Manjaro Architect - Install Your Own Manjaro Distro

hello and welcome back to the otb channel so you know i'm an arch fan you know i'm a tweaker you know that i don't like things to be overly customized and uh i would rather start off with a really clean as close to vanilla as possible base and i found myself asking the question recently well manjaro has a tool that's meant to allow you to do that called manjaro architect why haven't you looked at that before so today that's what i'm gonna do see you after the intro okay welcome back um yeah so manjaro architect i don't know why i've not looked at it before if if i'm honest uh i've looked at you know archfy and uh various other script-based arch installers and yet manjaro architect seems to have passed me by and i think it's probably because you don't hear that much about it um but it's it's a manjaro system that works of a 2e rather than a gui so so it's it's in the terminal and it allows you to configure a manjaro system however you want it which sounds great um so i thought well i've got to give it a try haven't i i mean manjaro whether you love it or hate it has been riding high on distro watcher number two for goodness knows how long not the distro watch the league tables are in any way you know an indication of overall popularity um because they're just not they're just about page hits but i think in terms of an archbase distro manjaro is probably the most popular because it's the most user-friendly so what's this manjaro architect all about and is it worth looking at so i've i've just done a little uh i've just been playing with it and i've just done an install with it and what i would say before we go any further is um i'm your typical bloke really you know i don't read instructions so i didn't really read anything about manjaro architect i i simply went to the manjaro page i downloaded the iso and things did not go well i did eventually get things working as you'll see um and i got a system up and running um the problems that i experienced were more to do with me not doing the research and a little bit of preparation before using it but i always take the view that hey i'm gonna download and try this many of you may do the same and uh this will hopefully avoid you making some of the same mistakes that i did but let's go across to the split screen and let's have a look at manjaro's website so here here we have it i just went over to manjaro's uh main website manjaro.org forward slash download and get architect is in the main list of distros there you know so i could scroll up and it starts with xfce then gives you plasma then gnome then architect so it tells you set up and configure manjaro in every detail using the command line it comes with a 2e installer which is all good and allows total customization on your manjaro installation which i thought was great so you can choose your kernel you can choose which branch you're going to go on stable testing or unstable choose your desktop environment add any unconfigured desktop environment that you want choose your shell choose your graphic drivers choose the additional packages that you want installed great okay all good um i quite fancy doing this because i wanted to see what i ended up with so uh i downloaded the iso which was seven hundred and something megs so not overly uh heavy by any stretch of the imagination and it booted and you log in with the username manjaro and the password manjaro and you proceed as you meant to proceed and i found on the wiki page a set of instructions about how you go on and essentially you log in and then you once you've logged in you just type set up and you follow along that's the theory so the theory looks simple enough you probably notice though that um it's 20.03 which i'm assuming is march to uh sorry yeah march 2020 this iso so i had kind of clocked that at the beginning and i thought that's pretty old and uh it turns out it's too old it booted okay i was able to log into it okay i was able to update the pacman keys okay but as soon as i hit setup uh it errored out it had an error message and i went on the web and uh i found a number of posts some saying that i had to install something first to replace something that was old so i did that um and it started again and this time i managed to get the screen up in manjaro architect that asked me to you know set my language etc etc and it all seemed to be going as it should be until i got to partitioning and unfortunately um manjaro could not see the virtual hard drive at all so without part being able to partition i couldn't get anywhere so manjaro um i i need to say that if this is too old this iso you need to remove it from your downloads section yes i should have read up on that and if i'd read some of the articles i would have found out that this download is problematic but unless it's updated there's not much point having a standalone iso however there is an alternative way of doing it download any mangiaro iso that you want and you will see on the desktop that there is a link to manjaro architect so rather than launching calamaris you can just not launch the architect and go through the process while you're in the live cd it's still a 2e it's not a gui but it does take you through the process and this time it worked so let's move over