Installing Xorg And A Window Manager In Arch Linux

a few days ago i made an updated video on how to install arch linux i ran through the base arch linux install so you know the pack strap command and all of that and then once i rebooted and had a working command prompt and you know networking was working i left it at that right because that really is the end of the base installation process the software you install after that is really up to you so it's always tough to decide what to do on a video past that because you guys want to see more you guys want to see xorg installed you want to see a desktop environment and or a window manager and various other applications terminal emulators and text editors you know you want to see me set it up to live in and that's tough because i have to make some decisions and whatever decisions i make on this video people are not going to agree with right because i'm going to do gnome but the kde guys want to see me do an installation of kde on art or xfce or awesome window manager or i3 or whatever it is so today i'm just going to make some executive decisions but very quickly i'm going to set up xorg and a window manager on a base installation of arch linux so those of you that were following along with me the other day and actually went through the base install with me inside virtualbox go grab that virtual machine that you created and what i did is i took that virtual machine here called arch linux and what i did is i cloned that virtual machine that it takes like a minute or two to clone that virtual machine i cloned it like three times that way i have the same virtual machine here basically i've got four versions of it why did i do this well i don't know i may break some stuff you may break some stuff you may break xor trying to install it or light dm or whatever login manager you do you may have a broken desktop environment or window manager and it's nice to you know do everything in one of these cloned vms and just leave that base installation alone you've always got that you can always come back to it later clone it again if you break some of these clones i'm just going to launch one of these clones here and it will be basically where we left off the other day which should just be a command prompt remember we set up the root user root password we also created a normal user and a normal password for that user so i created uh my user dt i'm going to log in as dt and it's going to ask me for dt's password here let me scale that up so you guys hopefully can see the font the font will be a little blurry you know blowing it up like this but at least you can read what i'm going to do and again i'm going to go over this very quickly i'm going to make some decisions on some software that i want to install i know you guys are going to have different things you want to install but at the end of the day you have to make your own decisions and if you have a problem with what you're trying to install don't ask me about it go consult the archwiki all right so here's the very first thing i want to do i want to do a pseudo pacman dash capital s so we're going to install some software and then what do we need to install now i'm in a virtual box here you know we probably need a video driver at some point i'm going to do the xf 86-video dash fb div i believe is the one i need here inside virtualbox i could be wrong about that but if i reboot and i i don't get uh next server working i'll come back and install some other drivers let's install x11 so install xorg that's just the big meta package with all the x11 things in it like x render and x set root and all that stuff just install the whole xorg package one other thing i need to install we need xor dash x init because i'm not going to bother setting up a login manager like light dm i've done that on videos in the past check some older videos if you want to see that all i'm doing on this video is i'm going to use the x init rc file and we're just going to start x to launch whatever desktop environment or window manager i install and then i think i'm going to do a window manager a standalone window manager we're going to need to draw wallpaper so i typically use a program called nitrogen a standalone window manager is not going to have a compositor so let's install picom for a compositor typically the three tools you need to always make sure you install before trying to log into a new desktop environment or window manager you want to make sure you have a text editor you want to make sure you have a terminal emulator and you want to make sure you have a web browser so you can go read documentation if you need help now on my previous video i knew that vm would not be installed out of the box so i already installed vm but if i had not i would add vm to the list as far as a terminal i'm going to add a terminal here in a minute but if you want to go ahead and put your favorite terminals such as termite or whatever it is you use alacrity is also in the standard repos you could add that i'm going to add a terminal at a later time in just a little bit and then i mentioned we need a web browser i'll go ahead and install firefox right now so let me type it correctly so i'll install all of this because all of this is in the standard arch repositories give it my root password it's asking me do i want everything associated with xor yes i do this may be a rather large download i'll pause the video for a minute or two all right we finished installing all of that the next thing i need to do is i need to go ahead and install the terminal emulator we really need a terminal emulator before we log into a window manager and then we also need a window manager itself and the reason i didn't add those to that previous list of things to install is because the terminal emulator i'm going to install and the window manager i'm going to install i'm going to grab from the aur but the aur we haven't actually enabled the aur just yet so let me get over here let me clear the screen and here is how you enabled aur we're going to install it the proper way without a aur helper because that's the only way to install uh the aur at first is without a aur helper so let's go ahead and do it the official way so first do a get clone and then this url http colon slash aur.archlinux.org i just happen to know this url here slash yay dash get dot get and it's going to clone that repository from the aur and if i did an ls right now i'll do it ls space dash la for long format and all files including the hidden files you will see in my home directory i only have one other directory yay dash get that we just did that git clone let's cd into yay dash get i'll do it ls let's do it ls dash la again and really the only thing in here is the source info and the package build that's basically just an arch package let's go ahead and make it and the standard way to make an arch