Arch Linux 2009.08 Review - Part 2 of 2

I decided to keep the screenshots to a minimum in this post. I mainly followed the very detailed Arch Linux Beginners Guide and since nearly everything I did is enter commands, I didn't think screenshots were necessary.


I started off running the rankmirrors script to order the mirrors by speed. I then downloaded and installed Powerpill. Powerpill is a wrapper for Pacman which is essentially Pacman using Aria2 with no configuration required.

Then I ran a "powerpill -Syu" to get the system up to date.

I was previously running as "root", so I created a user for myself along with a password.

I installed ALSA and modified the sound channels to get the sound working.

Here is where the fun begins. Installing X.
The X Windowing System, or x.org is a display protocol which provides a GUI (Graphical User Interface) on Unix-based operating systems. I installed x.org, then I installed the video drivers. Since I was using Virtualbox, I wasn't sure which driver to use, so I chose vesa (most compatible). I figured that I would install the guest additions at the end. Then I configured x.org .

Then it came time to text X to make sure it works. For some odd reason, the test no longer works correctly. Rather than getting an "x" mouse pointer on top of a black screen, there is now only a black screen. This makes it somewhat difficult to tell whether or not X is actually working. The removal of the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combo to force restart (or in this case quit) in one of the more recent versions of x.org made exiting the X test quite awkward. It required switching to another virtual terminal and back, then ending the process with Ctrl-C. I started a basic X session with only xterm running and it worked.

Then it was time to install a Desktop Environment. I chose xfce since it uses a similar widget toolkit as GNOME uses and there are many GNOME apps. xfce is also fairly lightweight which is definitely a plus.

I installed a bunch of font packages. I installed xfce along with a bunch of themes. I finished that and then, it was the moment of truth. I typed "startxfce4". The desktop loaded as expected except...

This is the part of my installation that makes the least amount of sense to me. Many icons were missing with either nothing in its place, or a small x. For at least 20 minutes, I thought I messed something up along the way. It turns out that there's a problem with xfce 4.6 from upstream. Why would the xfce developers ship their desktop environment with a whole bunch of missing icons? That does not make sense! "If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit". The solution for that was to install some icon themes. As expected that worked nicely.

Here is what the desktop looks like at this point.

Finally, I wanted to install the Virtualbox Guest Additions. I got an error within Arch when trying to mount the (virtual) CD. Maybe at some point, I'll troubleshoot and figure out what went wrong.