This project is undergoing major changes, will be back up in about 3-4 weeks

Changes

• improved spelling, fixing grammatical errors.
• Much better structure and headings to make it easier to use and navigate.
• There will be a copy here but also github docs page once complete.

Navigate through this page/guide using the table of contents on the right.

Installation

Dual booting

powercfg /h off - Run this command (in windows) to disable hibernation completely. This gets rid of hybrid boot, which can cause your hard drive to be read-only.

Configuration

Network Manager

If you are using an ethernet connection, you should just be connected to the internet. If not refer to the arch wiki.

For connecting to a wifi networking using Network Manager.

sudo nmcli radio wifi on #turns wifi on.
sudo nmcli dev wifi list #list networks.
sudo nmcli dev wifi connect <network-ssid> --ask

You can check if your internet connection works by using ping - ping gnu.org and viewing active connections by using nmcli con show.

AUR helper

Paru is my AUR helper of choice, written in rust and constantly updated. Check out the paru repository on github.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

I would also change some options so it is actually usuable.

• sudo vim /etc/pacman.conf - Uncommenting Color and ParallelDownloads = 5 and changing it to ParallelDownloads = 15.
• sudo vim /etc/paru.conf - Uncommenting BottomUp.

Auto-mounting drives on boot

First lets open the terminal and type lsblk -f. This will list all the disks & partitions connected along with their UUID. Select your disk of choice and copy the UUID from the terminal by using LCtrl + LShift + c. Also make note of the partition and open sudo vim /etc/fstab.

... # <-- These are already present drives. If the file is empty, you have not installed arch properly!
# /dev/sdb1 -> replace sdb1 with your partition name
UUID=<paste your UUID here>     /mnt/hdd ntfs defaults 0 2
#    ^ paste using Ctrl+Shift+v  ^this must be an empty directory
# replace ntfs with your drive's format. and leave the rest the same

Check whether your fstab file is valid by using sudo mount --fake -a and then sudo mount -a if there are no errors.

Bluetooth

Advanced

• If you want to change your kernel refer to this [guide

Theming

• Use the lxappearance package to manage gtk themes. You might want to install arc-gtk-theme.
• Use the qt5ct package to manage qt themes.You need to add QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct to /etc/environment and re-login/reboot. You might want to install breeze.

Changing keyboard layout and mouse acceleration

You'll need to create this section to the given file. Replace gb with your layout.

sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "system-keyboard"
        Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
        Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
EndSection

Mouse acceleration can be disabled by the following config.

sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mouse-acceleration.conf

Section "InputClass"
	Identifier "My Mouse"
	Driver "libinput"
	MatchIsPointer "yes"
	Option "AccelProfile" "flat"
	Option "AccelSpeed" "0"
EndSection

Services

A service is a program that runs in the background

Some commands

• sudo systemctl start <service_name>: to start a service
• sudo systemctl enable --now <service_name>: starts the service but also makes sure it is running when you turn your computer on / log in. If you don't need the service to run/start right now, you can omit the --now flag.
• sudo systemctl stop <service_name>: to stop a running service.
• sudo systemctl disable <service_name>: Stop a service from running on startup.

Some commands that are useful for debegging:

• sudo systemctl | grep running : see all the services that are running.
• sudo systemctl list-unit-files | grep enabled: see the enabled services

Applications

Using a WM

Some application such as JetBrains IDE's don't work properly on window managers. To fix this run this command, or add it to your autostart file.

export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1
export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit
wmname LG3D

Running windows applications

Microsoft and Adobe apps

I use winapps to run Microsoft Office, Visual studio and Adobe creative cloud apps. For this refer to the winapps repository.

Running Standalone 'exe' files

For running any small applications, I use bottles which is available in flathub here.

Terminal and bash scripting

Commands

• ls: lists subdirectories or files in your current directory
• pwd: gives your current directory
• cat <file>: Outputs the contents of the file onto the terminal. Used to look at the contents of a file without opening it.
• cd <target_directory>: Changes your current directory to the the specified target directory. The target directory must be in your current working folder/directory. You can check this by typing the ls command.
• grep "<string>" <file> : This is the most basic usage of grep, for more flags/options, see here and here. Some usage flags include: -i : ignore case, -H : with file name (prints file name where each match is found), -L stops at first match.
• touch <file>: can be used to create a file in the current working directory, or in the directory provided like this -> touch <path_to_file>.
• sed : Extremely powerful tool, Sed, the ultimate stream editor. We can substitute words(like find and replace tool) using regex and so much more. Some examples would be:

sed -i 's/old/new/g' file

This would replace "old" with "new" for all occurrence's in file. For information on sed can be found here.

• <command1>|<command2>: The pipe command transfers the output of a given command (Here output of command1 is transferred to command2). For example if I wanted to transfer
• > and >>: The '>' operator overwrites the existing file, or creates the file if file mentioned cannot be found. The '>>' operator appends to the existing file, or creates the file if file does not exist. See script below. Usage of the operators would be :{command_with_output} > file . Here is an example of a simple shell script.

#!/usr/bin/bash
# This is script I wrote that will append the given data to the file logger.md
echo -n "Enter line to be appended: "
read userinput
echo "$userinput" >> ~/Documents/logger.md

Bash scripting

Basic shell script examples.

The first script takes your height and appends to a height tracking markdown file. The first line #!/bin/bash indicates that it is a bash script.

#!/bin/bash
# takes input
echo -n "Enter height: "
read height
currentDate=`date +"%d/%m/%Y"`
# The output must be in table format in markdown
echo "| $currentDate | $height |" >> ~/Documents/heightLogger.md

Or we could have it take one argument

#!/bin/bash
currentDate=`date +"%d/%m/%Y"`
# The output must be in table format in markdown
echo "| $currentDate | $1 |" >> ~/Documents/heightLogger.md

Now we can add some additional checks to it

#!/bin/bash

if [ -z $1 ]; then
	echo "First argument required (your height)"
else
	currentDate=`date +"%d/%m/%Y"`
	# The output must be in table format in markdown
	echo "| $currentDate | $1 |" >> ~/Documents/heightLogger.md
fi

Now we can set an alias or make our file and executable to use it.

TODO