Arch Linux tips 'n tricks

[viking60]

Here is a good description of the new installation method:
http://ebalaskas.gr/wiki/archlinux/netinstall

[viking60]

Arch GUI package managements seems to come and go. Some are just to dangerous to use and some have dependencies that get broken.
Now there is a GUI front end for the great pacman that only depends on X:
PacmanXG4 is yet another GUI package manager but this one is pretty safe and also lets you update your AUR packages.

It gives a nice overview over all the options that pacman (and Yaourt) have to offer.

And why do you need it? Eh well you don't - but it is nice to search for a package and get info the easy way before you install it so why not?

You can use it to find your fastest mirrors, remove orphans, update the system - the works!
It is also a good tool to learn pacman because it will show you what commands it is executing.

To start pacmanxg4 you need to start it like this

Code: Select all

/opt/pacmanxg4/pacmanxg

******************
But there is a little helper that will keep track of your updates that is more suitable for updating both the standard repos and AUR:
Kalu wil keep track of updates from your standard repos and also what you have compiled from AUR.
Kalu might be all you need - In my case I have a problem to keep all my AUR stuff updated. Kalu tells me when it is time to react. Also I can mark packages that are not installed if I want to wait for a certain release etc - and Kalu will inform me about it:

So does this mean that Arch has become newbie friendly?
No certainly not!
Try any other distro and gain some experience and then try Arch:
These nice and easy tools do not replace the the important stuff between the Keyboard and the chair....

[viking60]

I use Grub legacy.
And I use e4rat to speed up boot time.
The problem: is that Arch has changed the path from /bin/systemd to /user/lib/systemd/systemd This needs to be altered wherever present in your boot process.

The solution:
Edit /etc/e4rat.conf and alter this line from:

Code: Select all

init /bin/systemd

to

Code: Select all

init /usr/lib/systemd/systemd

Save and life is good again

I have altered the Arch wiki to reflect the change

[viking60]

Lately we get a PGP key not trusted error when we update the Tor-Browser in Arch based distros (Manjaro Arch++++).
You can normally update your AUR apps with:

Code: Select all

yaourt -Syua

But Tor-browser will fail.
To get it to work I did a:

Code: Select all

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0x4E2C6E8793298290

The last number is the key ID and may vary it is published here

and then:

Code: Select all

gpg --fingerprint 0x4E2C6E8793298290 

after that the update went just fine.

More here

[viking60]

I have this laptop that works OK but on every boot I get Load Kernel modules failed.

So I decided to use the systemd way to get rid of it:

Code: Select all

systemctl status systemd-modules-load

This showed me the load kernel module error and the PID -117 - so I drilled down further with

Code: Select all

journalctl _PID=117

This showd me the following:

Code: Select all

-- Reboot --
juni 07 16:58:57 heidi-lap systemd-modules-load[117]: Inserted module 'nfs'
juni 07 16:58:57 heidi-lap systemd-modules-load[117]: Failed to find module 'startx' <--------- !!!!
juni 07 16:58:58 heidi-lap systemd-modules-load[117]: Inserted module 'loop'
juni 07 16:58:58 heidi-lap systemd-modules-load[117]: Inserted module 'fuse'

Startx does work regardless of this error message.

Since startx was the "problem" ; I need to check the config file for it in /etc/modules-load.d/
here I found the file startx.conf
I opened it with nano and it did only contain one word:

Code: Select all

startx

The thing is that starx works but systemd keeps giving me the load kernel modules error on every boot so I decided to comment it out like this;

Code: Select all

#startx

Would this stop the GUI from starting after a reboot? Time to find out...
I rebooted and everything was fine
The error message was gone (and maybe the boot was a litle bit faster).
The system check is clean as a whistle after this fix:

Code: Select all

systemctl status systemd-modules-load
 systemd-modules-load.service - Load Kernel Modules
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-modules-load.service; static; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (exited) since ma. 2015-06-08 08:29:31 CEST; 1min 48s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-modules-load.service(8)
           man:modules-load.d(5)
  Process: 128 ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-modules-load (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 128 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-modules-load.service


If I needed to fix this?
No - everything worked - but that error message was anoying

[dedanna1029]

Thank you! I used to get that a lot until my netbook crashed. Indeed, annoying!

[viking60]

Downgrade PHP7 to PHP 5.6

Code: Select all

yaourt -S php56

Here you migh get a pgp key error so you need to get the signature of the maintainer:

Code: Select all

gpg --keyserver hkp://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys C2BF0BC433CFC8B3 FE857D9A90D90EC1

Edit the server conf:

Code: Select all

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Comment out php7 and add the php5 stuff like this:

Code: Select all

#LoadModule php7_module modules/libphp7.so
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp56.so
#Include conf/extra/php7_module.conf
Include conf/extra/php56_module.conf

then restart the server:

Code: Select all

sudo systemctl restart httpd.service

Now you are running php5 but you will need to adjust mysql too I will get back to that...