Jason's Arch Linux experience

[Jason]

Okay, so did the Arch install on my Toshiba Ultrabook (from my demo notes) but this time dual-boot with Windows 10 Pro. I just left half of the 128 GB SSD free to use for Arch and installed everything in that partition.

Unfortunately, the grub boot menu generator didn't see Window 10 so it's not on the boot menu. Not a big deal as I'm not really using it right now, anyway but something I will work on later.

My goal here is to see if I can duplicate my existing desktop install of Ubuntu MATE 17.04 with the same programs I use there. So I started off with installing mate, mate-extra, mate-session-manager and marco and lightdm as the login manager and lightdm-gtk-greeter as the greeter. It's very basic, but it worked, after I installed xorg-server and xf86-video-intel for better video. Weird that installing mate desktop didn't bring in xorg as a dependency but maybe that's because wayland is available as an alternative?

Mate was super ugly with a non-scalable font until I installed ttf-dejavu which helped immensely. Ubuntu MATE uses MATE Tweak Tool to let you have different themes. I like the cupertino one, but it wasn't available. So I left the default and installed Plank and configured it to start at boot.

Installed and configured sudo so I wouldn't have to keep logging into root.

I had also installed Network Manager and up to this point had been using the wired connection which was configured automatically though I think I might have set it to start automatically at boot using systemctl. Wireless didn't work until I installed wpa-supplicant and configured the wireless network manually in settings. I couldn't just click on it and it ask for the password.

Installed my favorite browser, Google Chrome because I like it and because Chromium browser doesn't support widevine (for Netflix) and flash out of the box. I had to enable the AUR repository and built it and install it from there. Took a little while but it works perfectly.

Did complete system update and everything still seems to work.

I was wrong in my initial post - sound does work. Like Brian mentioned in his Beyond Arch, volume was set to zero and I just had to turn it up. Doh!

[fox]

The reason it might not be picking up Windows is that you are missing os-prober, which you can install from AUR. Alternatively, the grub archwiki shows you how to generate a Windows entry in grub.

Another alternative - if you still have Ubuntu Mate on your laptop and you can boot into it, if you update its grub it will pick up Arch, but incorrectly. But you can then edit the grub and fix it the way I did on my Acer (see this posting). Yet another alternative - install refind and it will properly pick up all of your OSes.

[Jason]

Thanks, Mike. I had installed os-probe on a previous install of Arch and it didn't seem to work. But this time it did.

[Jason]

Haven't been able to use my main computer, my desktop for days because of an overheating issue. So I've been using Arch on my ultrabook since then.

So far working out great including updates. My only issue so far has been getting it to recognize my tablet or phone when I plug it in as a USB storage device. This is only important because I've been learning to develop in Android and I like to test my apps on hardware as well as the emulator. For now, I just reboot into Windows 10 and develop there.

Admittedly, I'm not using a lot of programs right now, mainly just Chrome and Android Studio. I still want to get spotify, skype and inSync setup on it if that's possible.

[fox]

OK, I ran into something similar, trying to get the picture folder on my iPhone recognized. I needed to install ifuse and some gvfs files to make this work. Try googling your specific problem. Arch is pretty stingy in what it installs unless you ask it for something. Insync definitely works on Arch, and as I recall, it's in the AUR repository. I'm pretty sure that the same is true of Skype. I don't use Spotify, but I suspect it's there as well.

[Jason]

I remember I tried gvfs but not ifuse. I'll take another look later.