All in one Arch Linux installation BIOS with Xmonad

This video will give you an overview of all the necessary steps to take. You willl have a working system with Xmonad desktop.

We follow the guide of this page.

We have the standard lightdm, lightdm-gtk-greeter and lightdm-gtk-greeter-setttings installed but we still do not have a desktop.

Basically we can not login as lightdm can not start anything.

With right CTRL and F2 or F3 etc you can go to a TTY and run your commands.

(CTRL + ALT + F2 on ssd) 

Installing Xmonad is more complex than installing Xfce for example.
We learn from the Arch Wiki that we need to install these packages.

sudo pacman -S xmonad xmonad-contrib

We will also install these packages

sudo pacman -S xmonad-utils xmobar

We will later install xmonad-log from AUR.

Since Xmonad does not provide a config to work with we decide quite rapidly to get all the needed packages from the ArcoLinuxD github.

sudo pacman -S git
git clone https://github.com/arcolinuxd/arco-xmonad

In the video we will go over all the scripts and select them one by one and discuss them.

We can run script 400 since it uses the Arch repositories and all we need is pacman.

We show you what you need to do if you want to “spice up” your Arch Linux with ArcoLinux packages or “spices”. Check the folder Arch Way for that.

Importing the keys can take a while.

We are adding the ArcoLinux repos to /etc/pacman.conf.

We add a new repo to /etc/pacman.conf to be able to install trizen and yay called arcolinux_repo_ISO.

Then we install our AUR helpers

sudo pacman -S yay trizen

Now we can run script nr 500 with uses yay and trizen to install packages from AUR.

nomad-log is now installed.

Running script 600 will import the the configuration of Xmonad. That is the most important. But we will need the others too.

We resolve the conflict between lightdm and arcolinux-lightdm by removing the standard Arch Linux package.

sudo pacman -R lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings

After this line you can restart script 600 and there will be no conflicts.

Fonts are important so we install script 700. 

We install more packages in this video but first we check if we did not forget to run any script. It skips anything that is already installed. So no danger there.

I misspoke in the video – I did not install bluetooth but sound instead.

Script 200 and 300 will be installed as well.

A tiling window manager uses keyboard shortcuts to run its applications. If you do not install the packages behind the keyboard shortcut, nothing will happen.

 Azerty and Qwerty

setxkbmap be will change by keyboard to azerty.
But it is also defined in the autostart.sh file in ~/.xmonad/scripts.

More info about setxkbmap on the Arch Wiki.

bashrc is not the bashrc from ArcoLinux

We get our content from bashrc from ArcoLinux so that commands like update, upall, skel, … will work.

Then we discover that there are aliases that work with applications that we have installed on ArcoLinux but not on Arch Linux.

Since the video there is a script for those packages in the Arch Way folder for

• reflector
• youtube-dl
• expac
• hwinfo
• and maybe more to follow in the future hence the script.

Then we start tweaking the system and we change the

• icons
• themes
• cursors

This applies to any desktop environment as long as you are using lightdm. 

All we need to do, is to make script 800 work on Arch Linux.

On ArcoLinux we created a group called autologin.

On Arch Linux you need to take care of that. (see script in folder Arch Way)

Let us now create a system group called autologin.

sudo groupadd -r autologin

Now you can run script 800 to change the settings of lightdm and add your personal account to this newly created group called autologin.

If and when updates of haskell or Xmonad come in. 

Recompile Xmonad after installation – do not reboot before recompiling.

xmonad --recompile

or

Super + Shift + R