More on the move to Arch Linux
After installing a basic Arch system and adding X.org it still isn’t very usable. My desktop of choice is Gnome, so that’s what I installed next, with a few extra packages to make it prettier and more useful.
I found out the hard way a few weeks ago that if you install gnome without
gnome-extras then it’s a bad idea to install gdm and configure your system
to boot to X. That way you’ll end up in a situation where your desktop
doesn’t have an X terminal. I made sure to avoid that situation this time
around. After installing gnome,gnome-extras and gdm I noticed that both
gdm and policykit created users with uid 120 and 102, respectively. Just
like exptected from services they have low uids. What surprised me was that
they ended up having gid 1001 and 1002. That looks like bugs to me 
I decided to fix that up manually myself by editing the group file (using
vigr of course) and then searching for all file with the offending gids
(using find / -gid 1001 for the first, with obvious changes to find the
second).
After configuring gdm I realised I also needed gdm-themes And I also
added a few pretty fonts, and removed a few of the unpretty ones:
# pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts ttf-cheapskate artwiz-fonts ttf-bitstream-vera
# pacman -Rns xorg-fonts-75dpi xorg-fonts-100dpi
Then of course I needed to install xmonad:
# pacman -S xmonad-contrib
Co-ercing Gnome to actually use it was interesting though. I followed the
instructions for running Xmonad in Jaunty, but that wasn’t enough. I
also needed to place a file named xmonad.desktop in
/usr/share/applications/ with the following contents (greatly inspired by
the metacity.desktop found in the same location):
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xmonad
Exec=xmonad
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-WMName=Xmonad
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager
After that it was time to install stuff that is useful First off was
Thunderbird, which I immidiately had to equip with a few plug-ins of
course. When setting up my mail account again I noticed that my Gnome session
wasn’t quite the way I wanted—there was no gpg-agent running. After a quick
check with the people on arch-general, without receiving any definitive
resolution, I wrote my own little hack to address it. Of course I posted it
in the thread I had started, but I might as well include it here too:
--- /etc/gdm/Xsession_orig 2009-04-27 17:13:50.346834448 +0100
+++ /etc/gdm/Xsession 2009-04-27 17:16:25.310151728 +0100
@@ -213,6 +213,14 @@
fi
fi
+# add seahorse if found
+seahorse="`gdmwhich seahorse-agent`"
+if [ -n "${seahorse}" ] && [ -x "${seahorse}" ]; then
+ command="seahorse-agent --execute $command"
+elif [ -z "${seahorse}" ]; then
+ echo "$0: seahorse not found!"
+fi
+
# add ssh-agent if found
sshagent="`gdmwhich ssh-agent`"
if [ -n "$sshagent" ] && [ -x "$sshagent" ] && [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then
There’s one more tool I can’t live without, parcellite, which is also
available pre-built on Arch.
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