Arch Linux

Disk partition

UEFI is replacing BIOS since 2010. If one has a UEFI enabled machine, a small partition needs to be created in the hard disk to save a boot loader image in it. The recommended size is about 512 M for duel boot machines. Most likely, there is already such a partition in the disk if there is Windows in the machine pre-installed.

SWAP is still needed. Search on Google to determine the size of it. For a machine that has a 16 G of memory, the SWAP partition size would be 20 G to ensure a stable hibernation.

One can hence use fdisk to create three partitions for a machine that has only Linux in it:

• primary partition 1 in efi format with a size of 512 M
• primary partition 2 in swap format with a size of 20 G
• primary partition 3 in linux format that uses all the rest of the disk

Wireless

According to the Arch Linux Wiki page on wireless configurations,

$ lspci -k # check driver
$ ip link # list available network interfaces
$ ip link set wlp2s0 up # activate wireless interface named wlp2s0
$ ip link show wlp2s0 # show status of the interface named wlp2s0
$ iw dev wlp2s0 scan # show networks detected by wlp2s0

These commands replace old ones, such as ifconfig, etc. iw needs to be installed.

Authentication has to be done using wpa_supplicant.

Another way is to install networkmanager and gnome and run the following command:

$ systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

to let a service run on the background all the time so that a user can use some GUI to setup the network. This is noticeably easy. If one has a not-too-old machine, this should be a preferred method.

Printing

According to the Arch Linux Wiki, the first step is to install CUPS:

$ pacman -S cups cups-pdf

The second is to enable the server:

$ systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd.service

The third is to install the driver for the printer. Common ones are listed here.

The forth is to add a printer using the CUPS web UI: http://localhost:631. According to this post, to install a network printer, one should select ipp (internet protocol) and use the following url:

socket://192.168.1.xxx

Note that you should ping the IP address before the action above to make sure that you can connect to the printer.

Sound

ALSA is included in the kernel. The user just needs to install alsa-utils.

# list playback devices
$ aplay -l
# list recording devices
$ arecord -l

alsamixer provides a GUI using ncurses. amixer is a pure command-line tool and can be used together with xbindkeys to enable multimedia keys on a keyboard.

debug microphone

$ arecord --duration=5 --format=dat test-mic.wav
$ aplay test-mic.wav

# or show sound level in terminal. User it together with alsamixer to tune boost
$ arecord -vv --format=dat /dev/null

Input method

$ pacman -S ibus
$ ibus-setup
$ ibus-daemon --xim -d

AUR

makepkg

Create ~/.makepkg.conf with the following contents:

PKGEXT=.kpg.tar

to disable compression of the package files after build.