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#1 2008-09-06 10:50:14

jarav
Member
Registered: 2008-09-04
Posts: 63

ongoing arch installation on an external usb hard disk

Having heard of Arch being a fast bloat-free linux distribution, I wanted to try it out. I have been an Ubuntu user ( just an average Ubuntu user and by no means an expert) and I have been looking for a snappier Linux distro.
My system is a Dell Inspiron 6400 with an NVIDIA graphics card with 2GB RAM. I have been going through the Beginner's guide, the wikis and the forums. I have also had a look at the excellent Dell Inspiron 6400 Arch Wiki.
To be on the safe side, I am installing Arch on an external USB hard disk (Lacie 160 GB, /dev/sdb). Here is my experience so far.

1. I did a manual partition. 30 GB for /, 6 GB for /var, 1 GB for swap and 40 GB for /home. The first 3 partitions are primary and the /home is a logical one so that I can create other logical ( say a FAT32) partitions later if I want.
2. My cdrom was corrupted and the 'Install packages'  step failed. I cut another cdrom, verified it with md5sum and started again.

3. As stated in another newbie thread there is only one package category -- 'base-devel' now and not four as stated in the wiki:base, support, devel and lib. This was a point of confusion.

4. I didn't also see a 'Select all packages by default' option when selecting the packages as stated in the wiki. I just went ahead with the selected packages and everything was ok.

5. While configuring fstab I found that the UUID's given there did not match with the ones I got by a 'ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/'. I changed the UUID's in the fstab to match the ones obtained by ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ ( which was a MISTAKE). I did the same mistake while configuring GRUB. I wanted GRUB to be installed on the external usb hard drive ( /dev/sdb ) but I did not correct this line in the GRUB configuration file:
'root (hd1,0) '
to
'root (hd0, 0)'

As a result I could not boot into by new Arch installation.

I tried again, correcting the above mistakes.
I found that I had to use the command 'blkid' rather than 'ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid' for the correct UUID's in fstab and the GRUB configuration file.
Finally I could boot into my new Arch.
6. I had not selected wireless_tools during installation. So I had to first connect to the net using my wired LAN, update Pacman and install wireless_tools. My first attempt in connecting manually using wpa_supplicant failed because I did not have the latest iwlwifi driver ( I have Intel 3945 wifi ). After updating the iwlwifi driver I could manually connect using wpa supplicant. My wpa_supplicant.conf is this:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
network={
ssid="myssid"
scan_ssid=0
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
#psk="mypasskeyinascii"
psk=passkeyinhex
}

Since i do not want to connect automatically to the net on boot in my rc.conf I have:
#eth0...
INTERFACES=()
#gateway=...
ROUTES=()

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng !network !netfs crond)


7. I found that if I didn't want my clock to get reset every time I booted into the system, I had to set
USEDIRECTISA="yes"
in rc.conf

7. netcfg2 was totally unsuccessful despite all attempts.

8. The wifi light keeps blinking now and then --- this does not happen in Ubuntu. Is this ok?

9. I found that the laptop was getting warm. I downloaded and compiled dellfand from http://dellfand.dinglisch.net/ and ran it with
./dellfand 1 0.2 40 50 55
and the temperature has come down. I guess I should be invoking this from rc.local on boot.

That's all so far. Installation is continuing.

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