Setting up the tools to work in Archlabs

This weekend I was working on setting up a working environment using Archlabs linux distribution for my decade old Atom processor based Acer aspire one computer. Here are the notes from the process.

What I needed to install #

As I write and analyse numbers and data and work with literature files at lot, I set up my working computer with the following resources:

1. A word processor or text processor or a text editor that can edit markdown or plain text where I can write $\LaTeX$. Archlabs came with Geany as the text editor and I use this. For code editor, it also has nano. Besides, for markdown editor I downloaded and used typora, which is cross-platform and is very useful.
2. A document converter is very useful and I use pandoc for most of my work. This way a text file can be converted to latex, or word document with ease.
3. Git must be installed as this helps you to talk to the world and maintain your code and life in the github or other repositories such as Gitlab and bitbucket plus version control.
4. Another word processor where I can read when people send me word documents, this was in my case Abiword. Abiword is a simple word processor and is capable of reading word documents.
5. R for statistical data analysis.
6. Ideally Rstudio, but I also realised that the atom processor based machine with 1 gb ram where I was setting up, the machine would not be able to handle Rstudio, this is better used in the cloud. Besides, I have used Jupyter notebook and I find it very intuitive, hence I set up Jupyter notebook for my work.
7. A good PDF reader which was Evince that was set up as part of the installation process, but I also installed Mendeley that was useful for PDF management and bibtex management so that I could copy paste from Mendeley if I wanted.
8. I need a spreadsheet application, this should be gnumeric
9. A web browser as writings are increasingly dependent on web browsers. Archlabs came with Firefox, which by itself is great, but I use Vivaldi for day to day use, so I wanted to have Vivaldi in the system.

Challenge #

The challenge was that this computer was a really underpowered device that did not play well with the workflow I had earlier. When I used Manjaro, I could not use Vivaldi well, it always crawled to a slow virtually unusable piece of web browser. Ditto with Firefox, although I had several extensions with Firefox that I hardly used, and this would force me to use a minimalist approach towards using Firefox or any other browser.

Steps of installation

• I downloaded the iso image from Archlabs. The downloadable iso file is here

Archlabs Download Site

The next thing was to burn the iso on a usb drive

dd if=“archlabs.iso” of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

The usb was then inserted in the netbook and installed.

Post-installation

• Set the computer name, etc
• Install openbox, avoid i3 if you do not know what it is or have not read about it.
• Use pacman to install programs.

  pacman -S programme_name

Pacman is the installer for Arch. You can have other installers that provide a UI on pacman such as pacui. Obtain pacui from below:

Pacui

In a terminal, type the following command:

bash pacui

This will bring up the pacui UI from where you can install other programmes that are not in the Arch official repositories. I installed yaourt on the computer this way and then later, installed other programmes using yaourt.

The Openbox window management system is very intuitive and is helpful. Archlabs comes with lightdm as display manager that controls your sign-on, etc, but I found lxdma better option.

1. First install lxdm using pacman -S lxdm
2. Then enable lxdm as follows: sudo systemctl enable lxdm.service
3. But before you do so, remember to disable the lightdm service otherwise this will not work: sudo systemctl disable lightdm.service
4. Reboot, and you will find a window prompt asking for your username and password. After you enter your username and password, you will see the openbox window manager. It is an intuitive manager, and you can control most of its features.

Notes on installation of packages

• R was installed as:
  pacman -S r

• It installed the dependencies and it was ready to work from the console.

• jupyter notebook was installed as:
  pacman -S jupyter

• If you want to have R as inferior process in Jupyter notebook, then you will need to install tk otherwise you cannot install the inferior process. Pacman may alert you on this and ask you to install tk, and if so, do it with:
  pacman -S tk

• Next, visit the Jupyter’s IRkernel site and follow their instructions to install the IRKernel. This process is time consuming and it took me about two hours to install everything. The wait is worthwhile as the process worked even in this bogus machine.

• Although Archlabs installs Firefox by default and it is good enough as a browser (it installs FF version 63 or whatever is the newest stable version), you may want to install other browsers. I installed Vivaldi which is an excellent browser. If you want to watch videos in Vivaldi (which I do not use in this bogus machine), you need to install codecs separately. Otherwise, if you want to install Vivaldi, you will need to use yaourt or similar to install as Vivaldi is not in the official Arch repo. To do that, do as follows:

• Open /etc/yaourtrc file in nano by typing:
  sudo nano /etc/yaourtrc (remember to be the root user)

• When the file opens in nano, scroll down to where it says #TMP and uncomment or remove the # mark and replace with the following:

  TMP = "/Your/directory/to_store/temp_build_files"
  

  Remember to put the directory somewhere on your hard drive where you have enough space. Yaourtbuilds the packages from their rpm or deb sources.

  Next, use pacui or yaourt to install Vivaldi, say

  yaourt vivaldi and yaourt will find Vivaldi and will prompt you to attempt to download and install it. By doing so it builds Vivaldi. Depending on your computer it may take a long time.

  Installation of Mendeley took a different route. Mendeley is a bibliography management programme and comes with a linux package that can be downloaded as a zipped file with all dependencies included from their website. So, to do that, visit the Mendeley website and download the Linux file. It is provided in a mendeley-.tar.bz2 file. In order to unzip it with tar, you do:

  tar -jxvf mendeley-<version>.tar.bz2 in the folder where you have downloaded the file (in my case it was /home/username/Downloads folder). This will put a Mendeley link to the binary in a programme group (this was handy). During installation of Mendeley, it will ask you to install gconf2. There is no package named gconf2 in any of the repositories, so if you type this name, you will get error messages. Instead, install gconf-gtk from the AUR (Arch User repositories) using yaourt

  You can click on the visual link and start Mendeley, or in a terminal, type:

  cd <Folder where you have Mendeley expanded>
  ./bin/mendeleydesktop
  

  Finally, installation of pandoc is from the official repositories of Arch Linux with the following command:

  pacman -S pandoc and it gets installed.

  Lastly, installation of Typora, a decent markdown editor was through yaourtusing instructions from their website. I found that although Typora itself is intuitive, it is a memory hog as it uses Electron which is essentially built on Chromium, or the Chrome browser. For a low resource computer, this could be a pain. But it works well.