Install a minimal gnome setup and some more useful things

arch-linux-gnome-install.md

Install Gnome and some other useful thins

The official installation guide (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_Guide) contains a more verbose description.

And based on https://wiki.archlinux.de/title/Anleitung_f%C3%BCr_Einsteiger

I have just copied commands from https://wiki.archlinux.de/title/Anleitung_f%C3%BCr_Einsteiger#Weitere_notwendige_Dienste

It's just to have it with one view after doing a fresh installation

Some useful services

pacman -S acpid ntp dbus cups cronie

systemctl enable acpid systemctl enable ntpd systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd.service

nano /etc/ntp.conf # not needed

For german time server de.pool.ntp.org

ntpd -gq date # verify correct time hwclock -w

GUI installation

pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit

Find out your graphics drivers

lspci | grep VGA pacman -Ss xf86-video | less #

pacman -S YOUR_DRIVER pacman -S xorg-drivers # For all if you do not know

For labtops

pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics

Minimal gnome installation

pacman -S gnome-shell nautilus gnome-terminal guake gnome-tweak-tool gnome-control-center xdg-user-dirs gdm

The gnome terminal manager needs en_US.UTF-8 uncommented in locale.gen

For guake you have to change the keyboard and format used in the Gnome settings

If guake cannot display chars like: ä,ö,ü then regenerate the locales, like:

nano /etc/locale.gen # uncomment the needed lines like: de_DE.UTF-8 or en_US.UTF-8 locale-gen

you need to restart gnome so gnome knows about the change or just reboot

If you do not want a graphical user login

cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc /home/MYUSERNAME

If there is no such file use:

cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc /home/MYUSERNAME mv ~/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc nano ~/.xinitrc # As a normal user

Add exec gnome-session but only one exec should be used

startx # Start Gnome session

If you want to use a graphical user login

systemctl start gdm systemctl enable gdm # If everything works fine, to use gdm automatically

Install NetworkManager

Gnome-keyring is needed to store the wifi passwords encrypted

sudo pacman -S networkmanager gnome-keyring sudo systemctl start NetworkManager sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager