Arch Linux tips 'n tricks

[viking60]

Ok I am ready to throw some pearls again: In order to speed up boot time in Arch you can background your deamons.

Backgrounding is starting daemons without waiting for the previous one to finish. That can be made by putting an @ before each daemon's name in rc.conf. However, some daemons should be started before some others, such as hal before wicd. This is my DAEMONS array:

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DAEMONS=(syslog-ng @network netfs @crond @hal @networkmanager @kdm @portmap @fam @alsa @sshd @httpd @mysqld @webmin @proftpd @cups)

You can do this with any deamon except syslog-ng

[viking60]

I just need to write this down somewhere so I thought this might be a good place. Install reflector.
To find the 8 most updated mirrors and to sort them by speed:

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# reflector -l 8 -r -o /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist


[viking60]

I like to keep my system clean so I tend to remove my orphans whenever I can. In Mandriva this was easy with urpme --auto-orphans or apt-get autoremove in Debian. In Arch it is easy to list them all with

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pacman -Qdt

This will give you a nice list over the orphans that are no longer needed by any application.
In my case that list was quite long so I did not want to remove them one by one, with pacman -Rs.
The solution is to combine the the two commands:

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pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qqdt)

This will list all your orphans and prompt you for deleting them.
Remember pacman -Qqtd will only list packages that are installed as a dependency - not if they in fact are needed as a dependency. (Better install things right!)

To clear the pacman cache you can do a

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pacman -Sc

(I needed to write this down too )

[viking60]

OK I like pacman but it was necessary to maintain the repos there. I like yaourt because I can query anything there and install directly from AUR. To speed things up I got the tip to install powerpill. That did not replace yaourt but it sure did speed things up when upgrading a lot of files. I also integrated it in yaourt.
It might have speeded things up, there but I still had to wait a bit.
Having installed powerpill I could now install Bauerbill. It is based on powerpill and adds some of the functionality of yaourt.
And it is fast
Edit:
After having installed it I do not see anything brilliant yet about using it. so I installed packer too. That one does it.

[dedanna1029]

How did you integrate powerpill with yaourt? Curious.

Very nice tips, btw. Thank you. I'll be able to use some of these.

[viking60]

Edit /etc/yaourtrc

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sudo nano /etc/yaourtrc

And add the line:
PACMANBIN="/usr/bin/powerpill"

Like this:

# yaourtrc - Configuration for yaourt
#
# See yaourtrc(5) for more information
#
#
ABS_REPO=(testing core extra community-testing community gnome-unstable kde-uns$
#NOCONFIRM=0
#FORCE=0
#AUTOSAVEBACKUPFILE=0
#FORCEENGLISH=0
#EDITFILES=1
#AURCOMMENT=1
#DEVELBUILDDIR="/var/abs/local/yaourtbuild/"
#DEVEL=0
#NOENTER=1
#AURUPGRADE=0
#AURVOTE=1
#AURSEARCH=1
#TERMINALTITLE=1
#EXPORTDIR=""
#TMPDIR="/tmp"
#MAXCOMMENTS=5
#EDITOR="$EDITOR"
PACMANBIN="/usr/bin/powerpill"
#COLORMODE="normal"
#SHOWORPHANS=1
#DIFFEDITCMD="vimdiff"
#DETAILUPGRADE=1

[dedanna1029]

Ooooooooo nice. Thank you!

[viking60]

I wanted to find out which programs that required PHP:

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pacman -Qi php |grep 'Required By'

Required By : phpmyadmin

Nice for removing bloat.

[viking60]

IPv6 is using a lot of resources when activated so it might speed browsing up to disable it:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IP ... the_Module

My browser was like a turtle on Pot and this fixed it!

[viking60]

I just installed nessus:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nessus
Real useful security check there.
I had to download the Fedor Core 14 rpm package and yaourt did the rest.

[dedanna1029]

IPv6 is using a lot of resources when activated so it might speed browsing up to disable it:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IP ... the_Module

Which method there did you use?

May give Nessus a try... thanks.

[viking60]

I altered /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

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# disable autoload of ipv6
alias net-pf-10 off