Arch Linux from Scratch to Compiz Standalone

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Arch Linux from Scratch to Compiz Standalone

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Arch Linux from Scratch to Compiz Standalone

In this technical tutorial, I will show you how to install and configure Arch Linux from
scratch to use Compiz as a standalone window manager without any desktop environment.
I have accomplished this both in VirtualBox and on actual hardware. This howto is
assuming you have a basic knowledge of Arch Linux, the pacman package manager, and
the AUR. All the commands and details of interest will be highlighted in blue. All
commands should be run as root unless otherwise noted.
Let us get started!
Step 1. Install the Arch Linux base system
Pop in the latest Arch Linux disk or USB stick, and start Arch.
If you want to install over SSH, first create a password:
passwd
Then, enable SSH:
systemctl start sshd
And, look up your ip:
ip addr

You should now be able to SSH into the installation.

We'll begin by creating our partitions using cfdisk. Here I'll create the traditional three
partitions of root, swap, and home.
Command:
cfdisk

Choose the dos partition table.

Partition your disk to your preferance, I'm using the traditional root/home/swap method.
Delete all existing partitions so there is one block of free space.
For root partition (sda1), select new, primary, size 10000MB, beginning, toggle bootable.
For swap partition (sda2), select new, primary, size 2048MB, end.
For home partition (sda3), select new, primary, size: whatever is left.
Select write, type yes, and quit. We are done creating our partitions.
Now we will make our file systems.
Format root and home to ext4:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
Make a swap file and turn swap on:
mkswap /dev/sda2

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Arch Linux from Scratch to Compiz
Standalone

swapon /dev/sda2
Now we will mount our root and home partitions:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/home
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home
Optionally, edit pacman's mirrors with this command:
nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
And select a mirror from your region. I'm in the USA so I deleted all the mirrors outside my
area and kept the top 3 from the US. Using the default mirrorlist without editing works
fine too, but may be a little bit slower.
We will now download and install our base system:
pacstrap /mnt base base-devel
Create a file system table:
genfstab /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Check that fstab was created. We don't want to change anything here, just double
checking.
nano /mnt/etc/fstab
We will now chroot into our new system to set it up:
arch-chroot /mnt
Create a root password:
passwd
Set up your time zone and locales:
nano /etc/locale.gen
Uncomment your desired locales, I uncommented these two for the US:
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1
And now generate the locales:
locale-gen
For the time zone we will make a symbolic link to our zone file using something like this
command:
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/<Zone>/<SubZone> /etc/localtime
Replacing Zone and SubZone with your area
As an example, I'm in the US near Chicago so I used this command:
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime
To see all the available zones, change directory into /usr/share/zoneinfo and have a look.
cd /usr/share/zoneinfo
ls
Set up a hostname:
echo hostname > /etc/hostname
We will now download and install grub:
pacman -S grub-bios

grub-install /dev/sda
Optionally create an initial ramdisk environment using this command:
mkinitcpio -p linux
Now we'll generate our grub configuration:
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Type exit to leave chroot.
Unmount partitions:
umount /mnt/home
umount /mnt
Congratulations, you have now installed Arch Linux!
Reboot
Step 2. Post Install
Log in as root.
First we'll bring up the network using dhcpcd:
systemctl start dhcpcd
And to enable at boot:
systemctl enable dhcpcd
If you want to continue to work over SSH you'll have to install openssh:
pacman -S openssh
start the SSH server:
systemctl start sshd
And to enable it at every boot:
systemctl enable sshd
Check your ip address:
ip addr
Now we'll add a new user:
useradd -m -g users -G wheel -s /bin/bash username
Create a password for the new user:
passwd username
Now we will configure pacman to enable the multilib and archlinuxfr repositories:
nano /etc/pacman.conf
Uncomment these two lines:
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
And add the following three lines to the bottom of the same file. Save and close.

[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

This will enable us to install yaourt, an AUR front end so we can easily install packages
from the Arch User Repositories.

Sync pacman and the repositories:

pacman -Syy
And to install yaourt:
pacman -S yaourt
To enable sound we'll setup alsa:
pacman -S alsa-utils
The sound is muted by default so we will un-mute with this command:
alsamixer
Raise the master switch to full.
You may need to configure the sound settingsspecificto your preference or hardware.
Now we need to install the xorg-server and our video drivers:
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-xinit
Amd for 3D support:
pacman -S mesa
Install the video driver for your video card or chipset:
Intel:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics
Nvidia:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
ATI:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI

Reboot after driver install.

If you are installing in virtualbox use the following commands to start x
sudo pacman -S virtualbox-guest-utils
Then edit this file:

sudo nano /etc/modules-load.d/virtualbox.conf

And add these three lines:

vboxguest
vboxsf
vboxvideo
And to get this to load at boot issue this command:

sudo systemctl enable vboxservice.service

Reboot after driver install.
If your using a laptop you'll want to install the following package to use your mousepad
and other tools:
pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics
And finally, some fonts to get us started:
pacman -S ttf-dejavu
Step 3. Install and configure Compiz to work as a standalone window manager.
Here we will need a login manager and a panel with a system tray. I've chosen to use SLiM
and the xfce4-panel. We will also install compiz as well as emerald for our window

decorations. We will also briefly install the xfce desktop so that we can graphically
configure compiz and emerald.
I chose SLiM as our login manager because it uses the ~/.xinitrc file for startup and
execution, which is easy to configure.
Install SliM:
pacman -S slim
As a normal user, copy the ~/.xinitrc file to the home directory:
cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~
Make it executable:
chmod +x ~/.xinitrc
Enable SliM at boot, as root:
systemctl enable slim.service
Install xfce:
pacman -S xfce4
We will now edit our ~/.xinitrc file to start xfce at boot:
As normal user:
nano ~/.xinitrc
Uncomment: exec startxfce4
Save and close.
Reboot and login to the XFCE environment.
Using yaourt or your AUR frontend of choice, install compiz and it's dependencies from the
AUR. Be sure to use yaourt as a normal user.
We will need the following packages from the AUR. Some will be pulled in automatically
as dependencies to others. Just make sure you have everything on the list.
ccsm
compiz-bcop
compiz-core
compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
compiz-fusion-plugins-main-genie
compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported
fusion-icon
libcompizconfig
At some point you may be prompted with this message:
"compiz-fusion-plugins-main-genie and compiz-fusion-plugins-main are in conflict. Remove
compiz-fusion-plugins-main?" select yes.
Install emerald and emerald-themes from the AUR to get us started with some window
borders.
emerald
emerald-themes
Now to configure compiz.
Open up ccsm (compiz-config-settings-manager) and at the minimum enable:
move windows
resize windows
window decorations
Select the window decorations settings and where it says command make sure it says:
emerald --replace
Open up the Emerald theme manager and select a window decoration, then close.
Launch fusion-icon, right click on it and make sure it is set to Compiz as the window

manager and Emerald as the window decorator.

Now we will uninstall the XFCE desktop and reinstall just the panel.
pacman -Rsnc xfce4
pacman -S xfce4-panel
And we'll need a terminal:
pacman -S xterm
And finally, we will edit the ~/.xinitrc file to run our panel at boot to execute the
fusion-icon, thus starting compiz.
As a normal user:
nano ~/.xinitrc
Comment out the entry: exec startxfce4
And add these two lines to the bottom of the file, in this order:
xfce4-panel &
exec fusion-icon
Save, close, and reboot into your new system.
You should now have compiz running as a standalone window manager. Configure and
tweak to your liking!
Note: The background may look like the SliM login screen. You'll have to enable the
wallpaper option in ccsm and choose an image.
Thanks for looking!

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Posted by augustkk at 2:40 AM

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