i i downloaded xfce the xfce version of manjaro and you'll see how i got on right so uh i've booted into uh the xfce manjaro iso that i've downloaded and it's booted fine it's gone into full hd which is brilliant i quite like the look of that i i've not used the xfce version of manjaro before but the purpose of this is not to double click on the install icon but to actually go for manjaro architect and you'll see that there is a link there on the desktop now i've never used this before and i probably should have done some preparation i've not done a huge amount but let me just make this full screen and let's see what it does it seems to be setting itself up now disabling keys retrieving packages and okay it's gone straight through to select my language and i'm going to select english all checks passed all good it's now going to download the latest packages from the manjaro repositories uh menu options i can select by pressing the option number or the up and down keys yeah yeah okay prepare installation so i presume this is where it's going to take me through partitioning the disk eventually set virtual console so currently configured key map setting is us so i do want to change that i want uk which is probably going to be all the way down at the bottom i would imagine so let's just go down there and see if we can find it there we go uk list devices optional okay so fine it spotted the virtual box hard drive just out of interest i did try the uh iso installer just from manjaro architect and that was where it went all wrong when i tried to list the devices it couldn't find anything so um we're next on to partition disk so devices are available the first is sda second sdb okay so that's the one i want what do i want to do uh do i want to securely wipe the device and set up for bias and uefi automatic partitioning bias and uefi or do i want to use cf disk do you know i'm going to try here and use automatic as far as possible to see how simple it is so let's go for automatic partitioning okay everything's going to be destroyed that's far fine off you go and what's it done it's created a 512 meg partition and it looks to me like a root partition so it may well have set this up in uefi potentially but okay raid i don't want to do that lvm i don't want to do that l-u-k-s encryption don't want to do that but it's good to have that as the option as is zfs so i want to mount the partitions partitions can be mounted without formatting them by selecting the do not format option okay let's just click ok select root partition so that's going to be that one i want to format that with ext4 yes use space to deselect the desired mount options so noah time is selected by default which is good especially if you're using an ssd because it does limit the rights confirm the following amount options no time yeah all good mount successful right so select the swap partition so it's a swap partition the 512 megs or is it uh swap file no it's not it's just selecting everything i'm going to go with no swap file that's what i'm going to go with select additional partitions in any order or done to finish i'm just going to select done to finish i don't want to set up a uefi partition at this stage not really although i suppose no i i've booted this in standard bias mode so i'm just going to say standard done configure install a mirror list um well let's just rank mirrors by speed let's just do it simple we want stable and it's going through its checks right so it's um it's finished this i just pause that for a second and it's gone through and it's done a speed test i'm gonna just select united kingdom and set it to okay i want to use those mirrors absolutely so okay we go back conf or refresh pacman keys okay let let's let it do its stuff all good so far just a little bit wary about that partitioning stage so it's uh refreshing 146 keys so all good so far right so all the keys have been refreshed again i just pause that uh very slightly uh just to allow that to take place now if we got choose pacman cache do you want to use the pacman cache off the running system instead of the installation target this can reduce the size of the required download in the installation um yeah why not enable fsck hook do you want to use ffck hook let's say yes and back right so we're now on to install a desktop system which is what we want you could install a cli system or your own custom system but let's go for the desktop system what do i want to do so install a manjaro desktop okay i want uh linux lts i'm gonna go for the lts kernel and choose a desktop environment well i'm going to go for marty so you just hit the spacebar okay good would you like to add any additional packages to your installation let's say yes and let's see what it comes up with choose any extra packages you'd like to add okay press tab to select multiple packages and proceed or quit with enter okay so let's move down so arch linux keyring what else do i want bash i certainly want to install bing utils and let me just work my way through here and choose a few bits and pieces quite interesting here because although it's asking us to uh install the manjaro desktop i'm finding it quite confusing understanding what everything is here so it really is quite fine grain it even asks us if we want to install grub or