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Installing ArchLinux on laptop

Having had Ubuntu installed briefly on my laptop, I thought it was a bit bloated and wanted something a bit more lean (OK, a LOT more lean) on the machine.

Enter ArchLinux. Having read good things about it, I decided to give it a go. It is a lot more bare bones than many of the other distributions, which aim to be one-click installers. With arch linux, you configure everything, from network to keyboard input drivers, video drivers etc.

It is more time consuming, but it is an excellent way to learn about the building blocks of the operating system. The documentation guiding the beginner through installation and configuration is excellent and very detailed.

First I had to remove the existing Ubuntu installation and prepare for arch. I removed the existing GRUB boot by using the MBRFIX utility to restore the Master Boot Record of the harddrive, so that the machine again booted directly into XP.

I then booted with a Ubuntu Live CD and use the GParted partition utility to delete, create and resize partitions necessary for the installation.

Windows already had two partitions on the disk, and I needed another three, so extended partitions were needed (as a disk can only have four primary partitions).

The partition map then looked like this:

/dev/sda1 -> NTFS (windows drive C:)
/dev/sda2 -> NTFS (windows drive D:)
/dev/sda4 -> ext3 (root)
/dev/sda5 -> ext4 (home)
/dev/sda6 -> swap (linux swap)

The actual installation of archlinux is straightforward, and then there is the matter of configuration. The installer walks you through it step by step, and indicates which configuration files need to be edited, and what the various entries could and should be set to.

According to my naming standard, caffeinux was chosen as the host name of the machine.

The network installation was straightforward with regards to wired networking, but wireless was causing me some problems. A quick bit of googling revelead that I was missing the microcode for the wireless card, and once this was corrected (by choosing the correct package from the core installation disk), the wireless network also was working correctly.

Archlinux uses a package management system (pacman) which makes installing and uninstalling applications a breeze. I decided to try KDE, but found it too bloated as well, so for the moment I am trying a tiled window manager (so far I have looked at ratpoison and dwm). Awesome is also an option. Ratpoison had trouble with dialogs in java apps, showing them as full screen windows, but dwm seems to handle this better. awesome seems to have more features, but is configured with Lua scripts, and I am not sure I want to learn another scripting language just to configure a window manager.

So now I have started installing applications, and have java (openjdk), git, eclipse, ruby, rubymine end emacs installed.

I will try awesome to see what it is like, and the final outcome of the quest to find a decent window manager will result in another post on the blog.