Out of box experience
This page is a simple guide for making things nice after you've got the basic Arch Linux installed
It's recommended that you don't use the root user. Many applications will not work as root, and for good reason. You can add a new user with the following commands:
$ useradd -m <username>
$ passwd <username>
When that's done, you can then install sudo and add this user to the sudoers list:
$ pacman -S sudo
$ nano /etc/sudoers
Find the line below:
# %sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL
Remove the #:
%sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL
And lastly add your new user to the sudo group:
$ groupadd sudo
$ gpasswd -a <username> sudo
Now you can log out of the root user and login as your new super user.
Open the terminal and connect to your wifi using wifi-menu mlan0, after you're connected you can use pacman to install a nice wifi GUI:
$ pacman -S wicd wicd-gtk
$ systemctl enable wicd
$ reboot
Now you will have a tray icon to select and connect to your wifi network. By default, it will have your wireless interface (mlan0) listed as a wired interface. You can change this in the preferences:
Network Interfaces
Wireless interface: mlan0
Wired interface: <blank>
If you experience issues such as huge packet loss, or pages seeming to not load, you may need to disable the power management option for the wireless interface. First of all you will need to have acpid installed and enabled, then do the following:
$ sudo nano /etc/pm/power.d/wireless
Enter the following:
#!/bin/sh
/sbin/iwconfig mlan0 power off
Then make this file executable
$ sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/power.d/wireless
Now, for good measure you can manually trigger this the first time, or just reboot.
$ sudo iwconfig mlan0 power off
The trackpad should work nicely out of the box as we installed the necessary configuration files during the install. There are some settings you may want to change though, such as enabling 2-finger scrolling. You can do this in the following way:
Go to the 'Touchpad' tab and change the settings as you like.
AUR is a great way to get new software that hasn't made it in to the main Arch repositories. There are a bunch of helpful wrappers out there to make using AUR easy. I prefer packer because it uses the same syntax as pacman.
$ sudo pacman -S packer
You can then use packer to search for and install packages from AUR. If you're going to be installing packages from AUR you will need the base-devel and git packages installed too:
$ sudo pacman -S base-devel git
I created a theme for lightdm-webkit that looks very Google-esque. You can read more about it here
Here's how you can install it:
$ packer -S lightdm-webkit-theme-google
This will install my theme and the lightdm-webkit greeter. Next you need to enable it:
$ sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
Under [SeatDefaults] add a new line:
greeter-session=lightdm-webkit-greeter
user-session=mate
That tells lightdm to use the lightdm-webkit-greeter to present a login screen, and to start mate after we log in. Now we need to tell lightdm-webkit-greeter to use my Google-esque theme:
$ sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm-webkit-greeter.conf
Change theme-name to the new theme:
webkit-theme=lightdm-webkit-google
Then we're done. You can now reboot and see your new login screen. If you want to set a user picture, you need to make a jpg called .face in your home directory, lightdm will pick it up automatically.
To see how much battery you have left, you will need to install a GUI for this. I recommend batti:
$ packer -S batti
After it's installed, just launch batti from the application menu.
To make batti start when you login, go to:
Add a new startup program, you'll just need to put batti for the command. Reboot and then batti should launch automatically when you log in.