Configuring Parabola (post-install)

Post-installation configuration steps for Parabola GNU+Linux-libre. Parabola is extremely flexible; this is just an example.

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Table of Contents

• Configuring pacman
  • Updating Parabola
  • Maintaining Parabola during system updates
    • Clearing package cache after updating
    • Pacman command equivalents (compared to other package managers)
  • your-freedom
• Add a user account
• System D
• Interesting repositories
• Setup a network connection in Parabola
  • Setting hostname
  • Network status
  • Network interface names
  • Network setup
• System maintenance - important!
• Configuring the desktop
  • Install Xorg
  • Xorg keyboard layout
  • Install LXDE
  • LXDE - clock
  • LXDE - font
  • LXDE - screenlock
  • LXDE - automounting
  • LXDE - disable suspend
  • LXDE - battery monitor
  • LXDE - network manager

While not strictly related to the libreboot project, this guide is intended to be useful for those interested in installing Parabola on their libreboot system.

It details configuration steps that I took after installing the base system, as a follow up to encrypted_parabola.html. This guide is likely to become obsolete at a later date (due to the volatile 'rolling-release' model that Arch/Parabola both use), but attempts will be made to maintain it.

This guide was valid on 2014-09-21. If you see any changes that should to be made at the present date, please get in touch with the libreboot project!

You do not necessarily have to follow this guide word-for-word; parabola is extremely flexible. The aim here is to provide a common setup that most users will be happy with. While Parabola can seem daunting at first glance (especially for new GNU+Linux users), with a simple guide it can provide all the same usability as Debian or Devuan, without hiding any details from the user.

Paradoxically, as you get more advanced Parabola can actually become easier to use when you want to set up your system in a special way compared to what most distributions provide. You will find over time that other distributions tend to get in your way.

This guide assumes that you already have Parabola installed. If you have not yet installed Parabola, then this guide is highly recommended!

A lot of the steps in this guide will refer to the Arch wiki. Arch is the upstream distribution that Parabola uses. Most of this guide will also tell you to read wiki articles, other pages, manuals, and so on. In general it tries to cherry pick the most useful information but nonetheless you are encouraged to learn as much as possible. It might take you a few days to fully install your system how you like, depending on how much you need to read. Patience is key, especially for new users.

The Arch wiki will sometimes use bad language, such as calling the whole system Linux, using the term open-source (or closed-source), and it will sometimes recommend the use of proprietary software. You need to be careful about this when reading anything on the Arch wiki.

Some of these steps require internet access. I'll go into networking later but for now, I just connected my system to a switch and did:
# systemctl start dhcpcd.service
You can stop it later by running:
# systemctl stop dhcpcd.service
For most people this should be enough, but if you don't have DHCP on your network then you should setup your network connection first:
Setup network connection in Parabola

Configure pacman

pacman (package manager) is the name of the package management system in Arch, which Parabola (as a deblobbed parallel effort) also uses. Like with 'apt-get' on Debian or Devuan, this can be used to add/remove and update the software on your computer.

Based on https://wiki.parabolagnulinux.org/Installation_Guide#Configure_pacman and from reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman (make sure to read and understand this, it's very important) and https://wiki.parabolagnulinux.org/Official_Repositories

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Updating Parabola

In the end, I didn't change my configuration for pacman. When you are updating, resync with the latest package names/versions:
# pacman -Syy
(according to the wiki, -Syy is better than Sy because it refreshes the package list even if it appears to be up to date, which can be useful when switching to another mirror).
Then, update the system:
# pacman -Syu

Before installing packages with 'pacman -S', always update first, using the notes above.

Keep an eye out on the output, or read it in /var/log/pacman.log. Sometimes, pacman will show messages about maintenance steps that you will need to perform with certain files (typically configurations) after the update. Also, you should check both the Parabola and Arch home pages to see if they mention any issues. If a new kernel is installed, you should also update to be able to use it (the currently running kernel will also be fine). It's generally good enough to update Parabola once every week, or maybe twice. As a rolling release distribution, it's a good idea never to leave your install too outdated; update regularly. This is simply because of the way the project works; old packages are deleted from the repositories quickly, once they are updated. A system that hasn't been updated for quite a while will mean potentially more reading of previous posts through the website, and more maintenance work.

