Configuration notes

Notes

pkgfile to find which packages(s) contain particular files

pacman to install and uninstall packages. pacman -Q | sort for a sorted list of all installed packages

timedatectl to administer time, date, NTP, time zone, etc.

Template installation notes

• During installation of the OS, after arch-chroot /mnt and installation of grub but before booting into the new OS for the first time:
  • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="biosdevname=0 net.ifnames=0 systemd.unit=multi-user.target". This systemd.unit specification is required because at some point after installing graphical packages (probably a window manager), the start-up target gets set to graphical and this causes the console to break during boot because we don't have an X11 server and/or GDM/xdm installed. The biosdevname/ifnames settings mean we get "eth0" instead of something like "ensX".
  • Replace MODULES line with MODULES=(virtio virtio_blk virtio_pci virtio_net) in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and run mkinitcpio -p linux to build a new initramfs with virtio modules for qemu devices
• timedatectl set-ntp true
• pacman -S pkgfile and then pkgfile -u
• Install bind-tools, net-tools, strace, lsof
• pacman -S openssh, change PermitRootLogin to "yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, then systemctl enable/start sshd
• Xorg packages to install:
  

  xorg-bdftopcf
  xorg-font-util
  xorg-font-utils
  xorg-fonts-100dpi
  xorg-fonts-75dpi
  xorg-fonts-alias
  xorg-fonts-encodings
  xorg-fonts-misc
  xorg-fonts-type1
  xorg-luit
  xorg-mkfontdir
  xorg-mkfontscale
  xorg-oclock
  xorg-twm
  xorg-xauth
  xorg-xcalc
  xorg-xclock
  xorg-xev
  xorg-xeyes
  xorg-xload
  xorg-xset
  xorg-xsetroot
  xorg-xwininfo

• Important packages: tcl, rsync
• Packages for academics: gcc, clang, make, gdb, ghc, python3
• Install and configure openldap, nss_ldap
• Install autofs and nfs-utils (to get mount.nfs which performs the actual home directory NFS mounts)
• Install xterm, fvwm and arandr
• Install libreoffice-fresh, libreoffice-fresh-en-GB, libepoxy
• Install nedit and gedit
• Install lyx, ghostscript and xpdf
• Install firefox
• Problem:
  

  man: command exited with status 159: /usr/lib/man-db/zsoelim | /usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//IGNORE | preconv -e UTF-8 | tbl | nroff -mandoc -rLL=113n -rLT=113n -Tascii

  
  Solution:
  The problem happens when man is run without the SHELL environment variable set. We can fix it by creating a /etc/bash.bashrc containing only export SHELL. This exports a useful value into the environment of the shell and, hence, man

• Install postgresql
• Reflect deeply on the consequences of installing Gnome + KDE + Xfce4 + Fluxbox = more than 3 GB of space required

Configuration notes

• The Gnome (desktop) environment requires systemd which isn't available in the archlinux64 environment and, hence, it can't be used.

Snapshot details