ArchLabs Review - Arch Linux and Openbox

hello welcome back to the OTB Channel have you ever thought about installing a really lightweight distro perhaps just using a window manager such as open box and ideally you'd like it to be based on arch but rather than installing it from scratch you'd prefer if the distribution gave you a little bit of a lift and that you ended up quite quickly with a fully configured desktop perhaps arch labs could be for you let's go to the intro and we'll look at it in more detail [Music] right welcome back so how much Labs the reason that I'm going to do a quick installation and review well there are two reasons really quite a few of my viewers have requested that I have a look at this distro I've never looked at it before so I'm quite open-minded and also I know that it's primarily an open box distro and I've fallen in love a little bit with open box sir over the last three or four weeks as you know I've been using it on my current setup but I've got to the point now where my little x13 1e my little thing this beast is time for a change I've been running Debian distros I run peppermint and Linux Mint on it dual booting and it's the one that I take with me when I'm staying away during the week and it's been great but it's time for a change I had a very brief spin with our Cole Enix which I enjoyed and now haven't reviewed our : ik sir specifically other than looking at its arch arch linux d i think it was a few a few weeks ago or a month or so ago and i will get back to that but i want something lightweight i want something usable i want something that will just work for me I've been with the Debian distros it's now now time to switch over to the Arch distros and arch lab C is quite interesting I'll say right from the word go that it isn't a GUI installer it's a text base installer which bears similarities to the arch Phi script if anything else but it does take you through it you don't need to all sorts of different commands so arch Labs what is it let's go to the split-screen some of you might be familiar with an open box distro called Bunsen labs which is Debian based and I believe the current version is still based on Debian 9 well as it says here arch labs is an arch based distro influenced and inspired by the look and feel of Bunsen labs with the intermediate to advanced user in mind so it's explicitly saying this isn't necessarily a distro for beginners you need to have had some sort of experience and you only have to look at the webpage and the color scheme to see that arch labs may well have been inspired by Bunsen labs but lurking in the background we perhaps have crunchbang which was a very minimal distro and it sort of utilized this sort of color scheme so what's it all about then well let's just have a read here so it's launched by two guys with a love of love of Bunsen labs and arch linux so they they've essentially started off trying to produce a Bunsen labs but that was arch based and and as they say here the original vision was to take the look of Bunsen labs and just put it on top of arch because arch has more up-to-date packages sure compared to Debian stable they also like pac-man and of course the aur but now that it's become established arch labs apparently has developed its own look we've kept true to our legacy by keeping our ISO images as minimal as possible and adding only core applications and utilities ok let's just go and have a look very quickly 657 Meg's I'm looking at here is what the ISO was so it would still fit on a CD so that's pretty impressive in itself highlights well it's a minimal desktop environments easy installation using the al installer or the al I so it's a text sort of installer but it's menu-driven so okay good minimal themes based on arch a whole range of window managers and desktop environments open box certainly but I three BS p WM d WM and others ok so it's not just one window manager it's a range of window managers and I believe they have a range of desktop environments that you can choose from as well you can freely switch between panels and Doc's konkey int into available where necessary various themes etc etc ok so looks good don't know what it's going to be like I did a basic installation in VirtualBox during the week just to set everything up for this and the main reason for doing that I haven't looked at the district just done a basic installation which took a few minutes I want to install this on my x1 3 1a and I'm going to do the installation and try and capture it in OBS with my capture card the screen though on the x1 3 1e is tiny compared to my full HD screen here so I'm going to have to crop it somewhat so it might be a bit fuzzy it's fine as far as the text installation is concerned but once the installation is complete I'm going to swap over to VirtualBox just so that you can see the installation in full HD and it's probably gonna render a lot better but for now let's crack on let's have a look at the installation and see what we think right so I've booted the USB containing the arch labs ISO on my ThinkPad x1 3 1e I've got it set up to boot in EFI mode and the first thing that happens once I've booted and it goes up goes through its startup routine is I get this little text box what do I want to do a standard install run a live session change the installation name or set roots etc etc well do you know what I'm just going to go for the standard install this reminds me very much of what a Slackware installation is like it's a little bit old old-school but not necessarily anything lot wrong with that so the standard install asks me to type Arch Labs installer and let's hit enter and see what happens so this will help me get Arch Labs installed and set up on my system if I'm unsure about a section the default option will be listed or the first selected item will be the default ok great so it's asking me first of all to set up my locale so I'm looking for GB there is near the top right so it's now asking me do I want to use a wired connection or a Wi-Fi connection well actually I did intend to hook this up by wire to my my routed directly thinking that it wouldn't automatically pick up my Wi-Fi chip which is a Broadcom chip in this x13 1a but I can see it's giving me a list of