ArcoLinux - An Arch Distro With A WOW! Factor

hello welcome to the OTB channel so perhaps you've been using Linux for a little while and you fancy getting your feet wet looking at an arch system but you're a little bit worried that arch requires a level of technical expertise that you don't feel you're quite at as yet but you're happy learning and in the meantime what you'd like is a very workable system to help you gain that knowledge or perhaps Arco Linux is for you that's what we're going to look at today [Music] okay welcome back so I thought I'd move on to do a review of something that I've been meaning to get around to for a few months in fact a couple of months ago I did arco Linux D which was a basic ISO which booted me into a plane system R then pull down github scripts from the arco Linux repo and I turned it into a Marte desktop what I never looked out though is the essential core Arco Linux ISO because you don't have to go through that github process if you just want to install Arco Linux in fact the basic system comes through with three desktops configured it comes with xfce open box and i3 now when I first looked at that I thought that's a really strange mixture until you take a step back and you think we'll hold on it's not really the whole fault of philosophy behind Arco Linux is it's about learning Linux as you go and if I think about what I've recently done marte the desktop environment was for many years my favorites but I've recently moved on to window managers and I started with open box and for the last couple of months I've been tiling with a three and BS PWM etc etc so in a way if it's going to be a learning experience having three different types of environment on an ISO make sense start off with the desktop environments move on to look at a plane window manage your open box which is still floating and then if you want to get into tiling well as I three so from that perspective it makes a lot of cents and I've played with this ISO a few times over the course of the last couple of months and I've actually put it on one of my Fink pads one of my older think pads and it's been bulletproof now there are lots of arch based systems out there and some of them are brilliant endeavor and Manjaro to name two of them but there are many out there arch labs can't forget that the thing is from a personal point of view our co Linux for me has the wow factor it looks absolutely great and not only does it look absolutely great but it's a rolling release a bleeding edge release that almost holes you by the hand so let's just move over to the R : its webpage very briefly before we fire this bad boy up this is probably the weakest point of our : that's as far as I'm concerned because the the websites all over the place and it's not easy to find information that's not to say there isn't a wealth of great information on here but essentially I use a Google search if I need to find something about our coal enix and it will generally take me to the right the right points on this R : excite anyway enough said I've looked at that in the past the whole point of our co Linux though as it says here it's a learning path install the core ISO and then move on to look at how you can build up desktops yourself with github scripts create your own ISOs etc etc and perhaps even install a basic or a plain arch system all I really want to cover here is the Downloads as far as downloading this ISO with three environments on choose which you want go to any of these links and just download our code Nick's not R : XD or our Kelvin XP just RK Linux just for information r : XP are though it gives you the opportunity to create your own ISO there are also a number of community editions on here where they've already been created with single desktops so that's also an option anyway before we do that before we get into it any further let's load up the ISO and let's give it a spin right so you should see the xfce desktop in front of you of our co Linux with the welcome screen it booted in VirtualBox without a problem and the guest in additions are obviously installed already because it's booted straight into a HD resolution this welcome screen gives us the option to run gparted or kalamarez and there's a reason for this kalamarez currently has a little bit of a bug were sometimes automatic installation or automatic partitioning crashes out and you've all seen that happen to me a number of times so our co linux recommends you run gparted first create your partitions run kalamarez and do a manual setup so we'll do that as it says there we advise you to clean the computer with gparted before installing cleans a bit of a strange term but hey-ho and so we'll just run gparted which should launch in a minute and i shall just maximize that now this is a new disk or a new virtual disk so the first thing we do is we go to the device menu and we need to create a partition table this is an EFI system so I'm going to create a GPT partition and hit apply I'm then going to go to the icon on the far left and I'm going to create my ESP fat32 partition to start off with and I'm going to make that 550 Maggs it can stay as a primary partition but I'm gonna set it to fat32 and click Add next now I don't normally create a swap partition on virtual machines sure but just for giggles let's create a four gig partition I know it'll just be under 4,000 Meg's because it's a thousand and 24 Meg's per gig etc but no matter and I'm gonna set that to Linux swap and click Add last but not least I'll use the remainder of the space for an ext4 partition which I'll use for route so that's the three created I'll now hit the tick box apply and gparted will do it stuff and it will set up my partitions now currently kalamarez seems to struggle when it comes to setting flags and on quite a few occasions there isn't an option to set an ESP flag so I'm going to click here in gparted on the fat32 partition and click manage flags and I'm actually going to set the ESP flag there and it will automatically set