The Arch forum can also be useful, if others have the same issue as you (if you encounter issues, that is). The Parabola IRC channel (#parabola on freenode) can also help you.

Due to this and the volatile nature of Parabola/Arch, you should only update when you have at least a couple hours of spare time in case of issues that need to be resolved. You should never update, for example, if you need your system for an important event, like a presentation or sending an email to an important person before an allocated deadline, and so on.

Relax - packages are well-tested regularly when new updates are made to the repositories. Separate 'testing' repositories exist for this exact reason. Despite what many people will tell you, Parabola is fairly stable and trouble-free, so long as you are aware of how to check for issues, and are willing to spend some time fixing issues in the rare event that they do occur.

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Maintaining Parabola

Parabola is a very simple distro, in the sense that you are in full control and everything is made transparent to you. One consequence is that you also need to know what you are doing, and what you have done before. In general, keeping notes (such as what I have done with this page) can be very useful as a reference in the future (if you wanted to re-install it or install the distro on another computer, for example).

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Cleaning the package cache

The following is very important as you continue to use, update and maintain your Parabola system:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman#Cleaning_the_package_cache. Essentially, this guide talks about a directory that has to be cleaned once in a while, to prevent it from growing too big (it's a cache of old package information, updated automatically when you do anything in pacman).

To clean out all old packages that are cached:
# pacman -Sc

The wiki cautions that this should be used with care. For example, since older packages are deleted from the repo, if you encounter issues and want to revert back to an older package then it's useful to have the caches available. Only do this if you are sure that you won't need it.

The wiki also mentions this method for removing everything from the cache, including currently installed packages that are cached:
# pacman -Scc
This is inadvisable, since it means re-downloading the package again if you wanted to quickly re-install it. This should only be used when disk space is at a premium.

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pacman command equivalents

The following table lists other distro package manager commands, and their equivalent in pacman:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta

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your-freedom

your-freedom is a package specific to Parabola, and it is installed by default. What it does is conflict with packages from Arch that are known to be non-free (proprietary) software. When migrating from Arch (there is a guide on the Parabola wiki for migrating - converting - an existing Arch system to a Parabola system), installing your-freedom will also fail if these packages are installed, citing them as conflicts; the recommended solution is then to delete the offending packages, and continue installing your-freedom.

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Add a user

Based on https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Users_and_Groups.

It is important (for security reasons) to create and use a non-root (non-admin) user account for everyday use. The default 'root' account is intended only for critical administrative work, since it has complete access to the entire operating system.

Read the entire document linked to above, and then continue.

Add your user:
# useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash yourusername
Set a password:
# passwd yourusername

Use of the diceware method is recommended, for generating secure passphrases (instead of passwords).

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systemd

This is the name of the system used for managing services in Parabola. It is a good idea to become familiar with it. Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd#Basic_systemctl_usage to gain a full understanding. This is very important! Make sure to read them.

An example of a 'service' could be a webserver (such as lighttpd), or sshd (openssh), dhcp, etc. There are countless others.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530 explains the background behind the decision by Arch (Parabola's upstream supplier) to use systemd.

The manpage should also help:
# man systemd
The section on 'unit types' is especially useful.

According to the wiki, systemd 'journal' keeps logs of a size up to 10% of the total size your / partition takes up. on a 60GB root this would mean 6GB. That's not exactly practical, and can have performance implications later when the log gets too big. Based on instructions from the wiki, I will reduce the total size of the journal to 50MiB (the wiki recommends 50MiB).

Open /etc/systemd/journald.conf and find the line that says:
#SystemMaxUse=
Change it to say:
SystemMaxUse=50M

The wiki also recommended a method for forwarding journal output to TTY 12 (accessible by pressing ctrl+alt+f12, and you use ctrl+alt+[F1-F12] to switch between terminals). I decided not to enable it.

Restart journald:
# systemctl restart systemd-journald

The wiki recommends that if the journal gets too large, you can also simply delete (rm -Rf) everything inside /var/log/journald/* but recommends backing it up. This shouldn't be necessary, since you already set the size limit above and systemd will automatically start to delete older records when the journal size reaches it's limit (according to systemd developers).

