Things to do after installing Arch (part I)

In the universe GNU / Linux as we well know there is something for all tastes, and just as there distros that arrive with everything ready to start using them to their full potential (with well-updated drivers, multimedia support and others) in others you have to work a little more. An example case for the latter is that of Arch Linux, and it is that after finishing the installation we are left with a command line that more advanced users will be able to get away with without problems, but those who are knowing need some advice and now we are going to give it to them.

That is why in this post we will see the most important things to do after installing Arch Linux, and of course we are going to start with the most important thing, which is the graphical server installation X and all the packages that make up a desktop (be this GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate or others) and of course, also a home screen since it is the one that ultimately allows us to access the system.

In Arch Linux things are quite simple and therefore we will be able to install everything relatively quickly and without complications, leaving Pacman (the package manager of this distro) to do its homework. So let's install X.Org server, for which we execute the following command:

#pacman -S xorg

Now that we have the graphical server we can install a desktop of our preference, and this is also really very simple. Let's see how:

GNOME:

#pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

KDE:

#pacman -S plasma

XFCE:

#pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies

Cinnamon:

#pacman -S cinnamon nemo-fileroller

Mate:

#pacman -S mate mate-extra

Once we have the above, we will need install a startup manager or login manager, which will manage the login to our team. It is the tool that asks us for username and password and once both data have been verified, it allows us to access the desktop, and although there are several very good projects in this section, the truth is that there are 2 or 3 that are the most used, and therefore we we will build on them in this post.

LightDM:

#pacman -S lightdm ligthdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-greeter-settings

The third package (lightdm-greeter-settings is the one that installs the configuration tool, which will allow us to add or remove themes and other customization issues.

Keep in mind that there are desktops that have their own startup manager, as is the case with GNOME or KDE, so if we are using any of them we will not need to install one. But if we are in any of the other desktops and we want to install one other than LightDM, we can simply verify those that are available in the repositories, for which we execute:

#pacman -Ss greeter

This is all for now, in a next installment we will see how to add other tools and configure some other basic aspects of our Arch Linux installation.