Manjaro #2: Drivers & System

Polishing your Archlinux system with up-to-date drivers, softwares and themes

Rphl-Mstl
Tech notes and Geek stuff
5 min readJan 15, 2018

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See also:

Following the Linux/Windows dual-boot installation, let’s finish the system setup and customization. We need to make sure all our hardware is detected and has the right drivers, then modify the look and feel of the distro.

Manjaro Gnome customized

Pacman

This command will rank your mirrors by speed and will filter the out of date mirrors. Useful to get rid of unreachable servers when syncing the database.

Nvidia drivers

Now the real challenge: optimizing the video drivers. My computer is an Asus Intel with Nvidia graphic card using the Optimus technology to automatically switch between the CPU and GPU when using softwares. The following guideline matches this specific setup.

Manjaro has installed by default the Nouveau (open source) drivers for my graphic card, leaving the GPU unusable. We need to delete them to install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, using the Manjaro hardware utility tool.

First, install some requirements:

Then, using mhwd delete (-r) Nouveau and install (-i) Nvidia:

You can test both the CPU and GPU to confirm the installation. The first command for CPU, the second for the GPU, activated through the optirun argument:

Reboot.

Gnome-shell extensions

Keep it simple but functional, with some additional extensions:

  • Alternatetab: better alt-tab
  • Clock Override: customize the date format
  • Dash to Dock: best dock extension around
  • Drop Down Terminal: just like in Quake
  • Night Light Slider: adjust the night light temperature

Bashrc

Edit your prompt line the way you like:

Manjaro Terminal with Screenfetch

Conky

Display updated system information on your desktop wallpaper

Tweak your .conkyrc file:

And a script to launch Conky at startup:

Conky at bottom-right

SSH to your Raspberry

See my previous post to learn how to headlessly connect to a RaspberryPi. You’ll need two additonal packages to connect to your Raspberry:

Check the IP address of your device by performing host discovery with nmap:

Once found, connect through terminal using ssh:

RaspberryPi in SSH

Your file manager also support SSH connection to transfer files to the Raspberry. Use ssh:// to specify your path:

File Manager > Location : ssh://192.168.1.x

Create scripts and put them in your PATH

  • Create a new bash file
  • Create your script
  • Make it executable with: chmod 755 filename
  • Save it to a folder dedicated to your scripts
  • Export this folder in your PATH, so your scripts can be executed in your terminal without specifying their directory or nature.

For the current session only:

Permanently, by adding the export line to your .bashrc:

Just type the script filename in your terminal, from any location, to launch the script

NTFS-3G on Manjaro

Write on your NTSF partition

If you dual-booted Windows, you certainly have a NTFS partition with personnal data on it. Reading it is no problem, just mount it. But you’ll need a few tweaks to write on it.

First thing : proceed to a full Windows shutdown. To do so on Windows 10, deactivate hybernation and fast start by using the admin command:

And shutdown your system using the command:

Then in Linux, proceed as follow:

  • Install the package ntfs-3g
  • Create the partition mount point: mkdir mnt/winodws
  • Mount your NTFS partition with ntfs-3g command:

You can now write on the NTFS partition.

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Rphl-Mstl
Tech notes and Geek stuff

OS explorer, UI & UX passionate, Voxels crafter, code lover, Video Games player, Podcasts listener, Music amateur // Digital Publishing professional