Finally, the wiki mentions 'temporary' files and the utility for managing them.
# man systemd-tmpfiles
The command for 'clean' is:
# systemd-tmpfiles --clean
According to the manpage, this "cleans all files and directories with an age parameter". According to the Arch wiki, this reads information in /etc/tmpfiles.d/ and /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/ to know what actions to perform. Therefore, it is a good idea to read what's stored in these locations to get a better understanding.

I looked in /etc/tmpfiles.d/ and found that it was empty on my system. However, /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/ contained some files. The first one was etc.conf, containing information and a reference to this manpage:
# man tmpfiles.d
Read that manpage, and then continue studying all the files.

The systemd developers tell me that it isn't usually necessary to touch the systemd-tmpfiles utility manually at all.

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Interesting repositories

Parabola wiki at https://wiki.parabolagnulinux.org/Repositories#kernels mentions about a repository called [kernels] for custom kernels that aren't in the default base. It might be worth looking into what is available there, depending on your use case.

I enabled it on my system, to see what was in it. Edit /etc/pacman.conf and below the 'extra' section add:
[kernels]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Now sync with the repository:
# pacman -Syy

List all available packages in this repository:
# pacman -Sl kernels

In the end, I decided not to install anything from it but I kept the repository enabled regardless.

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Setup a network connection in Parabola

Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Configuring_Network.

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Set the hostname

This should be the same as the hostname that you set in /etc/hostname when installing Parabola. You can also do it with systemd (do so now, if you like):
# hostnamectl set-hostname yourhostname
This writes the specified hostname to /etc/hostname. More information can be found in these manpages:
# man hostname
# info hostname
# man hostnamectl

Add the same hostname to /etc/hosts, on each line. Example:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost myhostname
::1 localhost.localdomain localhost myhostname

You'll note that I set both lines; the 2nd line is for IPv6. More and more ISPs are providing this now (mine does) so it's good to be forward-thinking here.

The hostname utility is part of the inetutils package and is in core/, installed by default (as part of base).

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Network Status

According to the Arch wiki, udev should already detect the ethernet chipset and load the driver for it automatically at boot time. You can check this in the "Ethernet controller" section when running this command:
# lspci -v

Look at the remaining sections 'Kernel driver in use' and 'Kernel modules'. In my case it was as follows:
Kernel driver in use: e1000e
Kernel modules: e1000e

Check that the driver was loaded by issuing dmesg | grep module_name. In my case, I did:
# dmesg | grep e1000e

Network device names

According to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Configuring_Network#Device_names, it is important to note that the old interface names like eth0, wlan0, wwan0 and so on no longer apply. Instead, systemd creates device names starting with en (for enternet), wl (for wifi) and ww (for wwan) with a fixed identifier that systemd automatically generates. An example device name for your ethernet chipset would be enp0s25, where it is never supposed to change.

If you want to enable the old names (eth0, wlan0, wwan0, etc), the Arch wiki recommends adding net.ifnames=0 to your kernel parameters (in libreboot context, this would be accomplished by following the instructions in grub_cbfs.html).

For background information, read Predictable Network Interface Names

Show device names:
# ls /sys/class/net

Changing the device names is possible (I chose not to do it):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Configuring_Network#Change_device_name

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Network setup

I actually chose to ignore most of Networking section on the wiki. Instead, I plan to set up LXDE desktop with the graphical network-manager client. Here is a list of network managers:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Internet#Network_managers. If you need to, set a static IP address (temporarily) using the networking guide and the Arch wiki, or start the dhcpcd service in systemd. NetworkManager will be setup later, after installing LXDE.

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System Maintenance

Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance before continuing. Also read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enhance_system_stability. This is important, so make sure to read them!

Install smartmontools (it can be used to check smart data. HDDs use non-free firmware inside, but it's transparent to you but the smart data comes from it. Therefore, don't rely on it too much):
# pacman -S smartmontools
Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/S.M.A.R.T. to learn how to use it.

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Configuring the desktop

Based on steps from General Recommendations on the Arch wiki. The plan is to use LXDE and LXDM/LightDM, along with everything else that you would expect on other distributions that provide LXDE by default.

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Copyright © 2014, 2015 Leah Rowe <info@minifree.org>
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