grub fedora right i must admit i'm found finding this part quite confusing because i'm not entirely sure what everything is i would have thought installing a multi desktop would have installed a lot of this by by default but no everything is configurable including sudo and i can even choose to install systemd which as far as i'm a word is required for the marte desktop but perhaps i'm wrong right i've just unpaused this uh i i have to say i'm getting a bit bored now let's go for libra office fresh here okay all good i'm hitting the tab key and i suppose we should go for gb there we are and uh it seems to scroll forever so uh we'll come back again in a minute right so i'm beginning to think that i should have just said no to extra packages i'm gonna i'm going to hit okay to come out of that i think the thing is if you are really certain about you only want very very specific libraries installed by all means uh agreed to install those additional packages i tend to feel now though that it was the wrong choice to to pick that what i should have done is just say no to that and then it goes on to full or minimal so we're talking about marty here what do i want full i'll let it do its thing and then i shall go and do what i need to do after that so full this is obviously what it is so i presumably write that out and it's doing its thing so let's see what what happens once it's finished right so uh the initial install seems to have more or less finished um we've now got to this uh display driver section do we want to auto install free drivers or auto install proprietary drivers i'm going to select proprietary drivers here simply because we're on virtualbox and it says a successfully installed video virtual machine so great all done now install the bootloader what do we want grub or grub plus os pro well this is a virtual machine so it doesn't need to detect any other operating systems so we'll just go for grub and yes i do want it installed on dev sda to the master boot record this may fail on some machines running a custom kernel right okay but it seems to have worked for me configure the base right so generate an f-stab so by uuid your name let's do it by uuid set a host name uh we'll we'll stick with the default hey manjaro set system locale uh right so there we go on gb uh right okay set desk top keyboard layout okay so is this gb or is it uk i can never never remember to be honest uh let's just see if there's a uk there i have a feeling it's actually gb this one the terminal is uk but for the desktop environment it's gb right there we go gb set time zone and clock okay europe and london even though i'm nowhere near london there we go london set time zone europe london yes please and do i want it in utc or local time let's keep it as utc set root password okay enter again add a new user okay otb oh i want bash please thank you password for otb and it's creating the user and setting groups and we move back system tweaks what does this involve do we want to enable automatic login enable hibernation no i don't want any of those things what about performance i o schedulers i'm just going to leave that as as is swap configuration swappiness set to 10. okay that's not bad save that and come out of that preload i don't want to do that let's go back security and system d tweaks no i don't think i want to do any of that at this stage so let's go back review configuration uh files i don't even think i want to do that but let's see what what it gives us the opportunity to do okay so pretty good i like the fact that it gives you that uh that uh opportunity um shrews into the installation um why not let's just see so i'm now shooting in i want to see how it set up these partitions interestingly it seems to have set up sda1 as the booting partition i don't know if that will work but that's flagged as boot i didn't set sda1 to anything so we'll see but let's just exit out of here and that should take us back um right we're getting a bit of interference here interesting perhaps if we say done um i'm not sure what the flashing screen is all about here i can't seem to to click done okay well the only thing i can do is come out close window and let's see where we're up to well the good news is and i was a little bit worried whether this would work it has actually booted and uh you can see what it's booted into so let's just make sure that if i can log in where we get to and i'm hoping to see a nice desktop here and phew i have indeed got a marte desktop so um it wasn't problem free i'm not sure why it uh completely struggled what have we actually got in the menu here have we actually got we have got uh libreoffice that's great i don't know what we've got another hp scan admin accessories sound and video the lc is there already it seems to have done it amazing um and uh if i uh bring up a terminal so there's the mart 8 terminal i presume now if i go in for pseudo pac-man s-y-u it should be fully updated and it is and sudo is indeed configured out of the box right okay so despite the fact of me not feeling that it might have done it it seems to have figured itself out so all good let's go and have a chat right so that's manjaro architect um you'll have noticed i've now corrected the uh where are we the spelling of manjaro here i only noticed this after i'd already recorded the rest so hey mistakes happen i i leave them in so what did i think um well some lessons learned uh if you're going to use manjaro architect don't download the iso just download any of the other isos and use it from there it has some advantages you can customize your installation as much as you want to do i think if i was to use it again i wouldn't go for the automatic petitioning i would do the partitioning myself before i even launched it um i didn't quite understand why it created that additional 512 meg partition as well as my root partition as i wasn't actually doing a uefi system but i suppose it was it was to to account for the fact that that might be something that you wanted to do um but it worked it booted um and up until the point where i decided i made the decision to install additional packages and it just went through loads and loads of libraries which some of them i didn't know what they did and i think that would just confuse the heck out of you and in future i would just say no to that and go for the standard marte install either a minimal marte install or the full install i did end up though while i was choosing additional packages uh choosing all the manjaro customer customizations which i didn't have to do and presumably i could have ended up with a vanilla marte if i'd wished to do that but i just wanted to see how it worked so it does work it does get you a customized system uh it does gives you an up-to-date system because it's essentially a net install would i use it um well to install manjaro i i think personally i'd just go for the standard uh marte marty install rather than going through the architect um probably quicker just to remove the programs that i don't want then it took me to actually go through the architect but i also feel that you know if you're looking for a vanilla arch install that takes less time than the architect does to be honest and i think that's probably a lot more straightforward compared to other similar um tui installs or script-based installs i think i think i also need to give a a big shout out to esnix i'm sure most of you follow his channel and he's constantly working on his uh easy archer iso and what i love about that i perhaps should have showcased that and i need to do that i need to do that in the coming weeks your boot is live iso and and you have a choice of three different installation methods you can just do a calamaris install and get a standard desktop which i believe is mate now or you can run one of his scripts and you can edit the script beforehand to get a customized installed just as you want it or you can open a terminal on the live system and follow his myway arch install and get the very very traditional arch installation so it gives you more choices i appreciate the fact that manjaro architect now that it's combined with all the other isos gives you a choice when you download an iso but i don't know uh i i just feel that is there a need for it with manjaro if you want manjaro don't you want the customizations that manjaro offers maybe i'm wrong maybe it's just me not not seeing it as far as the installer is concerned and apart from my mistakes great but manjaro you need to remove that iso right guys um there isn't going to be a video uh for the next week or two i'm taking a little bit of a holiday uh we're coming up we're only a couple of months off two years and i've pretty much produced a video every single saturday and uh i've got quite a few projects that i want to do on raspberry pi's and i want to have a bit bit of a play so i'm gonna put some time aside just for the next two weeks it's temporary i will be back it's been prompted as much as anything else uh that next weekend i'm due to get the jab and quite a few of my friends and colleagues who've had the jab appear to have a day or two with where they feel pretty rough so i'm preempting it as much as anything else i'm probably not going to be feeling on top form anyway so uh it's time to take a little bit of a minor break where i can play with some stuff and then come back and show you what i've played with so i hope you enjoyed today this really was me playing with no preparation should have done the preparation really but i didn't um so i just like to say hope you enjoyed it anyway um come and join me on the facebook group certainly come and join me on library oh and by the way while i'm here if i can say hello and thank you to my patreons robert gary aristotelis storm pick stephen mike david bird richard wade tiger patrick glenn magnus skipper and john m thank you guys your support has helped a lot have a great weekend everyone and i'll see you in a week or two

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 7,544

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, manjaro, manjaro linux, manjaro architect, custom manjaro installation, manjaro tui installation, manjaro architect iso, manjaro xfce, manjaro architect installer, manjaro architect tutorial, manjaro linux architect, how to install manjaro architect, how to install manjaro architect edition, step by step, manjaro linux review, install arch linux bios, operating system tutorial, manjaro installation guide

Id: zAsMKikkuHI

Length: 31min 14sec (1874 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021