Post Installation

Just logged in after installing? Let's make sure you have a working internet connection. Try running ping gnu.org. If you start receiving packets, then you are connected!. Stop this command by pressing Ctrl-C.

If you do not get any packets, you might want to connect to the internet either using ethernet or wifi. If you are using NetworkManager, also make sure the service is running by using the command sudo systemctl status NetworkManager. If it is not running, start it and enable it using the command sudo systemctl enable --now NetworkManager.

To connect to a wifi network using NetworkManager have a look at the Network Manager page

Info

We will be modifying configuration files from the command line using the tool VIM. You can learn the basics by VIM by reading the VIM page.

PC Speaker

To provide auditory cues, your motherboard usually comes with a simple speaker capable of producing beeps. This can be very loud and annoying when using the terminal, as it might beep quite often. To test if you have this problem, just press <TAB> multiple after logging in, if you hear a beep and want to remove perform the following actions.

Non-Persistant solution

We can disable it by unloading the pcspkr and snd_pcsp kernel modules.

rmmod pcspkr
rmmod snd_pcsp

Persistant solution

There are two easy ways of persisting this change.

Blacklisting modules

You can blacklist the modules to prevent them from being loaded at boot. Either by adding module_blacklist=pcspkr,snd_pcsp in our bootloaders kernel line. (This is "advanced" and will require regenerating your grub config if you are using grub)

or by creating the file /etc/modprobe.d/nobeep.conf (with root permissions) with the following content.

blacklist pcspkr
blacklist snd_pcsp

Console

You can uncomment set bell-style none in /etc/inputrc. (require root permission)

.bashrc

When we are using the terminal we are usually interacting with a shell inside of a terminal emulator. When we open the shell, it loads its "configuration" from the file ~/.bashrc. In here we can set command shortcuts to improve our work flow.

Example

Updating our computer using pacman usually is done using pacman -Syu We can simplify it to update, by adding alias update='pacman -Syu' in our ~/.bashrc file.

Configuring Pacman

Now lets configure pacman so it is more perfomant and readable.

Enabling Parallel Downloads

This will usually significantly improve download times when using pacman. Lets open the file /etc/pacman.conf with root priviledges.

sudo vim /etc/pacman.conf

Now find this line. (using vim)

#ParallelDownloads...

and replace it with

ParallelDownloads = 15

Enabling multilib repository

This repository contains 32-bit applications. Includes applications such as steam. To enable this, uncomment the following lines in /etc/pacman.conf (root permission required)

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Now you will need to update pacman's database by running

sudo pacman -Sy

Enabling color output

This will enable colour ouput which will be helpful for our AUR Helper paru. To enable this, we will need to uncomment Color from /etc/pacman.conf. (root permission required)