set boot as well so that's that just setting the boot flag you don't need to hit the tick it's all done now so let me close down gparted and will now run kalamarez now this Calomiris is the latest version and our co linux has done a fair bit to customise it as well where you get the option to install lots of additional packages starts off as normal though let's set the language to English and straight away we go - what kernel do you want well if you've got Nvidia you can install one of the kernels with Nvidia I don't have Nvidia so I'm just gonna click the long term somewhat support kernel without any Nvidia but you get the whole range of options here the standard colonel the hardened colonel the Zen colonel you choose if you want to install microcode on intel and AMD cpus it's a good point to do it here let's click Next do I want any of this communication software installed well I've seen a review with a riot desktop let's give that a go what about development tools well geni plugins leafpad might be quite interesting let's click Next what office applications do I want well I'm going to install Libre Office number I'm going for the still package which is like the long term support version rather than the rolling release which is the fresh version I'm going to click Next and we have a whole range of options here for multimedia let's just click audacity and next what browsers do we want well I'll have the brave browser firefox thunderbird and let's say transmission i'd obviously take longer to make these choices if i was installing it on a real system how about themes I quite like the ark icon theme the materia gtk theme the papyrus icon theme that'll do I think I don't want any games do I want any of these utilities not at the moment thank you what accessories do I want will cheese is always fun with webcams so we'll do that and some alternative file managers well PC man FM is always good do I want any additional fonts the terminal for terminus font or gates or graphics or anything else I'm just gonna pick terminals and I'm going to install the alacrity terminal as well and for now I'm not going to install virtualbox I'm just gonna hit next I don't need any of the art are : X dev tools so next and we go straight to our normal timezone screen which it sir correctly identified my keyboard is set as UK so that's great now we get to partitioning so I'm gonna hit manual partitioning because we've already created the partitions and we go to next so let's highlight that fat32 partition and click Edit we don't need to reformat it because that's already been done within gparted but I do want to mount it on boot EFI you can see there that the boot flag I've already set in gparted is there but I don't have the option to set an ESP partition so I'm just gonna click OK swap well we can leave that as is but our root partition we will need to make sure that we've got the mount point set correctly we don't need any flags and we'll click ok and next let me just set my normal name and I will as usual use exactly the same password for wrote so it's telling me what it's gonna do here it's setup the fat32 partition with mount point boot efi and install arco linux on the system partition dev SDA 3 yeah and it's already picked up the swap partition i can see so not a problem let's hit install and we'll come back once this is done [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] right so we're all done it took a little bit longer than normal but that's because it was pulling in additional packages so what I'm going to do I'm going to shut this down and we'll come back once I put it into the install system right so where I've rebooted and we're at a light DM login screen which is really nice looking I can see up on the top right that the default desktop session is xfce but we have the options there for i3 and open box let's stick with xfce to start off with and I'll just log in and see where we get to and here we go our welcome screen loads up again and I'm really quite impressed I like I like the color scheme I like the way it looks I really like the icon set I believe he uses the Sardi icon set but we'll come to that in a minute let's go straight away to this welcome screen and the first big button on there says update la arch mirrors so let's do that it seems to have finished updating the arch mirrors so what else have we got here well release information choose your project which just opens up the arco Linux website core info let's see what that's all about again it opens up the arch are : its website with some links to join the group on discord or on telegram first track I'm not sure what fast track is but let's have a look these are all website links by the look of it oh right and that gives you a little bit of information checking ISO for errors writing an ISO to USB bias you a UEFI etc etc okay all good a link to the forum I believe the arco Linux forum is very friendly it doesn't have the reputation at the standard arc slit our clinics forum house so we've got a donate button I get involved button a debug button what's this let's just have a quick look right I'm not exactly sure what we would do with that but okay and a YouTube button now Eric Dubois produces a huge amount of YouTube videos we should see them Firefox is already running but not responding oh right okay well let's try something else then okay so that's working let's go to youtube right it's working now obviously I shut down firewalk Fox and reopened it too quickly so we have Eric Dubois YouTube page here now he is someone who publishes videos constantly you can see looking at the recent ones three days ago four days ago four days ago four day and on it goes there are hundreds and hundreds of videos on this site with how to's for various things I'm always surprised at how few views he actually gets on his videos I personally have subscribed and I would suggest you do the same if you're gonna run arco Linux but okay so there you basic buttons your links to own range of sites and then down