Here are the details to install a window manager. There are many choices available under-the-hood, among them:
With the unusable Unity and Gnome switching to Gnome 3, more and more people are moving to such light environments. This page supposes that you already installed an ArchLinux environment (went to the end of the ISO install). You might have installed this iso in a new machine or a VirtualBox, this page covers both cases as desktop install is very close for both environments.
When installing a system the following packages are recommended:
A tip here, you can change virtual desktop with Alt+Fn, there are 6 virtual terminals available :). Don’t forget to update your list of packages first!
pacman -Suy
This guide is divided into several parts.
A user $USERNAME has to be added to some specific groups, UID being important to maintain compatibility for user-level permissions in the case where files are transfered across machines.
useradd -m -g users -G audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,games,power,scanner \
-u $UID -s /bin/bash $USERNAME
Add later on a user to a given group:
gpasswd -a $USERNAME $GROUPNAME
Then modify its password with this command.
passwd $USERNAME
Install those packages.
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit
Here is a package installing xsetroot, able to set a monocolor font as desktop background.
pacman -S xorg-xsetroot
Adjust screen size with something like this command.
xrandr --output Virtual1 --mode 1360x768
–output can be determined by looking at the output of xrandr and –mode will be something listed there.
To make such settings persistent, it is necessary to create a configuration file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/, like 10-monitor.conf:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Monitor "Virtual1"
SubSection "Display"
Modes "1360x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection
This is suitable for a screen in a virtual machine (Identifier=Virtual1) for a screen size of 1360x768.
This part differs if you use a VirtualBox or an environment with nvidia drivers.
Install the following packages.
pacman -S nvidia
Run this command to configure your card.
nvidia-xconfig
Install that:
pacman -S xf86-video-intel libva-intel-driver
libva-intel-driver is useful for acceleration on newer GPU.
Install the following packages.
pacman -S virtualbox-guest-modules virtualbox-guest-utils \
kernel26-headers
You also need to set the kernel so as the vbox modules are launched automatically at each boot. It is necessary to create a configuration file /etc/modules-load.d/vbox.conf.
vboxguest
vboxsf
vboxvideo
You can however launch them like this, but this has to be done at each boot.
modprobe -a vboxguest vboxsf vboxvideo
Xorg needs a monitor that will work as an extra layer with the window manager. Slim is light, and may be a good choice (at least it has never failed the other of this site).
pacman -S slim
Then activate slim to become your active display manager.
systemctl enable slim.service
This makes your session to balance to slim instead of moving to a terminal at boot.
This heavily depends on the system you want, here are some examples. For XFCE4, here are the packages.
pacman -S [ xfce4 xfce4-goodies | i3 | awesome ]
Packages for i3, or even awesome are available. After installation what is needed is ~/.xinitrc with something like that (depends on the window manager installed though).
exec ck-launch-session startxfce4
exec i3
exec awesome
In a virtual environment, you might find the error:
Fatal server error, no screens found
This error usually happens because xorg is not able to find the correct video driver.
Launch this command.
pacman -S xf86-video-vesa
Then add vboxdrv in /etc/modules-load.d/ to allow the drivers to be booted at startup.
Install that:
pacman -S xf86-input-vmmouse xf86-video-vmware svga-dri
Then add vmwgfx in /etc/modules-load.d/ to allow the drivers to be booted at startup. And you are done!
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