different wireless networks in my area the second one is mine so I'm really impressed to start off with it's picked up the broad I'm chip so could not activate connection the access points blah blah blah was not in the scan list it's there right okay perhaps not then I wonder if I can rescan this ah activate there we go could not activate connection right well let's go back to my original view and let's do a wired connection let me just plug in the ethernet cable okay we're all good I've just plugged in the Ethernet cable and let's proceed from here so activate which presumably is just looking for DHCP maybe I need to now move down to quit yeah okay that's great this is the Installer main menu once a setup is complete or once a step is complete you'll return here on successful successful completion of a step the cursor will be advanced to the next step one failure the cursor will be placed on the step required to advance okay so show device tray what have we got here so we have a single SSD in here it has a V fat connect partition which is the ESP partition and it currently has an ext4 partition I've got that set up currently with our colon X on it so what do I want to do next let's go to partitioning choose carefully when editing formatting and mounting partitions or your data may be lost yeah absolutely great right so I'm just going to try Auto and see if that works all data on dev SDA will be destroyed in the following partitions will be created a fat32 EFI boot partition ok and then ext partition for all the remaining space that's great yes so it's creating new partitions by the look of it that's fine and we'll just wait for it to do its thing process complete great I don't want to do looks encryption I don't want to use LVM I do want to mount the partitions so select whether to use a swap file I'm gonna select none oh I tell you what let's create a swap file we'll leave it out the default and just click OK right select bootloader what do I want to use I want to use grub so I'll just select that right username and password well let's just put in OTB my password and let's repeat it let's go to root again repeat it and click OK system configuration let's have a look what do I want to use all right what kind of shell do I want to use Zed Sh bash or MK Sh I'm gonna stick with bash because that's what I know I keep saying to myself I'm going to have a look at Zed SH but now is not that time host name for the new system we'll stick with the default arch labs and will now set the locale so let's have a look for the e ends and there we go GB and we'll set our timezone so we're looking for Europe and London what kind of Colonel do I want to I want the latest Linux kernel or do I want to use the long term support kernel I'm gonna use the LTS kernel as I will be using this little lappy constantly select the window manager or desktop okay right and these are my options I three gaps open box d WM b SP WM j WM xfce for awesome fluxbox plasma gnome or cinnamon right so this is an all-in-one system essentially I want to go with open box and to highlight that I'm just gonna hit the spacebar but you know what I'm gonna have a backup as well I'm going to install xfce just to see what happens so that'll do let me click OK select what kind of login management to use right I'm gonna use light DM it works for me select additional packages right so what do I want to install here um let's just go down here and have a look I'll install chromium I'm not an Emacs man I also like to firefox on the system I like genie yes the guc view yeah I've got a little webcam on here Libre Office fresh yeah why not and let's install some fonts OBS studio that might be useful PC man fm absolutely simple screen recorder Terminator I like that as a terminal Thunderbird absolutely I like transmission gtk TTFN font awesome why not VLC why not the XFC terminal should probably be installed anyway did i miss kdenlive what was it an option here let's just go back and have a look yes it was kdenlive do you know that will do to start off with and let's say ok run a command on the install system I don't think I need to do that view configuration in command selections so we're going to set up a few partitions here it looks to me like it's going to set up their SD a1 and SDA - we're not using LVM or looks oK we've set up the username we've specified a number of packages ok all good confirm choices and start the installation and off we go and we'll come back in a second right so the installation finished it took a little while 13 14 minutes and then I rebooted and as you can see we are at a light dn screen the default is open box so let me just put in my password and see what it takes us to and we get a very nice straightforward and a plain a very plain but nicely configured open box screen let's just have a look at this it's got the which I asked it to install it's got chromium and Firefox and Thunderbird and transmission which is gray we've got OpenOffice they're floating xfce we've got preferences what are we going preferences we've got a R&R which is great advanced network configuration the display module this looks like to be all the xfce options here and on the system itself we have a CH top just out of interest let's see what it's running 280 megabits bytes should I say that's pretty low it really is so a nicely configured desktop arch install from scratch let's have a look and see exactly how it's made up in order to do this and in order to get a slightly better quality screen I'm gonna switch over to VirtualBox now where I can show it in full 1920 by 1080 without scaling the screen up so it should be crisper and sharper okay then so let's return to the desktop so now we can look around the system well first of all it is very plain but that's open box and you can pretty much do with open box whatever you like it's using the tint to panel and just to see what else has been launched if now I'm opening the file manager which is what this is thinner I see it has it installed by default if I open the config directory and I move over to open box let me have a look at the auto start right so it's starting XF Esseesse or XF settings right from the beginning so it's not open box plain and simple with nothing else it's