Technology Tales

Setting up GNOME 3 on Arch Linux

22^nd July 2011

It must have been my curiosity that drove me to explore Arch Linux a few weeks ago. Its inclusion on a Linux Format DVD and a few kind words about its being a cutting edge distribution were enough to set me installing it into a VirtualBox virtual machine for a spot of investigation. Despite warnings to the contrary, I took the path of least resistance with the installation, even though I did look among the packages to see if I could select a desktop environment to be added as well. Not finding anything like GNOME in there, I left everything as defaulted and ended up with a command line interface, as I suspected. The next job was to use the pacman command to add the extras that were needed to set in place a fully functioning desktop.

For this, the Arch Linux wiki is a copious source of information, even if it didn't stop me doing things out of sequence. That I didn't go about perusing it linearly was part of the cause of this, but you have to know which place to start first as well. As a result, I have decided to draw everything together here so that it's all in one place and in a more sensible order, even if it wasn't the one that I followed.

The first thing to do is add X.org using the following command:

pacman -Syu xorg-server

The -Syu switch tells pacman to update the package list, upgrade any packages that require it, and adds the listed package if it isn't in place already; that's X.org in this case. For my testing, I added xor-xinit too. This puts that startx command in place. This is the command for adding it:

pacman -S xorg-xinit

With those in place, I would add the VirtualBox Guest Additions next. GNOME Shell requires 3D capability, so you need to have this done while the machine is off or when setting it up in the first place. This command will add the required VirtualBox extensions:

pacman -Syu virtualbox-guest-additions

Once that's done, you need to edit /etc/rc.conf by adding vboxguest vboxsf vboxvideo within the brackets on the MODULES line and adding rc.vboxadd within the brackets on the DAEMONS line. On restarting, everything should be available to you, but the modprobe command is there for any troubleshooting.

With the above pre-work done, you can set to installing GNOME, and I added the basic desktop from the gnome package and the other GNOME applications from the gnome-extra one. GDM is the login screen manager, so that's needed too, and the GNOME Tweak Tool is a very handy thing to have for changing settings that you otherwise couldn't. Here are the commands that I used to add all of these:

pacman -Syu gnome
pacman -Syu gnome-extra
pacman -Syu gdm
pacman -Syu gnome-tweak-tool

With those in place, some configuration files were edited so that a GUI was on show instead of a black screen with a command prompt, as useful as that can be. The first of these was /etc/rc.conf where dbus was added within the brackets on the DAEMONS line and fuse was added between those on the MODULES one.

Creating a file named .xinitrc in the root home area with the following line to that file makes running a GNOME session from issuing a startx command:

exec ck-launch-session gnome-session

With all those in place, all that was needed to get a GNOME 3 login screen was a reboot. Arch is so pared back that I could log in as root, not the safest of things to be doing, so I added an account for more regular use. After that, it has been a matter of tweaking the GNOME desktop environment and adding missing applications. The bare-bones installation that I allowed to happen meant that there were a surprising number of them, but that isn't difficult to fix using pacman.

All of this emphasises that Arch Linux is for those who want to pick what they want from an operating system rather than having that decided for you by someone else, an approach that has something going for it with some of the decisions that make their presence felt in computing environments from time to time. While there's no doubt that this isn't for everyone, the documentation is complete enough for the minimalism not to be a problem for experienced Linux users, and I certainly managed to make things work for me once I got them in the right order. Another thing in its favour is that Arch also is a rolling distribution, so you don't need to have to go through the whole set up routine every six months, unlike some others. So far, it does seem stable enough and even has set me to wondering if I could pop it on a real computer sometime.