# Arch install

I went through a phase of installing and reinstalling Linux distributions on old
HP machines I have lying around until I got sick of it and returned to my 2017
MacBook Air as a daily driver, but now that it's on its last update of macOS 12,
I'm thinking of gutting it for Arch and will probably pull the trigger once my
Homebrew packages stop working. I also missed i3 the more I got into QMK, and I
use WezTerm, cd/ls, ranger et al more often than Finder these days anyway. I'm
almost anti-mouse at this point.

So here are the steps I followed to install Arch on an HP ProBook 430 I kicked
off a bunk bed in 2017, mostly for my own reference. It does not deviate from
the wiki's installation guide, really, but I like lists and doing these things
manually rather than with something like archinstall.


## Installation

I torrented the latest .iso on my MacBook Air, but Balena Etcher kept saying
"Error opening source," so I used a mirror URL. Straight after booting from the
flash drive and connecting Internet with iwctl, I partitioned the wee internal
drive with cfdisk and ran all these commands to get this lsblk output:

    $ mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
    $ mkswp /dev/sda2
    $ mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda1

    $ mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
    $ mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
    $ mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
    $ swapon /dev/sda2

    NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
    sda      8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk
    ├─sda1   8:1    0     1G  0 part /mnt/boot/efi
    ├─sda2   8:2    0     8G  0 part [SWAP]
    └─sda3   8:3    0 110.2G  0 part /mnt

Write file system table:

    $ genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Essential packages I grabbed while still in [root@archiso]:

    $ pacstrap -K /mnt linux linux-firmware base base-devel vim networkmanager
    efibootmgr grub sof-firmware

Localization, setting root password, and creating my sudo-privileged user are
all well-documented, but I'm a doofus who's too impatient to pull up useradd -h
so:

    $ useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash spica

I know from past experience this laptop demands initramfs, though "why" escapes
me. Just that my first attempts to install Arch on it failed until I ran

    $ mkinitcpio -P

Back in [root@archiso]:

    $ systemctl enable NetworkManager
    $ grub-install /dev/sda
    $ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
    $ umount -a
    $ reboot now


## Visual

On reboot and login I had to run nmcli since I did this over wifi. The next
packages I installed were

* xf86-video-intel
* xorg-server
* i3
* dmenu
* polybar
* firefox
* wezterm
* feh
* picom
* autorandr
* lightdm :/

I've only used and have no complaints about Xorg and don't see any reason to
change since my daily use is mostly writing with some browsing. The one thing
I've always done and did this time around that I don't love is LightDM and its
ugly greeter that depends on GTK (I hate Adwaita, sorry). Since then I've
replaced it with emptty, which is everything I've dreamed.

=> https://github.com/tvrzna/emptty/

I used to change my WezTerm font to anything but JetBrains, but I'm learning
Russian again and you can't beat its Cyrillic support. I also find noto-cjk and
noto-emoji essential and use Latin Modern Mono and Cozette for aesthetics.

I set up SSH and connected to my macOS to copy my public key and grab .config
and .vim. The first repos I cloned were yay and my own projects from GitHub. I
use the AUR sparingly, only for bashmount, spotifytui, nerdfetch, and some fonts
like Cozette and Unifont.

For wallpapers, I've been using HDPI scans of Naoko Takeuchi's artbooks for
Sailor Moon for years, and while mounting my external drive is easiest, I'm
trying my darnedest to escape GUIs and successfully used transmission-cli for
the first time to torrent one volume off nyaa.

=> https://missdream.org/raw-sailor-moon-downloads/manga/art-books/


## To-do

* Write scripts to change feh, polybar, dmenu at night.
* Figure out transmission-remote.
* Find a CLI VPN. I have SurfShark now, but I also use Proton apps and am
  interested in ProtonVPN.