Experimenting with Arch: Continuing Where I Left Off

So after a brief hiatus I figured I would get back to configuring my new Arch system. First thing on the list was to install a graphical terminal emulator… because as much as I love going to a different tty session to install things I think this might make my life easier in the long-run.

sudo pacman -S gnome-terminal

Excellent! Now I can continue from the comfort of my MATE desktop environment 🙂

Next I figured it would be kind of nice to be able to browse the internet and so off I went to install a web browser. Arch offers quite a range of graphical web browsers to choose from but because I didn’t want to mess around with getting Flash to work in Firefox I opted to just install Google Chrome from the AUR.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/google-chrome.git
cd google-chrome
makepkg -si

After getting Chrome installed I went over to YouTube to confirm everything was working and noticed that while the video was playing I wasn’t getting any sound! I know a lot of people don’t like PulseAudio for a variety of reasons but I figured that if I installed it and got the control panel up I could at least see what was happening.

sudo pacman -S pulseaudio pavucontrol

A quick restart later and after un-muting the output device in pavucontrol I was in business!

From there it was just a matter of installing the normal applications one might need for every day activities. Like an office suite:

sudo pacman -S libreoffice-fresh

A media player:

sudo pacman -S vlc libcdio

A password manager:

sudo pacman -S keepassx2

And while we’re at it why not install Dropbox too?

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/dropbox.git
cd dropbox
makepkg -si

Now it’s looking like more and more like a fully featured computer! I think I’m finally getting past all of those “installing Arch Linux is hard” parts so now I’m just left with wondering what other fun things I can do with Arch. If you have any suggestions let me know in the comments below!



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