Neural Advance

I have just spent the best part of my evening getting to grips with Arch Linux and I have to say it was an absolute pleasure. If you are interested in getting yourself a perfect Gnome 3 setup on your computer then hopefully this article will tell you all you need to know.

I first of all installed Arch Linux using the net install media so as to get the latest packages right from the get go. If you have a reasonable internet connection I highly recommend that you follow this path.

I won’t cover the initial installation as that is covered already by the excellent installation manual. The only thing I will say is that if you get errors about your locale you may need to add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

export LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8

of course you’ll need to substitute the locale for the one that you want to use (the British one is used in the above example). This didn’t happen on my second install so it could be down to me getting something wrong on my first attempt.

Once you have completed the instructions in the installation guide we can move on to getting Gnome 3 installed and configured.

The first step is to create a non-root user for your own use and to also install the sudo command. The easiest way to create a new user is to use the adduser command.

adduser

Just follow through the commands choosing the default for all options other than the username, additional groups and your full name. For the additional groups section add the following exactly as shown:

audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,games,power,scanner,floppy

this allows the user to use the specific software in each category. If you don’t have a floppy disk drive in your computer you can leave that group out.

I highly recommend that you follow my guide on getting ntpd installed before going further with this tutorial.

Now that we have ntpd properly configured we can move on to getting X11 and Gnome installed and working.

Installing X11 is a trivial process and simply consists of running the following command:

pacman -S xorg-server

you’ll also need to install the correct graphics drivers for your card. You have three options based on the type of graphics card that you have (there maybe more options but I doubt many people have a graphics card from a different manufacturer). These are listed below:

xf86-video-ati
xf86-video-nvidia
xf86-video-intel

pick the one that matches your card and install it using the following command:

pacman -S xf86-video-ati

obviously you’ll need to substitute the ATI drivers if you have a graphics card made by Intel or Nvidia.

Now that X11 is installed we can move straight on to getting Gnome 3 installed and configured. Install all the requirements as follows:

pacman -S gnome gdm dbus ttf-liberation

and when pacman asks you which packages to install just press return to select all of the options.

Now all you need to do is add dbus and gdm to your daemons configuration option in your rc.conf and away you go!

DAEMONS=(... dbus gdm)

Note: make sure dbus and gdm are the last two items in your DAEMONS list.

Congratulations, you should now have a fully working Gnome 3 install on your Arch Linux box. Any other customisation you wish to do is down to you.

Tags: Arch, Gnome, Linux

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 12:18 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.