What First To do in Arch Linux
You have just installed Arch Linux and wonder what to do next. I am going to share with you my 10 things to do first after installing Arch Linux.
It’s Average Linux User. And the first thing I recommend is to Install a Long Term Support Kernel. Check your current kernel. Then install an LTS kernel and reconfigure grub.
You may also install linux-lts-headers. It is required for some applications like VirtualBox. Reboot and check which kernel is in use with uname -r.
If everything is fine and your active kernel is an LTS kernel. Feel free to remove non-lts kernel. Type sudo pacman -Rs linux. The second step – Install Microcode. Microcode is some kind of software installed on your processor.
While microcode can be updated through the BIOS, the Linux kernel is also able to apply these updates during boot. These updates provide bug fixes that can be critical to the stability of your system.
For intel processors with grub boot loader install intel-ucode and update grub config file. For AMD processors install linux-firmware package. Third – Disable GRUB delay You see this GRUB menu every-time you start the system.
Let’s make the system skip it and load as fast as possible.
Add the following lines to the file
/etc/defult/grub.
Then put file 31_hold_shift to /etc/grub.d/.
The file is in the description. Make it executable, and regenerate the grub configuration.
This won’t show GRUB menu during the system load. To show GRUB menu, you need to hold the Shift key during the start-up.
The fourth step is to Install Some Key Packages. Here, I recommend only cross-desktop packages such as fonts, spell checking dictionaries, Gstreamer plugins, java. I list them all in the description.
I will do a separate video about the applications I install in KDE Plasma 5 desktop. The fifth step is Set Up Firewall The best way to set up a firewall on
Linux is to use iptables. But it is quite complicated and deserves a separate video. Here, I will show you how to set up an uncomplicated firewall which is fine for a regular user. Install ufw. Enable it. Check its status.
The rules to deny incoming and allow outgoing are good for most of the users. Finally, enable the start-up of this firewall with the system. Reboot and check the status again.
It should be active. The sixth thing is to Encrypt Your Home Directory. It is wise to make a back up of all your data before this step. The simplest way to encrypt your home directory is to use the ecryptfs-migrate-home script. To run it, you need to logged out. Switch to a virtual console with Ctrl+Alt+F2.
Login as a root and check that your user owns no processes. Run ps -U username. There should be no output.
If some processes are active you can kill them or reboot and login as a root. Install the necessary applications. Then encrypt your home directory. Run modprobe ecryptfs. And then run ecryptfs-migrate-home -u username. Use the same passphrase as your login password. It is required for auto-mounting. Log out and log in as a regular user.
Mount your encrypted home with ecryptfs-mount-private. Unwrap the passphrase and save it somewhere where only you can access it. Then run ls .ecryptfs and make sure auto-mount, auto-umount and wrapped-passphrase exist. Then open system-auth file and edit it as shown in this video. Reboot and make sure that you can login to your desktop. Now is safe to remove the backup of your home which was created during the migration and named with your username and some random characters. The next four steps can be classified as post-installation and post-configuration. So, the seventh – Remove Orphans.
Remove unused packages, also known as orphans, and their configuration files. So, run this command. As you can see I have no unused packages on this system. But you might have. Eighth – Optimize Pacman’s Database Access Speed. Run sudo pacman-optimize. This will speed-up your pacman. Nineths – Check for Errors. First, check for failed systemd services. Second, check for errors in logfiles. If you experience some errors, google them. If they are serious and try to fix them. The errors you see on my system are not very dangerous as far as I know.
And the last step is to Back-up the System. I have only the root partition on my system, so I backup everything except some unnecessary directories. You can find this command in the description. I hope this video was helpful for you. Please, SUBSCRIBE if you want to watch more Linux videos. Thanks for watching. .
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