Installation Issues! Please help!

rkt · May 30, 2020, 7:23am

Hello ArchLabs Community

Just to get it out there, I am trying to switch to Arch for the first time as I really need to extract more performance out of my old laptop. After spending days going through numerous articles / videos / etc I settled on ArchLabs as I loved the installer, the bare nature of the distro and also the out of the box experience.

But, since yesterday, I have tried a million times and failed to install and get it running. Surprisingly, I find no one with similar issues! What’s going on?

In my last attempt, I finally got through the installation when I did not select any additional package, selected only dwm as my wm and just went with the defaults for partitioning etc. But to my amazement, when I tried to log in, it said dwm not found! Like seriously people, what is going on!

It will be highly appreciated if someone helps me out real-time with installing ArchLabs! I am waiting with my installer ready. Please help me out or point me to things I can do to help myself out!

Thanks for your time.

Regards
R

Naltap · May 30, 2020, 9:22am

Hi rkt,
try another install with i3 and after install use the library from @nwg, really great for tiling

about dwm, you can so install after the yaxwm from @natemaia i use it is really good and i think it will be good to have in choice for installation., it is like dwm with some features.

https://bitbucket.org/natemaia/

About your issue, you can open a terminal by ctrl+alt+F2 and then install dwm with baph tools (in default) from AUR.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 9:28am

I cannot even complete the installation process most of the times. Currently I am trying again with Awesome.

nwg · May 30, 2020, 9:33am

I remember having issues with auto-partitioning selected. No idea if it still happens, as last several times I partitioned manually.

natemaia · May 30, 2020, 9:36am

It would be easier to help if I knew what kind of failure you’re running into.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 9:39am

I have tried both manual and auto. Sometimes one works for me, sometimes the other works! I really don’t know what is going on or where to look!

I do see that some downloads fail due maximum file size exceeded from SourceForge. Also the 3rd step where the post-transaction hook creates temporary directories gives failed error.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 9:41am

Most of the times it just said no error messages!

I am done with my current install with awesome. It says finished. Hopefully it’ll work this time!

natemaia · May 30, 2020, 9:44am

Try swapping the sources around in /etc/pacman.conf to use something other than SourceForge. That won’t fail install though, it will fallback to the others on its own.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 9:54am

I don’t know what was going on, but I think I finally had a successful install. Tell me if this is how it supposed to look!

Also is there a way to install ArchLabs on top of a bare bones Arch install? I will like to use the setup you guys have made and get back to working on my projects asap (have pending work )

natemaia · May 30, 2020, 9:58am

You can install the same packages and configs yea, all our stuff is available.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 9:59am

Getting ~300-315M ram usage in idle with just xterm+htop. Is this the lowest we can go?

natemaia · May 30, 2020, 10:02am

You have 4G, why is it an issue? If you test on a machine with more limited resources it would be lower, try a VM with 256M and it’ll be much lower. It’ll gobble more if you have enough rather than swap to disk all the time.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 10:01am

Can you tell me how or redirect me to some reading material on how I can get the packages, which packages to get and how to setup?

rkt · May 30, 2020, 10:04am

I used ubuntu 16 + gnome for a long time. It consumed ~1-1.3G! So much happier now

natemaia · May 30, 2020, 10:14am

The installer source is where I’d direct you. I don’t know of any guides as there’s not much purpose, we already use plain arch as a base so it’s all the same aside from a few configs it’s not like manjaro where they have separate repos.

As far as packages go, almost all of ours are the skel configs. /etc/skel gets copied over new users home directory. The package list varies depending on what sessions are being installed.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 10:16am

Once I exit out of awesome, I get a bunch of errors. And I noticed a lot of things were not working inside awesome too, like the clock and other icons on the top right.

rkt · May 30, 2020, 10:19am

I was checking out the repo (the bitbucket one) yesterday only. I will dive deep once again tonight and try to figure out on my own. Thanks

altman · May 30, 2020, 2:26pm

What s your hardware & gpu, might help other people in order to help you out with the install.

Hope that you ll get it resolved quickly enough @rkt

Head_on_a_Stick · May 30, 2020, 4:49pm

Looks like one of the keybindings isn’t recognised and a couple of programs have child processes that are exiting successfully. Not big deals IMO.

I can’t remember if ArchLabs logs X errors, is there a file at ~/.xsession-errors that you could post the content of here? If not then launch X manually with

startx 2>~/.xsession-errors

natemaia · May 30, 2020, 7:00pm

We don’t redirect the X output, generally the Xorg logs can be found in ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log where 0 is the display. Arch defaults to rootless xorg I believe but if you disable I think they’re in /var/log/xorg.