Arch linux in a Slimbook Laptop

8 min readMay 24, 2021

I had been using MacOS since 2012 when together with some friends I started Evomote, a startup which was going to be the revolution of the remote controller (Spoiler: It ended not to be it, but that’s a story for another day), on those days it took me a while to get used to the MacOS nuances but I managed to do it and I kept using it without any issues for the next 8 years (after a small hardware revamp in 2018 when I upgraded the memory to 16GB RAM and extended the SSD Drive to 512GB one).

Last year, I decided it was time for a change, and since I had been always a Linux fan, I started to look for a substitute for the old Macbook Pro, this time searching for a Linux specialized brand where I could find a good value for money lightweight laptop, so I ended up buying a Slimbook PROX 14.

For the initial setup, I tweaked a little bit the laptop specs for the long run (See below for details), and among the options for the OS, I took the Slimbook OS (a modified version of Ubuntu distribution), thinking that it was the best choice as it would be fully optimized for the hardware (indeed it was) a part from bringing some small jewels in form of apps such as Slimbook battery.

As I started to get my toes wet into my new role as CTO in Goxo, technology started to grow within my daily activities, please don’t get me wrong, I consider myself a technology geek, I am always playing around with some sort of technology, and although my previous roles allowed me to be in touch with technology, this was a totally different level, so a feeling of going deeper in my productivity stack started growing up inside me.

Having this in mind, I started the investigation journey for choosing the right distribution for me which had the characteristics that allow me to keep learning at the same time that I could have full control of all the pieces within the system, and after few attempts, installations and conversations with colleagues I ended up picking Arch Linux as the candidate (special thanks to Iban for being a great mentor and support with this).

So here, it is the story of my up to date experience with Arch linux, this document constitutes a compilation of my learnings during Arch Linux
Installation & Configuration in my Slimbook ProX14.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a linux expert, with this guide I am trying to put together all the learnings I made a long the way, I hope to save some time in the future not only for me in a potential reinstallation situation but for other people who are in the same situation as me which basically it is a strong desire for becoming knowledgeable in the linux world, I adjusted this setup balancing my taste, time and comprenhension of the subsystems and modules, probably there are better ways to do these configurations, go out
there and find yours because that is the beauty of the open source software.

The current look of my desktop environment

Following you can find the specs of the setup (excerpt from inxi command):

Machine:
 Type: Laptop System: SLIMBOOK product: PROX14–10 
Memory:
 RAM: total: 31.22 GiB used: 883.6 MiB (2.8%) 
CPU:
 Info: Quad Core model: Intel Core i7–10510U bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Kaby Lake 
Graphics:
 Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 
 Device-2: NVIDIA GP108M [GeForce MX250] 
 Device-3: Chicony HD Webcam type: USB 
Audio:
 Device-1: Intel Comet Lake PCH-LP cAVS vendor: Tongfang Hongkong Limited 
Network:
 Device-1: Intel Comet Lake PCH-LP CNVi WiFi
 Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet 
Bluetooth:
 Device-1: Intel Bluetooth 9460/9560 Jefferson Peak (JfP) 
Drives:
 ID-1: Samsung model: SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB 
Battery:
 ID-1: 46.7 Wh

The document is divided in two parts:

Installation of a plain vanilla Arch Linux
Configuration and customization for a development oriented user

NOTE: The starting point was a single boot with Slimbook OS (modified Ubuntu 20.04) preinstalled.

1. Installation of a plain vanilla Arch Linux

This procedure includes the root partition encryption (using LUKS without LVM)

0. Fetch the latest Arch linux iso to a USB flash memory

In linux you can use the following:

dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdX

where sdX is the device representing your usb key.

1. Load Spanish keyboard layout, connect to internet and adjust clock:

loadkeys es
iwctl station wlan0 connect "MiWifi"
timedatectl set-ntp true

2. Load additional kernel modules for encryption

modprobe dm-crypt
modprobe dm-mod

3. Create the partitions, we are going to need three of them:

Please use the tool you feel the most comfortable with, in my case I used fdisk

fdisk /dev/nvme0n1

If everything goes fine you should see something like this:

4. Encrypt root partition

You will be requested to confirm with a YES (in uppercase) and then set a password:

cryptsetup luksFormat -v -s 512 -h sha512 /dev/nvme0n1p3
cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p3 luks_root

5. Format partitions

mkfs.vfat -n “EFI System” /dev/nvme0n1p1
mkfs.ext4 -L boot /dev/nvme0n1p2
mkfs.ext4 -L root /dev/mapper/luks_root

6. Mount partitions

Be careful to execute the commands in the proper order so that directories
are created in the proper partitions:

mount /dev/mapper/luks_root /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/boot
mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi

7. Swap file

Only if you are planning to hibernate the laptop to the hard drive.
Change the parameter count to set the amount of swap you would want:

cd /mnt
dd if=/dev/zero of=swap bs=1M count=2048
mkswap swap
swapon swap
chmod 0600 swap

