family">
			<string>monospace</string>
		</test>
		<edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same">
			<string>Noto Mono</string>
		</edit>
	</match>
</fontconfig>

Update and set your font of choice on settings.

Artcile 1 [Installation]

Article 3 [Extras]

Article 4 [Web Development Setup]