Working with Manjaro KDE Linux

OS Installation

1. Preparation of a USB media.

   1. Download the proper Manjaro KDE Edition disc image (ISO file).
   2. Check your device list using sudo fdisk -l.
   3. Run command as sudo dd if=~/Downloads/manjaro-kde-17.0.1-stable-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdc (You may replace the ISO file name and target device name by yourself). This will take even over 10 minutes. For Windows user, it is highly recommended to use Rufus, which can automatically process with more than one partition. Set the options as:

   

   When it comes with a dialog box for choosing writing mode, choose as:

   

2. Restart your PC and press F12 to choose boot from USB flash driver.

3. Start Installation. Choose correct partition table type(GPT for UEFI supported motherboard, with manually choose UEFI boot later. MBR for others). You never need set a mount point of /home at this step, for it should be mounted with another hard disk who will storage data. Volume of these partitions should be set as below:

   Directories	Volume	File system
   /boot	512M 1	ext4
   swap	2048M 2	Linux-swap
   /	remaining space 3	ext4

4. After installation, reboot and try mount /home.

   1. Use sudo fdisk -l to check all mountable devices.
   2. Make partition: Suppose another hard disk is recognized as /dev/sdb (for example). If its volume less than 2TB, you can simply use fdisk to make partition table for it. Else, you may use another advanced tool like parted. Run parted /dev/sdb to start, you will get a (parted) prompt. Here we want to create only one partition, whose type is primary with ext4 file system, just type mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%.

Some users may notice that print can be used to show information of current device, then they may use mkpart primary ext4 0 8TB (for example) to build partition table, which sometimes raise a warning message:

Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.

Ignore/Cancel?

The warning means the partition start is not aligned. Anyway, 0KB is not real start of your disk.

What you should do is to remove all partitions on the disk then run the command like ./parted_mkpart_calc.sh sdb (the shell script can be obtained here), then you will see imformations like:

Using default 1 MiB default alignment in calc
Calculated alignment for /dev/sdb (gpt) is: 2048s

If you would be root, you could create partition with:
# parted /dev/sdb mkpart [name] [type] 2048s 15624996863s
Verify partition alignment with:
# parted /dev/sdb align-check optimal 1
Should return: 1 aligned

So you can try parted /dev/sdb mkpart primary ext4 2048s 15624996863s and finally run parted /dev/sdb align-check optimal 1 for checking.

5. Run mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/sdb1 to reformat partition (parted’s ext4 parameter doesn’t works, I don’t know why yet).

6. mount /dev/sdb1 /home to mount new disk as /home. To make this mount point auto-mounted, add /dev/sdb1 /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2 at the last line of /etc/fstab, then restart.

7. To configure auto-starting services with systemd (use the sshd.service as example, you may also add teamviewerd and rstudio-server.service for auto-start them):

   1. Use the command like sudo systemctl enable sshd.service to enable the service, and this should create a symlink in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ that looks like the following (do NOT create this manually):

      lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 38 Aug  1 04:43 /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/service.service -> /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.service

   2. vim /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/sshd.service to check the content of the service file. Make sure the file contains a line like Restart=always under the [Service] section of the file to enable the service to respawn after a crash.

   3. Finally, reload the systemd daemon, followed by a restart of the service:

      sudo systemctl daemon-reload
      sudo systemctl restart sshd.service

8. If you have /home directory on KDE platform before, you may run cd; rm -rf .cache .config .kde4 .local to reset your KDE environment.

Autostart

To make programs (Yakuake, etc.) autostart: Alt + F2 -> autostart -> Add Program…

R!E!P!O!

# Testing and optimizing mirrors
sudo pacman-mirrors -g
sudo pacman-optimize && sync
# Updating OS
sudo pacman -Syyu

For some Chinese users, generating mirror list may raise an error (probably caused by network), you can use sudo pacman-mirrors -g -c china instead.

Then, for all Chinese users, it is better to add archlinuxcn mirror for pacman. Enter sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf then:

[archlinuxcn]
SigLevel = Optional TrustedOnly
Server = https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/archlinuxcn/$arch

You should put it bebind the main repos (for example, core) to prevent conflicts. Then:

sudo pacman -Syyu
sudo pacman -S archlinuxcn-keyring

Finally, use aurman for enhanced package manager:

sudo pacman -S aurman

DO NOT use yaourt any more nowadays. It’s out of date.

To upgrage the whole system, you should run aurman -Syu weekly. If there’s message like this:

~~ the following packages are neither in known repos nor in the aur
:: pcmciautils-018-8

Then you can run pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq) to remove all unused packages.

For some Chinese users, aurman may raise connection error, you can edit ~/.config/aurman/aurman_config to set longer timeout for it.

[miscellaneous]
aur_timeout=100

Change default DNS server

Install dnsutils first, then check DNS address.

sudo pacman -S dnsutils
dig www.baidu.com

Edit /etc/resolv.conf to change DNS server by adding these lines:

# Google nameservers
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Use sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf to set write-protection for this file (generally it will be reset during reboot).

Set users as sudoers

By typing sudo visudo, you can change sudoers in vi mode, then use /root with n (perhaps more than one time) to change the position of cursor to the User privilege specification section. Press yyp to copy & paste the current line, then dft to delete username ‘root’, finally add the new sudoer’s username. Press :wq to save and exit. Now this section of configuration file seems like:

##
## User privilege specification
##
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
ysun ALL=(ALL) ALL

If you want add a sudoer who never need password to run commands as root, you can set as:

ysun ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

You should only use one space as separator in this section (perhaps in the whole file) for correctly recognized.

Install and Configure softwares

VIM

sudo pacman -S vim

TeamViewer

sudo pacman -S teamviewer

To make TeamViewer work properly under Fedora 25 with Gnome 3:

1. Open the file /etc/gdm/custom.conf.
2. Uncomment or add the line WaylandEnable=false.
3. Save and reboot the system.

Sometimes TeamViewer cannot connect to server after Arch Linux system upgraded, you should restart then have another try.

gcc-fortran

sudo pacman -S gcc-fortran

Use gcc-fortran instead of gfortran (may cause conflicts when system upgrade).

locate

sudo pacman -S mlocate
# Make cache before you first use it
sudo updatedb

Aria2

sudo pacman -S aria2

To speed up aurman:

It’s makepkg but not aurman downloading the packages, so change the content of /etc/makepkg.conf to use aria2 instead of curl:

DLAGENTS=('ftp::/usr/bin/aria2c %u -o %o'
          'http::/usr/bin/aria2c %u -o %o'
          'https::/usr/bin/aria2c %u -o %o'
          'rsync::/usr/bin/rsync --no-motd -z %u %o'
          'scp::/usr/bin/scp -C %u %o')

R && RStudio

sudo pacman -S microsoft-r-open

aurman -S rstudio-desktop-bin

For RStudio server release, run sudo yaourt -S rstudio-server-bin instead.

Steam

Steam outputs this error and exits.

symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxcb-dri3.so.0: undefined symbol: xcb_send_request_with_fds

For steam to work, disable dri3 in xorg config file or as a workaround run steam with LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1. LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 steam

JetBrains Toolbox

Sometimes when the toolbox started after a system upgrade, the application consumes a lot CPU and displays a empty window. To solve this problem, add starting option --disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox in the system startup menu, then restart the application.

Virtualbox

See Arch Wiki here.

For ubuntu

Install flash plugin for web browser

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer