250712 Arch Linux Installation notes

Posted on Edited on In , Disqus: Word count in article: 5k Reading time ≈ 5 mins.

enable bluetooth

安装好Arch linux之后发现没有蓝牙，在设置里也启用不了，才发现要用命令行

1
sudo systemctl enable --now bluetooth

https://arch.icekylin.online/guide/rookie/desktop-env-and-app#_11-启动蓝牙-若有

install Chinese fonts

There is a list of Chinese fonts:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Localization/Simplified_Chinese

just just pacman to install one and then the firefox display Chinese characters correctly.

Laggy and flickering external monitor

Desktop environment: KDE plasma.

My laptop has an Intel integrated GPU and a GTX 1050 GPU. At the arch linstallation step, I choose the “all open source” for GPU drivers.

Once I connected an external monitor to my laptop, the good news was that the monitor was recognized and showed graphics; while the bad news was that there was tearing or laggy on the external dispay. The first idea was to install the nvidia drivers.

https://arch.icekylin.online/guide/rookie/graphic-driver#独立显卡

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

I installed nvidia nvidia-settings packages. After reboot, the external display was no longer laggy, but became flickering.

Nvidia Optimus

It seems a tool to make it easier to switch between integrated GPU and the descrete GPU. However, after installed, I found that it doesn’t support wayland. This gave me a hint that the problem might due to some incompatibility between Nvidia driver and wayland.

Although I later switched from wayland to xorg, I didn’t use it as I don’t understand its configurations. As long as now my external monitor works well, I don’t bother with it.

Solution

Switch from wayland to xorg session.

https://archlinux.org/news/plasma-640-will-need-manual-intervention-if-you-are-on-x11/

  1. Install plasma-x11-session.
  2. Log out.
  3. Log in with Xorg session.

Done!

vertical panel date time too small

When I changed the panel from bottom to left vertical, the clock and date became very small, nearly not readable. After some exploration, I found that KDE Plasma offers a flexible way to customize the desktop panels.

I can create multiple panels on the desktop, and each panel can contain multiple widgets. The Clock is just a widget. So, I create an Application Menu Bar panel at the top, and move the clock widget to that panel.

French input method with QWERTY keyboard

https://chakra-zh.blogspot.com/2012/09/chakra.html

  1. First need to install Fcitx5
  2. Settign -> Input Method -> Add Input Method…
    • Find “Keyboard - English (US) - English (US, intl., with dead keys)”

Auto mount NTFS disk

There are two storage drives on my lapto, one is used for OS, another is for data storage. Of course, both are originally used under Windows so they used NTFS file system. The one used for installing Arch OS has been formatted to ext4. The other one is not changed. After all, I don’t want to erase the data on it. Thus, I choose to cotinue use NTFS under Arch OS. Fortunately it’s not a big problem, Arch kernel already support NTFS file system.

  1. use the following command to list available disks
1
lsblk -f

In my case, I see my unmounted disk is sda, and the largest partition is sda2, and we get the UUID of it. I decide to mount this device to /mnt/ntfsssd.

  1. edit the file /etc/fstab, add the disk partition, save the file.
1
2
# <file system>        <mount point>   <type>   <options>                                <dump>  <pass>
UUID=8E76D90B76D8F545  /mnt/ntfsssd    ntfs  defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names  0       0

Options explaination

  • UUID=8E76D90B76D8F545: This is the unique identifier for your disk partition. Using the UUID is more reliable than using the device path (e.g., /dev/sda2).

  • /mnt/ntfsssd: The directory where the filesystem will be mounted. You must create this directory first if it doesn’t exist: sudo mkdir -p /mnt/ntfsssd.

  • ntfs3: This specifies the filesystem type.

  • defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names: These are the mount options.

    • defaults: A standard set of options suitable for most cases.

    • uid=1000, gid=1000: These set the ownership of the mounted files to your user. NTFS doesn’t support standard Linux permissions, so this makes your user the owner, giving you full read/write access. You can find your specific uid and gid by running the id command in your terminal. 1000 is the standard for the first user created on most systems.

    • windows_names: This option prevents you from creating files with names or characters that are illegal on Windows, which is useful for cross-platform compatibility.

  • 0 (dump): This disables the dump utility for this filesystem, which is standard for NTFS.

  • 0 (pass): This tells the fsck utility not to check this filesystem for errors at boot time, as Linux’s fsck can’t repair NTFS partitions.

  1. test if it works
1
sudo mount -a

After running the command, I get this hint:

mount: (hint) your fstab has been modified, but systemd still uses
the old version; use ‘systemctl daemon-reload’ to reload.

The NTFS drive now works fine.

Manage AppImages

Although it might be a preferable way to install software on Arch by using pacman or yay (AUR), I still find that AppImage is a simple “ready to use” way.

I also firstly tried to install an AppImage manager from Discover, called Gear Lever. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work - adding AppImage files into Gear Lever always failed.

I then installed another one called AppImageLauncher (https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher), and it works.

However, when I tried to run QQ AppImage file(downloaded from official site), AppImageLauncher didn’t managed to create a shortcut in the start menu, with an error message Failed to register AppImage in system via libappimage.

Show Caps Lock and Num Lock status

Although there is no on screen notification for status change of Caps lock and Num lock, there is a way to show the status by system tray. The System Tray widget has an entry Lock Keys Status. Set it to always shown or shown when relevant, then a status of lock keys will be shown in the system tray when enabled.

https://discuss.kde.org/t/caps-lock-numpad-osd-indicator/12934