8. Install base system and some minor utils

I am using neovim and Network Manager but feel free to install some other editor or network utilities:

pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel efibootmgr grub linux \
linux-firmware networkmanager sudo vim bash-completion neovim \
man-db iproute2 intel-ucode udev

9. Generate fstab file

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

10. Ch-root in your new system

arch-chroot /mnt

11. Add a new user

Create a new user, this user will be the one to operate the system (via sudo) as I am not using the root user:

useradd -m -s /bin/bash your_user_name
passwd your_user_name

12. Setup sudo

Execute the following line to edit the config with vim:

EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim visudo

Add the following line after the "root" user one:

your_user_name ALL=(ALL) ALL

Config your default visudo editor by adding the following line to the sudo config file:

Defaults editor=/usr/bin/nvim

13. Setup locale configuration

- Change Region by a valid one (e.g. Europe) as well as the City (e.g. Madrid);

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc

- Edit and uncomment by removing the '#' at the beginning of your locale configuration in my case Spanish (for me es_ES.UTF-8) then run:

locale-gen

- Add language support:

echo "LANG=es_ES.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf
echo "KEYMAP=es" > /etc/vconsole.conf

14. Setup network

- Set your hostname:

echo "your-host-name" > /etc/hostname

- Set your /etc/hosts file adding:

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 your-host-name.localdomain your-host-name

15. Setup grub

- Modify the following line in file /etc/default/grub so it looks like the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”cryptdevice=/dev/nvme0n1p3:luks_root”

- Add "encrypt" module at the line starting with HOOKS between block and filesystem at the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

HOOKS=(base udev autodetect modconf block encrypt filesystems keyboard fsck)

Then execute the following command to re-create the kernel config:

mkinitcpio -p linux

16. Install and config grub

grub-install --boot-directory=/boot --efi-directory=/boot/efi /dev/nvme0n1p2
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/arch/grub.cfg

17. Reboot

You are ready to go, exit from the chroot and reboot:

exit 
reboot

18. First boot

You will need to introduce the password for the encrypted partition (the one in the step 4. above)

After that the login will require you to Introduce your user's credentials

You can get online with the Network Manager, either by using nmtui or nmcli using, you should start it first:

sudo systemctl start NetworkManager
nmcli --ask device wifi connect "MiWifi"

Where "MiWifi" is the name of your SSID. After that enable NetworkManager:

sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager

2. Configuration and customization

After the arch installation it is time to start customizing the system for your
taste. See my repository for futher details.

The selection of the tools has been very vim-oriented and trying to be as much agnostic to any major Desktop Environment (such us Gnome, KDE, etc.)

In my case, I performed the customization in the following domains:

Installation of a pacman wrapper to be able to handle easily official packages as well the ones included in AUR. In my case I chose yay because its simplicity and because it's been developed in Golang. See installation details in yay target within the Makefile.
Installation of the graphical environment and some related utilities. My stack in this case is:
- XServer
- Nvidia proprietary driver and its utilities
- Light Desktop Manager with Slick Greeter
- Bspwm as a tiled window manager
- Sxhkd as a key stroke handler
- Rofi as a launcher
- Polybar as a status bar
- Dunst as a notification manager
- Picom as composer
- Pulseaudio as the audio system
- Betterlockscreen as screenlocker
- Blueman, and NetworkManager for handling BT and Network respectively
For the daily task activities I am using:
- Kitty as terminal, plus Oh-my-zsh and Startship as enhancements
- Neovim as editor with a bunch of plugins such as (airline, vim-go, and others)
- pqiv as image viewer
- ranger and pcmanfm for file management
- zathura as pdf reader
- scrot as screenshooter
- GVFS for Virtual filesystem (enables Trash bin, remote filesystem access, etc.)
- CUPS for the printer config
- Sane for the scanner config
- Tmux as screen multiplexer
- Onlyoffice as ofimatics suite
- Firefox as main browser, although I have also installed Chromium
For the theme I am using:
- GTK Theme: Matcha
- Icons: Flat remix
- Cursor: Bibata
Development tools (other than nvim): Visual Studio Code, Robo3T, Postman, MongoDB Compass, Portainer, Go-Swagger, Go, Github CLI and git.
Cloud environment and k8s toolkit: Google cloud SDK, Kubectx, kubens, dive, popeye, helm, linkerd, velero, and the beautiful k9s
For media utilities: gimp, kazam, handbrake, vlc
For social interaction: Slack, Cawbird (twitter) and Telegram

All the installation and configuration of these utilities can be seen in the proper targets in the Makefile, usually there is one target for installation and another one (*-config)for configuration.

Last but not the least, I also include within this repository my dotfiles for the
fine tuning of those tools as I have it today.

Hope you find this compilation of info useful.

Happy hacking!

— This article was written by Ángel J. Ramos, CTO & Head of Product at Goxo

References

All this installation and setup couldn't have been possible without the help
of the following links and guides, my biggest thanks for them.