Arch Girl Summer

April 28, 2024

tags: computers linux Arch

Listening to: Porter Robinson - Knock Yourself Out XD

I've spent my first week of summer freedom just sort of lazying about, playing games, binging some youtube content that I would have felt guilty for "procrastinating" just last week. Part of me is itching to do some kind of work, the inertia of the last 8 months eating away at my psyche, but I've been doing my best to just let it fade.

I got arch updated on my hand-me-down Thinkpad T420 after neglecting it for around 2 months, and then proceeded to start working on my lesser (but still cool) 10" Toshiba notebook from around 2010 or so.

My Hardware

Toshiba Notebook

The laptop in question booting into Windows 7 prior to wiping the HDD.

Installing Arch only came with a few hitches as expected; most of my time during the process nowadays comes down to dealing with the wi-fi process. A little tinkering and dropping back into the install media to patch up some stray issues to do with BIOS vs UEFI stuff (I forgot to create an MBR partition :P) and I was off to the races. Well, I was until I went to install sudo.

I found out around that time that something wasn't right. See, apparently I must have forgotten to set the local that second time around because now LC_ALL is unset by default and the system seems to complain about locale each time I try to run something like a desktop environment.

What I tried:

DE Working
Sway Works
SwayFX Doesn't work
Hyprland Doesn't work

Conclusion:

I like hyprland quite a bit for it's simplicity of config, easy defaults, and it's out of the box appearance. It takes a bit of tinkering to make work, but it's far, far easier to make Hyprland look pretty than to try and maintain an i3/Sway DE, especially when every other system I'm using also uses Hyprland.

I will be looking into just doing a re-installation of Arch, which shouldn't cause too much of an issue since I took the precaution to parition off the home directory seperately from the main machine. I might consider just installing some other, simpler linux onto the system just to try things out seeing as I have no plans to use this machine with any regular frequency, but that's for future me to decide.

Thinkpad :TM: T420

Listening to: カラカラー結束バンド

My pride and joy, a device so beautiful in it's construction that nothing will ever match it. There's something so t a c t i l e about the keyboard, the hinge, the funny nipple thing to control the mouse, the inclusion of two sets of left and right mouse click buttons located on both the top and bottom of the mouse pad itself.

Behold, the incontrovertible peak of good hardware design:

The first time this thing had probably been turned on in at least 8 years, if not more.

Installing arch on this was more of a struggle than I thought it was going to be. I've installed it in a VM a bunch prior for a class I took, so I was familiar with the process and following the guide, but on the physical machine was a different story. The first install I did on it I made the (reasonable) assumption that a 14 year old machine wouldn't have supported UEFI and hence installed for BIOS/MBR, only to be so painfully wrong. After this I did a second install for UEFI and still hit boot issues with GRUB, sending me into a bit of a rage spiral that led to me just run the archinstall script. The script worked without issue and even was able to take into account the partitions I had made in my prior attempt too.

Eventually the struggle was over, and I got to move onto installing software and tweaking things.

Apparently hyprland's default background has a default-enabled, togglable anime mascot. I swear this is not the ONLY reason I'm using it.

After tweaking some settings and adding a background. It really does just look this good out of the box otherwise, even on a native 720p display.

I don't consider this a finished project quite yet. Some things I'd like to do: