Installing the lxde group using pacman also installs the display manager (called lxdm). I’m all for saving resources so I’m installing the lightweight LXDE. You can choose from a bunch of different environments, from fancy feature rich to bare-bones, see the arch desktop page for the options. This consists of two parts, first the display manager that will log us in and kick off the desktop, and then the desktop environment itself.

Reboot using “sudo reboot”, once you are back into the environment type “startx”, and some very basic windows should open confirming that x is working! Type exit in these windows to return to the terminal.įinally, we will install the desktop environment. Sudo nano /etc/modules-load.d/nfĪfter nano opens, add these to these lines to the nf file: I got some good ideas from this post ( ), it might be worth checking it out for a second way of doing this. Sudo pacman -S xorg-twm xorg-xclock xtermīecause we are using virtualbox, we need to install some helper tools that will allow the graphics to work properly. sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-server-utils mesa Once you are at the line you want to insert your username, type “i” to insert, once you have finished type and then colon “:” and to save and exit (ie “:wq”). Note that visudo uses VI, which can be a little tricky to use for the uninitiated. After typing the visudo command scroll down to the line that contains “root ALL=(ALL) ALL”, and underneath that add your username and the “ALL=(ALL) ALL” part. Sudo has a special editor to change it called “visudo”, we should always use this modify the config file.

Useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash dwheeler Obviously substitute for your username and password. Enter a password after the passwd command. This first command creates a home directory called “dwheeler” using the -m flag, adds this user to the administrator group (wheel) with the -G flag and links us to bash. But first off we will setup sudo so we can stop being root. Now that we have our base system installed, its time to add some tools that will give us a nice GUI desktop. **This continues on from the previous post that can be found here**

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