package is to run this command make package make pkg space dash si give it those flags run that it says error cannot find the fake root binary so i i made a mistake there before we can build packages on arch you do need a set of packages from this meta package called base dash deville so run a sudo pacman dash capital s base dash deville and it's going to ask you do you want to install these 24 programs here and these are all programs that have to be installed before you can run things like make packages some of the various things you need for building arch packages and aur packages things like that fake root command that's number five in the list which is the one we needed and let's install them all and then now that we've done that let me clear the screen i'm still in the yay dash get repository so if i did ls again you can see there's the source info in the package build now let me run the make pkgs space dash s command and now it should build yay for me i don't think i mentioned that when i started doing the git clone and everything what we're installing here is yay the aur helper and yay has finished installing so now we can install stuff from the aur using the yay command yay space dash capital s similar to the pacman commands although yay you don't necessarily have to include the dash capital s i often do because the flags for pacman work with yay too now what i want to install i want to install a window manager i also want to install a terminal emulator and the reason i'm using yay here is because i have my own dwm in the arch repository so i'm going to do a yay dash capital s dwm dash distro tube dash get is the name of the package i also need to grab my build of st the terminal so s t dash distrotube dash get i also want my build of d menu d menu dash distro to dash get i could also grab my build of surf i think is also in the aur although i already installed firefox even though i keep a build of surf around firefox is a much better browser honestly anything else i need i think tabbed is also a requirement for my build of st but i think yay is going to recognize that as a dependency and install tabbed anyway i really think that's all i need you know what there is one thing i know because people have complained about it i haven't got around to it i'm sorry guys but my build of dwm does have a missing dependency it really should include this dependency here and that is nerd dash fonts dash mono noki because in my dwm config it calls on the mononoke font the mononoke nerd font specifically and for whatever reason when i made the dwm distro tube aur package i did not list that as a dependency so i need to fix that i'll try to fix that sometime this weekend but those of you that if you install exactly what i'm installing on this video a day or two after i put the video out it's probably still going to be broken so make sure you install nerd dash fonts dash mono noki if you try to use my build of dwm and let me hit enter a couple of times now of course you guys would install whatever window manager desktop environment you want to install if you want to install the base version of dwm you know go grab it from the success website and configure it to your liking if you already have your config files for a window manager on something like github or gitlab that's great matter of fact that's typically what i would do i would just install something like x-moned and then i'd run a git clone of my doc files to bring down my ex monad configs and i'd be done this is very similar except instead of having to go grab it from my git lab you know i'm just grabbing it from the aur because i have my dwm package in the aur so we've got xorg we've got our window manager can we just reboot and start into x well there's something else we need to do we're going to use the x init file so let's go ahead i'm going to clear the screen if i do a ls dash la in my home directory i don't have a dot x in it rc in this directory like i should now we could copy one because there is one on the system an example one let me copy slash etsy slash x11 that's capital x11 and then x init well just tab complete here x init rc all right and let's copy that over to slash home slash dt and we're going to name it dot x in it rc very important to put the dot in front of it where you're copying it to your home folder and now if i do an ls you will see that dot x-net rc is actually not here why is it not here well because i'm not in the right directory i'm still in the yay dash get directory let me cd to get back into the home directory and now run that ls and there is the dot init rc and the next thing we need to do is edit it in our text editor now i had already installed vim on the previous video i did so i do have a text editor on the system i'm going to page down to get to the end here and the very end of the x in it rc starts twm tom's window manager and various x11 utilities such as xclock and three different x terms you guys have probably seen that if you just install xor and run start x you know x 11 does have its own window manager built in called twm it's not a very good window manager so what i would do is get to those last five lines and then vim dd just dd about five times to get rid of those last five lines because we are going to start some other stuff and what i want to do is first when i start x and it launches my window manager what i really wanted to do is i wanted to draw the wallpaper on the screen and we're going to use nitrogen for that and the command to restore our wallpaper using nitrogen is nitrogen space dash dash restore and give it an amper sign at the end because we want that to be a background process a process running in the background we want our compositor to also be running so picom space and then a ampersand and then let's go ahead and execute our window manager which is going to be dwm in in my case in your case it might be i3 or awesome or xmlnet or whatever it is you're trying to start so let me colon wq and vm to write and quit and i really think that's about it i think i could reboot now let me go ahead and do a pseudo reboot let's see what happens and it's starting we have a login let me log in as my normal user you don't want to be root when you start x you need to be a normal user so whatever user you created as a normal user log in and then run the command start x if everything works correctly your window manager should launch now this is a little weird because i think x11 started just fine i think xorg is running but nothing's going on he said i don't see any errors on the screen i think what happened is virtualbox there's a problem with the driver so what i'm going to do is let me kill this vm and let me go into the settings of this vm and see what kind of driver we're using under display v m svga that's the default driver i have enable 3d acceleration ticked on let me take that off was there something that xor didn't like there and it wasn't xorg failed to start it wasn't that because you would get errors and i could go read the logs if that was the case but i think xorg started it's just the vm was just not able to show me what was going on yeah that was it we just needed to change that setting in virtualbox and this is my build of dwm and it's got the correct fonts these my workspaces we also had my version of st let me that's typical dwm right there and if i do the super shift enter there is my d menu so we installed those all three of those from the aur now let me open a terminal let's get a proper screen resolution so if i do a x render let's see what screen resolutions are available to me i would prefer 1920x1080 but it doesn't look like that's available in virtual blocks with these drivers but 1680x1050 is available so that's a pretty good resolution and let's see if i can you know what let's make it full screen if i can alright now that we've got a a better screen resolution wallpapers now what i would do is i'm going to run another git clone get clone https colon slash and this time the url is going to be gitlab.com dwt1 this is my get lab slash wallpapers dot get let's clone my wallpapers repository over at my gitlab all right now that we've done that if i did a ls here you see that i now have a wallpapers repository so let's cd into wallpapers i run an ls you know i have about 300 wallpapers in that directory so let me close the terminal and then i'm going to start the menu and i'm going to launch nitrogen this was the program that will draw our wallpapers i'm going to go down here to preferences and i'm going to add a directory i'm going to go to the home folder to wallpapers i'm going to select the wallpapers folder and i'm going to click ok it's going to load all of those wallpapers in nitrogen and then i just need to pick one now pick this one right here i'm going to click apply and i think i need to have it scaled otherwise i don't think it's going to fill the whole screen there it is all right and now let me quit out of d menu let's get back to the command prompt and start x launch d menu again yep and you see our wallpaper starts again although now i have to run x render which i could add x render to the startup script so you know this isn't a problem of course now i'd have to run nitrogen again too but this is just a vm problem this is not something you guys would have to fool with here now some of you if you're running a standalone window manager and you're using stardex some of you guys are not going to want to have to log in with your username and then your password and then type start x to log in you probably want to skip that startx script so you can do that in your bash profile so open in your favorite text editor i'll use them the dot dash underscore profile file on your system and i'm going to go to the last line here and hit o to get into insert mode and add another line and i'm going to insert this command here so i'm going to do two opening brackets and then a dollar symbol and then an opening parenthesis fg console all one word and then two greater than sign slash dev slash null and then a closing parenthesis space and then equals equal space one and then the two closing brackets oh that's not the right brackets the square brackets all right and then after that and and execute start x space dash dash space v t one i found that on the internet there's a several ways you can go about starting x automatically but your bash profile gets read you know before anything else so when you log in immediately your bash profile is read and because you have that command where it's you're telling it hey go ahead and start x it's just going to start x automatically for you you don't have to worry about it so i'm going to write and quit and let's do a pseudo reboot and if this worked when we log in it should automatically start x4 so give it just a second here all right we're at a prompt and let me log in with my username and my pass and it starts x automatically and i think that's where i want to stop with this video because honestly there's no point in going any further because again what you install is going to be completely different than what i just did and to be honest i wouldn't use startx i wouldn't use the xn yet i did that on this video because i've never done that on video before and you guys have asked about it i would install light dm i would install a login manager and use that the reason i do that though is because i have so many window managers installed on my systems but if you only run one window manager yeah it makes sense to just use the x init and just use startx and you guys that even though i did my personal builds of dwm and st and all of that very few of you guys probably want to do that just install whatever window manager or desktop environment you're used to hopefully again you guys have your own config stored on your personal get lab or github and that way as soon as you have the window manager installed get clone that repository that has your dot files boom you're done really it's so simple that installation of arch linux i did the other day the base install seriously probably took 15 to 20 minutes i don't know the run time of that video was a little over 30 minutes but that's me talking in the video i probably did the base install in about 15 minutes and installing xorg and my window managers because i already have them configured you know if you get your own configs you've already got yours config that seriously took 15 minutes i mean i can be up and working in a brand new arch linux installation with a working desktop environment or window manager and about half an hour people make arch linux seem like it's a lot more time consuming than it is it's not that time consuming if you come at it prepared now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank michael gabe corbinian mitchell devon fran arch 5530 akami channel chuck claudio donnie dylan george kell of devils louis paul scott and willie they are the producers of this episode without these guys this video about how to install xorg in a window manager inside arch linux this video wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work look for distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 194,485

Rating: 4.9445562 out of 5

Keywords: arch linux, desktop environment, window manager, linux help, install arch linux, display manager, arch install, arch linux tutorial, arch linux installation, desktop environment arch linux, window managers linux, window manager arch, aur, arch user repository, xorg, dwm, startx, xinit, xinitrc, arch wiki, btw i use arch, linux, gnu linux, how to install arch linux

Id: pouX5VvX0_Q

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WonderHollow]

Good old X

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the post DT