at the bottom Facebook Twitter me we Instagram LinkedIn and patreon discord telegram run Arcola next week tool and any conflicts information well let's just have a look at the conflicts information to start off with which I think is a nice little touch if you're going to install additional packages it tells you which packages are likely to conflict with any other packages so it's a prior warning what about the tweak tool now I've never seen this so I'm really interested to see what it does and hopefully I hope we certainly is it's launching now right so let me just maximize this so we have an also start section so we can start conky if we want to a desktop installer select a desktop to install Wow so picky desktop vs pwm cinnamon gnome I three JWM whatever you want and hit install this is really quite innovative I like that a lot grub config right so what sort of grub screen do you want I've just got that at the moment HP block oh so this is about blocking ads your light DM configuration choose the desktop you want to also log in so okay nothing's coming up there at the moment near fetch config what do we want to show their OB log out config pac-man config which repos do we want to enable so we could also enable the test repo and spin off repo I have no idea who hefter or Bobo are but hey ho slim lock not entirely sure what this is but I must I'm assuming it may well be some sort of Plymouth type theme don't know I would need to have a look and then there's a whole range of Plymouth themes okay well the auto start is useful and I'm especially impressed at this ability to select a desktop and just install it like that as simple as that in fact you know let's just pick one let's say JWM clear the cache before reinstall okay install and off it goes doing its thing JWM has been installed absolutely brilliant I like that a lot what else we got well we pretty much know what's there on the favorites we've got the welcome screen and the tweet tool already Firefox our file manager what is this is yeah this is thunar but we should have PC man FM installed here anyway cuz we asked for that to happen and there it is okay so accessories pretty much everything you'd expect in an xfce desktop plus the additional packages that i've installed but you've also got your screenshot tool here you've got a copy of planck variety is already installed development we've got genie meld sublime text and atom LibreOffice math already installed in education right is installed by default along with inks that Inkscape peak record short animated gif images from your screen interesting ristretto in a document scanner you've got the standard durst of I installed transmission Thunderbird brave but there's also chromium and Firefox there we've got audacity and cheese but guc view and VLC all of Libre Office obviously and then all of your settings okay I didn't want to go through the menu in huge detail because it was more about showcasing this and how you actually go about managing this system now the big thing here is I'm going to search for preferred applications to start off with and there is a little dialog there to set you provide your preferred applications so the web browsers currently set to Firefox the mail reader is evolution but I'm going to change that to Thunderbird and here is the main reason why I think going to preferred applications straightaway is a good idea for some reason Erik Dubois sets termite as the default terminal I think that's a rather strange choice but nevertheless I'm gonna set xfce as the main terminal and once it's set you can launch it simply by hitting the super button or the Windows key and enter and yes this is now the xfce terminal which is brilliant now I'm just going to maximize this at the moment because one of the big things about Arco Linux is it comes pre-configured with a load of aliases in your bash RC so if I just go into my bash RC now you can see that there is a stack of pre-existing aliases in here and I would suggest you go in straightaway and have a look at these to see exactly what everything does the list goes ever on and on to update the system well it's an arch system but eric has included a few aliases so for instance to update all of the packages from the standard arch repos plus the arco linux repos you just have to issue the word update it prompts for my password and it tells me there's nothing to do it would do that because I've just done an update before turning on the recording as well if we wanted to update all the aur packages as well there's another alias PKS yua and it's going through again there's nothing to do now one of the things that is quite unique really to our co Linux its Arch Linux clearly so it's a rolling release anyway very dubois and his team are constantly tweaking the system once you've installed a copy of our co Linux it's sort of fixed in time with all the tweaks and the configurations and the bash RC that you got right from the word go but if you want to keep your your distribution rolling and constantly pulling down all the latest weeks and the latest configurations there is a way to do that and the way to do that is simply to issue the command scale this will pull down all of the latest changes in your scale directory it will make a copy of your configuration file your dot config file and it will overwrite everything so if I now go to the command line and have a look here you can see that I've actually run scale twice it's taken the whole of my dot config career directory it's backed it up and it's created or it's pasted a brand new copy of the dot config directory so if you want to stay completely up to date run a scale you don't ever have to run the command scale if you don't want to but if you're really keen to stay on the absolutely bleeding aid edge of where our co Linux is up to this is what we do now I said there are our co Linux repositories as well as the standard Arch repositories and you'll see here in the bottom right there is a copy of per Mac so if I was to select repositories