also starting the xfce settings which is great it can help you out with quite a few things it's starting the tint to panel which is what we've got up here and it's using nitrogen for wallpaper which is brilliant so all good what I haven't seen before is this little menu I've done a bit of a fiddle on my menu which you might have seen when I installed open box a few weeks ago but it was basically just a copy of the standard right-click menu that we have here I'm not sure what this actually is jg menu so if you right-click it it brings up all the different sections which I'm presuming you can edit to your heart's content but I'm not necessarily sure that you'd want to it looks like a dynamic menu to me in fact I can confirm it is on my original VirtualBox install I haven't installed the I've just installed it via pac-man and it appeared automatically in the menu so that's all good we still of course have your standard open box right-click menu here so there's a screenshot tool there is a little menu entry to go to places so if we browse there there's nothing in it at the moment okay so it just opens up the file manager our preferences so for open box we can go to OB Kampf which is the configuration for open box itself where you can play about with the various themes that are installed you can of course install other themes what else have we got Compton restart disable or even edit your Compton kampf konkey chooser okay well conky didn't start by default which quite like but let's just have a look at conky chooser right arch lab labs conky RC oh and there we have it now transparency there and it's nice and straightforward and simple okay all good what else have we got on this right-click menu nitrogen let's launch it and we see actually a quite impressive range of different wallpapers what should we choose something like that perhaps yeah why not I know it looks quite grey but don't forget you can download any wallpaper you want and you can customize it as you want what else is here XFC for appearance settings okay so you can change your icon sets if you prefer to use xfce go for it what else xfce for power settings which strangely enough hasn't launched can we get that from here let's have a look XFC for power settings that's going to power manager okay it launches from there possibly something to do with the keybindings pulse audio volume control good and what else XFC for settings manager okay so you can change things around from here if we go to the desktop I presume we can set our wallpaper from here as well but let's just have a look see does it give us the option to apply it no it doesn't it's obviously based on nitrogen for that but no problem what else help in information right so various links to the arc labs homepage the forum the Google+ the arch labs knowledgebase so let's just open up that and not found that's a bit annoying but never mind what about something else help an info the arch labs forum okay so that is taking us to the forum which is great if it's your first time with an arch system you might find that quite helpful where are we forum basic health and support scripts tutorials and tips and then generally speaking we have a load of links to open box guides not arch like specific just general guides and even has a link to the arch wiki there and the Debian wiki and or a karmas open box open box guide okay so quite useful you've also got a method here of looking to see what your key bindings are you can either display them in a window or have a look at them in the menu well let's display them in a window so we can swap desktops here to start off with I can see I'm at desktop one if I want to go to desktop two it says W 2 which is the Windows key plus 2 so there's the second window what about three yeah and four yeah back to one okay so there are various ways of doing that you can send applications to desktop so if I wanted to send this so that'll be shift Windows to so shift Windows - and I'm already on work a workspace number two so shift Windows 1 sends me back they're all good what else have we got a range of different key bindings already set up for you you can control the volume with your key bindings which I've got my volume disabled in VirtualBox but you've got it up here anyway what else have we got let's move down some various key bindings here to launch your file manager so Windows key + F yep that works and open a terminal windows and t-that works launch web web browser windows and w and there we go and what else we've got some rafi commands here they all seem to run a pretty much similar command row fear um so we can hit alt f1 or control space let's try control space and as you can see down here this allows you to launch applications or search for applications on the system that's great let's hit escape to get out of there and then we have Windows key X which is row fear um - shell which i think is the logout key but let me just verify it yes it is so you can lock the screen logout reboot or shutdown and on it goes you can explore explore the key bindings to your heart's content you can of course with open box edit the key bindings in RC XML and go through and do it yourself very nice you may want to play around with the theme you may like the grayish theme I'm all good with it to be honest let's run a web browser here sorry a terminal here I want to see what's actually on the system so if I do cat et Cie pacman.com let's see what we've got so it looks pretty standard up to here we've got core extra community multi Lib all enabled by default and we have the arch labs repo with three servers I'm not quite clear on what's provided by the our arch labs herbs by the arch labs repo but we can always do that with pat list arch labs underscore repo I think it was and we've got something called arch labs bath be a pH okay we've got some common things which I presume are themes more than anything else we've got fonts I three lock key rings paranoid whatever that is and you're basically your configurations in for the scale directory okay and arch labs wallpapers I believe bath is actually like an AR yeah you are helper I'll have a look in a minute because I presume yeh is naturally installed on this system but let's have a look and just check that