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Manjaro XFCE Post Installation Tips and Tricks

It's nearly a year since my last post, a lot of things had happened in between, Placement preparation, couple of interviews, six month internship in Blackberry Platform at Payoda Technologies  and finally completion of my studies. During this period a lot of distros had been released but I stayed with the stable Opensuse, but then I felt KDE version of opensuse is little bit heavy, which can be felt during both start-up and during normal day to day usage(say Eclipse+amarok+chrome) even with 4GB RAM and i3 Processor.

I started my quest for "The best GNU/Linux OS" with distrowatch.com. Since I wanted a lighter distro but not certainly like Puppy/Tiny and no Ubuntu/Debian forks then by default I left with Arch. But the fear of  two earlier failed attempts to install Arch forced me to try arch fork than arch. Seeing Manjaro  Linux description "Manjaro Linux is a desktop-oriented, user-friendly distribution based on Arch Linux" , I thought I would give it a try. Downloaded and Installed manjaro-xfce-0.8.5.1-x86_64 from Manjaro site.

The first thing I noticed with Manjaro is, it's fast start-up and shutdown time, it is comparatively faster than opensuse. Here are the some of tricks which I had done to achieve what's in their description user-friendly distribution. NOTE: No Graphics driver installation tips are given because author himself followed the steps listed in Beginner's guide and finally ended with blank screen even though he only have Intel's Integrated graphics card. 

 1. Synchronize  and Update Manjaro repositories using pacman
Pacman is the package manager used in Manjaro/Arch.
sudo pacman -Syu
For handy pacman tips refer @YF-Dogan's thread from manjaro forum and the wiki. 
2.Mounting windows partition with Read and write permission.
i)To achieve write permissions for other users than root, you will need to install ntfs-3g,
which also  will install  the fuse package in order to work.
   sudo pacman -Sy ntfs-3g     
ii) List all available disk partitions
 [blizzard@linuxbox Desktop]$ blkid
 /dev/sda1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="F088C67D88C64238" TYPE="ntfs" 
 /dev/sda2: UUID="3C804D34804CF644" TYPE="ntfs" 
 /dev/sda4: UUID="A80E38E70E38B064" TYPE="ntfs" 
 /dev/sda5: UUID="1da4f64f-3576-4caf-8cb8-e46f0514cd21" TYPE="ext4" 
 /dev/sda6: LABEL="swap" UUID="28b7a025-ffc8-41aa-9244-7d12061af511" TYPE="swap" 
 /dev/sda7: UUID="a7944df5-3f69-4d94-bab6-a4fe76ee276f" TYPE="ext4" 
 /dev/sr1: UUID="2012-03-22-12-00-00-00" LABEL="Mobile Partner" TYPE="iso9660"
iii) Create Mount point 
[blizzard@linuxbox Desktop]$ sudo mkdir -v /mnt/Storage
 mkdir: created directory ‘/mnt/Storage’
iv) Add an /etc/fstab entry for any partition listed in `blkid`
e.g) For entry /dev/sda4: UUID="A80E38E70E38B064" TYPE="ntfs" as shown below: 
 #/dev/sda4
 UUID=A80E38E70E38B064 /mnt/Storage ntfs-3g  defaults,umask=077,uid=1000 0 0 
3. Install Chromium (Open source version of Google Chrome).  
  sudo pacman -S chromium.
4. Install other necessary utilities
    sudo pacman -S vim clementine osmo libreoffice-impress pinta xchm
  • vim - Text editor.
  • clementine - Music player. 
  • osmo - Personal calendar, note taking, todo list application.
  • libreoffice-impress - Presentation tool.
  • pinta - An alternative to GIMP(Photo editing).
  • xchm - CHM reader.
5. Automounting Removable disks
Goto Settings->Settings Manager -> Removable Drives and Media -> Mount removable drives when hot-plugged.


6. Installing Dropbox
$ sudo yaourt -S dropbox dropbox-cli
$ dropboxd & 
Refer: http://pfigue.github.io/blog/2012/12/24/installing-dropbox-in-arch-linux/

 7.Desktop and Workspace Shortcut Keys
By default the shortcut key used to minimize desktop is ctrl+alt+d. You can change the shortcut key by going to Settings->settings Manager->Window Manager and assigning the shortcut key.
The shortcut keys for "workspace+" and "Move window to workspace+" can be assigned based on the user preference. My favorite shortcut keys for "workspace[0-4]" are "<Alt>+[1-4]" and "Move window to workspace[1-4]" are "<super>+[1-4]".

 8.Setting shortcut for Terminal
Goto Settings->settings Manager->Keyboard->Application Shortcuts,click Add-> Type "xfce4-terminal" and click "ok", after that assign whatever shortcut you want.

 8. Stop Gedit from creating backup copy of files during each save
Goto Gedit Edit->Preferences->Editor-> Uncheck "Create a backup copy of files before saving".

9. Enable Touchpad Horizontal and  Vertical  scrolling. 
 $sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf 
             
Add the following content
Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad catchall"
 Driver "synaptics"
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 Option "TapButton1" "1"
 Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
 Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"
EndSection
For details refer Manjaro Wiki and Arch Wiki.

 10. Installing Uncomplicated Firewall(ufw)
The launchpad description of ufw says "Ufw stands for Uncomplicated Firewall, and is program for managing a netfilter firewall. It provides a command line interface and aims to be uncomplicated and easy to use.". As the name says the program is easy to install and configure it in manjaro.
  sudo yaourt -S gufw
For detailed configuration steps follow the @handy's post from Manjaro forum and wiki.

For more please refer



Customizing Manjaro


Some Random Learnings

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Comments

  1. EduardAug 26, 2013, 3:41:00 PM

    Great tutorial!

    After using Gnome 2 for many years, now I am using XFCE after moving to Debian Wheezy. I think it is such a great desktop.

    However, I needed to tweak it a little. I wrote a simple tutorial explaining the changes I did to adapt it to my own taste:

    http://cosmolinux.no-ip.org/raconetlinux2/xfce_wheezy.html

    I wish it is useful to someone else.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJan 28, 2015, 9:37:00 PM

    I'm not sure if this is because of a version difference but I installed and updated the latest XFCE version of Manjaro and it tells me "yaourt" cannot be run as root and instead is run with just "yaourt -S packagenames 1 2 3 etc" and then asks for an admin password
    Pacuar is also a nice replacement for using the pacman command and seems a little more user friendly, that may just be my opinion though

    ReplyDelete

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