for instance you'll see this core extra community and multi Lib which are all our standard repositories but there is also an arco Linux repo which are all the themes and various bits and pieces that come direct from Eric - what do ba there's a third-party repo there's not a huge amount in here there's additional things that you can install I see there's a copy of Mart 8-week they're already installed but a few but the basics are already here and there's a anarcho linux repo extra large right so this is where the brave browser and the Vivaldi browser come from but it goes on and on and on with lots of precompiled packages I've personally found the ark own Linux repos to be quite useful because something like poly bar is in the a you are already but on a narco Linux system where I was installing it it just installed it straight away from the repos the arco linux repo so if i kind of type poly bar yet there's a version of it already in the are coal and it's repo third party so you don't actually have to compile it direct from the aur you have got yay install by default though so you've got access to the aur anyway so I'm really impressed with that it's a lovely clean desktop what about the right-click menu well there are on here right at the bottom still your standard menu you get with right click on xfce but you have quite a few additional things here links to open a terminal to create sim links to search with catfish to compare to open folders as route changing the ownership of a folder to root or to the user and so on and so forth but you've also got a link here to the desktop settings what I want to look at is the wallpaper that we've actually got here because our co Linux does not use the standard xfce wallpapers we have an absolute load of really interesting wallpapers very colorful I quite like this sort of look myself the techie look and there's quite a few of these here I like that I really like that not quite sure what it is but it looks great so yeah you've got lots of options here but this is just xfce let's briefly log out of this and login to the open box system so I now select open box as our main session and login to this and it's just loading up we get our welcome screen again and here we have open box so we have our standard open box and well I say our standard open box menu it's certainly been customized it's a little fuller than what you'll get on a default open box he's obviously using OB menu generator here I'm presuming that this is plank but I'll find out in a minute yes it is plank okay so you've got plank on the left you've got network manager yeah already brought in so if you prefer to work in a window manager and you find that it's just as comfortable for you to work in a window manager as in a desktop environment and your fancy giving open box a shot this isn't bad at all what about if you want to go over to try a bit of tiling well let's just log out here right you've even even got a nicer log out screen there or graphic OB log out I think that's called we're back at the light the EM screen let's now move to I 3 and see what he's done with that right okay so we've already got conky starting out of the box there which can be quite useful because you clearly aren't necessarily going to know how you shut things down and how you do things I mean I'm looking at this so it's a super shift cue so super shift cue okay shuts that down super enter opens a terminal super enter hope is a terminal chef q right so if you want to give I three ago it's a nicely configured I three it's not gone mad as far as all the icons are concerned I was hoping it wasn't gonna be a mass of colors here than it was just gonna be a nice straightforward I three screen and I'm pleased to say that that's exactly what it looks like so if you fancy tiling you could do worse than using this to play around and to see whether it's something that you'd want to look out further that's all I want to say about RK Linux I'll be honest I'm blown away by this I think it's such a clever well put together is oh and yeah let's go in chat right so that's RK Linux to my mind when it comes to arch based distros I won't say it's the best but it's certainly up there with your endeavors in your man gyros in my mind and the actual look and feel of its its default configuration to me it has more of a WOW factor than the other ones that I just mentioned it's personal preference of course I do like the fact however that you can constantly keep it updated with the scale command and pull down or all the latest tweaks and configurations that Eric and his team has done I'm also particularly impressed with that little tweak tool that lets you install the desktop with click of a button that's gonna be something special so it's worth giving it a go I wouldn't recommend it for new starters but I think once you've got your feet wet and you're thinking of moving to have a look at arch it's a good choice you won't go far wrong so that's it for today guys back to the normal land FAQ video you see not a quickie you did last time don't forget to join me on library also the old tech bloke Facebook channel or group should I say seems to be working I'm getting lots of people coming in and saying can I join so I'm not quite sure why some people have had problems but anyway that's it for today and I'll see you on Saturday [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 42,585

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, arch linux, arcolinux, linux installation, arch linux installation, arcolinux installation, arcolinux review, how to install arcolinux, calamares install, gparted, xfce, i3, openbox, how to install linux, best arch installer, installing arch with calamares, customising arco installation, arcolinux xfce, arcolinux openbox, arcolinux i3, arch linux install uefi, arcolinux conky, arch linux customization, how to install arch linux 2020, install arcolinux, arco

Id: VHCxLALqdQA

Length: 37min 49sec (2269 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020