out no yeas not there so we're gonna have to use bath if we wanted to install something from the aur like yay not entirely sure how to do that so let's see if it's got a man page yes it has it's an aur helper or rather it's a small bash script that aids with installing and updating packages from the AR aur it's not a package manager other than installing and updating you'll still require pac-man yeah so pac-man for your basic packages and bath for your aur stuff so let's just see what the syntax might be I is for install ok well let's try something let's go bath - aye and let's the install yay phew or edit the package build I don't think so and let's see what happens here it's asking for my password proceed with installation and it's installing the go library which is required for yeh before we go any further once yays installed I must be honest on my laptop I will probably continue to use yay because it's what I'm familiar with more than anything else well that's installing I should just say when I rebooted my laptop the wireless wasn't working now I'm not that surprised with that because it uses the WL driver it's a Broadcom chip now the WL driver was actually installed on arch labs but because I picked the LTS kernel and the LTS kernel only it wouldn't work so what I had to do was I had to install the Broadcom - WL - DKMS driver and also install the LTS kernel headers and then everything worked that's all it took which packages do I want to remove right okay proceed with installation yes please and that should be it so let me just do yay syu and there we are it's all working I'll just do a quick update there okay so it comes with a an au our helper script just to get you started and then you can figure out what you want to do from there so guys that's all I really want to cover on arch labs it's a relatively straightforward installation it seems to be configured nicely I like that it's kept the right-click menu here but it's got lots of pre-configured stuff it's running very light I know this is now in VirtualBox but let me run htough again and see where we're at so well we've been running it for a while and opening and closing different applications and it's still only at 339 Meg's pretty impressive let's go and have a chat about this so that was our CH labs the installation was fairly straightforward unfortunately the wireless didn't activate for me right during the installation but I understand why because I'd pick the LTS Colonel and with this dodgy Broadcom chip on the little thing pad I couldn't really have expected it to but other than that everything installed beautifully I'm gonna play with it for the coming three or four weeks and see what I feel I've decided to put open box on this little thing pad and I could have done an archway install and just set up open box my way but there's two reasons I chose Arch Labs one is it's just quick and easy it saves me time and secondly I can do the arch my way installation what I'm interested in seeing is what other distros that are arch based offer in terms of configuration and initial setup and I was pretty impressed I learnt a few things today and I learnt about that menu on the tin to bar which I may well play with myself on my main desktop I like the right-click menu I like the little preferences that have been added to it I'm not sure that the black and white color scheme is necessarily for me and I will no doubt change and fiddle about with that but nevertheless it's a nice looking distro and the RAM usage I mean it's minimal absolutely minimal which is great it's just gonna fly on that little thing pad so I'm really impressed because its arch I can do what I want with it I can install anything I want with it and configure it because I'm familiar with the system but for those considering a basic arch install who who perhaps are not as comfortable with the arch scripts such as arch Phi and would rather have something that's entirely menu driven and ends up with a pre-configured system it may be an option there's many other options out there of course Arco Linux is worn all the scripts that I've looked out over the previous months do the job as well but this just adds a twist in terms of its look and feel and initially impressions for me are it looks pretty good there must be a reason why people keep asking me to review it I'll see what the forums are like as well I'm not sure that I'm much of a forum contributor I haven't looked at the arch Labs forums but I'm gonna take a look over the coming week so it's another viable option and it stays true to my roots of being either Debian based or arch based and yeah give it a spin people just before I go don't forget that I am now on library as well so if you'd like to join that's great I'll put a link down in the information in the video description and I've also started up a few months ago a Facebook group we're still a very small group there's less than 20 of us there but if you want to join by all means and that's about it I only have one more thing to do before I say goodbye for this this particular video I just want to very quickly show you my desktop oh what's that you might ask well why don't you guess it's not I three I'm a well do a review of it at some point but I've decided I three was enough for a few weeks we'll talk about other window managers in the future so guys have a great weekend I hope you stay in well in this current environment sir I'm isolated myself and a little bit of a loss now all the pubs have shot what I'm going to do with my Saturday night and but cheers everyone and I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 13,438

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, archlabs, install, review, arch linux, openbox, window manager, tint2, conky, geany, easy arch install, crunchbang, bunsenlabs, AL-installer, Archlabs install, Archlabs review, thinkpad install, openbox customisation, archlabs efi install, htop, archlabs auto partitioning, broadcom-wl-dkms, lightweight linux, lightweight distro, baph, archlabs linux distro review, archlabs minimo, archlabs linux download, archlabs linux, archlabs distro review, arch linux install

Id: McWs_VSIRs4

Length: 41min 8sec (2468 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020