My 2018 Linux Test

So I figured out the reason the resolution seemed to be changing whenever I installed the nvidia driver.

Seems GRUB was passing along its graphics settings to the kernel so once I set GRUB up to have a resolution that matched my monitor, the nvidia driver started displaying at the resolution passed by GRUB.

Still didn't fix my GUI problem, but at least i fixed something. :p
 
Wow, I finally fixed it.

As I was reading through the Xorg document in the Arch Wiki for the 100th time trying to diagnose this problem, something finally clicked.

There's a note stating that configuration of X is not required because Arch does it for you. However, this seems to be bologna. The note in the configuration says, "Arch supplies default configuration files in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/, and no extra configuration is necessary for most setups." I have yet to see Arch or any other program put anything into the xorg.conf.d directory.

So, I ran Xorg :0 -configure. This output a config file by X to the /root directory called xorg.conf.new.

When I opened it with a text editor using nano xorg.conf.new, the configuration file was drastically different from the one nvidia-xconfig created.

So I copied xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to override the previous configuration file and viola, Xfce loaded with no problems.

I still don't think all of the X settings in xorg.conf are correct, but it definitely wanted to setup my system as a dual head because of having two video cards, even if only one monitor is connected.
 
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You can start nvidia-settings with sudo so it can write to the xconfig file. Might be the easiest road now that you have the GUI up.
 
So, as I continue to work this solution, it seems you MUST generate an X config file using Xorg :0 -configure first and then run nvidia-xconfig. It seems the nvidia-xconfig utility assumes this is done and appends any data to the existing X configuration file, but doesn't generate a functional one on its own.
 
You can start nvidia-settings with sudo so it can write to the xconfig file. Might be the easiest road now that you have the GUI up.
Yeah, I'm able to pull up nvidia-settings, but even as root it doesn't seem to be working correctly. Some settings seem to change fine, but when I click the 'Save to X Configuration File' I first get a message about Multiple X screens being set to absolute positioning. Then I get a message that it failed to generate x config file. Then it comes up with Save X Configuration but when I click 'show preview' it is blank.
 
Yeah, I'm able to pull up nvidia-settings, but even as root it doesn't seem to be working correctly. Some settings seem to change fine, but when I click the 'Save to X Configuration File' I first get a message about Multiple X screens being set to absolute positioning. Then I get a message that it failed to generate x config file. Then it comes up with Save X Configuration but when I click 'show preview' it is blank.

Something that worked for me is to change a setting in the display settings outside of Nvidia Settings. So for me I had issues with my 100hz refresh rate sticking. I even tried saving it as root with no luck. Someone else suggested that I make a change in the display settings and then try it and the settings stuck for whatever reason.
 
There were a lot of Linux users who used it primarily as a status thing. Linux wasn't as easy to install and configure so it put them in their own made up elite club of people who could actually use Linux. Over time, things changed and Linux became a lot more accessible. There were GUI's for installing the OS, you didn't have to manually partition to install, you didn't have to understand file systems and swap, and everything you needed would come working out of the box. Hell it wasn't too long ago that using Linux on a laptop was a huge nightmare because 99% of the time, it wouldn't come with wireless or ethernet drivers. Now installing Ubuntu is easier and objectively better than Windows. You can still configure everything like you used to, or you could click 5 things that are all in very plain english and it will install a full GUI desktop, all your drivers will work, and every piece of software you could ever want is installed and ready to use.

The gap was closed between regular computer users and the "elite few" in that special made up club I was talking about earlier. People had issues with Linux being more accessible so they moved to one of the least accessible versions - Arch. Installing Arch isn't hard, it just takes a little effort and maybe a little research. This was enough for some users to fill their gatekeeping jollies. This lasted a couple years until Manjaro came out and became popular. It was Arch, but any person who had even a little bit of computer savyness could install and use it. The gap closed just a little more between regular users and the "elite few". Now the community has turned on itself for Arch. You try and get any kind of help, even something moderately hard to fix, and you get ridiculed for even asking. You even bring up that you use Manjaro and you can practically feel the rage of some Arch users coming through your monitor.

This is an absolutely accurate explanation of why it is a pain in the hole to get help from the Arch community.

There's a Linux server on discord that is run by one of the worst human beings I've ever encountered in my entire life. Now frankly that's reason enough to stay away from that server, but one of the most sacrosanct and rigidly enforced rules in that server is they *absolutely refuse* to help anyone running an Arch derivative (Manjaro, AntergOS, anything) - and that includes Arch itself if the user installed it using Zen Installer - which is absolutely ridiculous because Zen installer is literally a GUI for installing stock Arch. All it really does different is it will partition a drive for you instead of forcing you to decide on a partitioning scheme, and it allows you to enable an extra repository during install if you want to.

Unfortunately this is very much the norm with Arch folk I have found. It's not a case of simply expecting people to have tried to fix their own problems. It's an active and present dislike of anyone that isn't already at their level of understanding.

For example, Arch Wiki did previously have a basic install guide and it was removed. Not because it was outdated or not useful - but because it allowed people who didn't understand Arch to install Arch.

Then you get articles like this one, which are just horrendously written and needlessly confusing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fstab

Reason being, it's normal on the Arch Wiki, to never provide a simple explanation inline with your own writing. Instead, every article links to every other article, making it a trawl to understand any given statement because you have to backtrack from what you wanted to know (How fstab works) to what a block device is and fully grok that before you can actually understand fstab.
 
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This is an absolutely accurate explanation of why it is a pain in the hole to get help from the Arch community.

There's a Linux server on discord that is run by one of the worst human beings I've ever encountered in my entire life. Now frankly that's reason enough to stay away from that server, but one of the most sacrosanct and rigidly enforced rules in that server is they *absolutely refuse* to help anyone running an Arch derivative (Manjaro, AntergOS, anything) - and that includes Arch itself if the user installed it using Zen Installer - which is absolutely ridiculous because Zen installer is literally a GUI for installing stock Arch. All it really does different is it will partition a drive for you instead of forcing you to decide on a partitioning scheme, and it allows you to enable an extra repository during install if you want to.

Unfortunately this is very much the norm with Arch folk I have found. It's not a case of simply expecting people to have tried to fix their own problems. It's an active and present dislike of anyone that isn't already at their level of understanding.

For example, Arch Wiki did previously have a basic install guide and it was removed. Not because it was outdated or not useful - but because it allowed people who didn't understand Arch to install Arch.

Then you get articles like this one, which are just horrendously written and needlessly confusing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fstab

Reason being, it's normal on the Arch Wiki, to never provide a simple explanation inline with your own writing. Instead, every article links to every other article, making it a trawl to understand any given statement because you have to backtrack from what you wanted to know (How fstab works) to what a block device is and fully grok that before you can actually understand fstab.


It's pretty bad when you find another Linux user, they ask what distro you use, and if you say any Ubuntu flavor, Manjaro, or Soulis, they turn their nose up to you. I shit you not I was on a plane from Seattle to go to Microsoft Ignite a couple years ago. I was sitting next to a guy who had a Surface Pro with Linux stickers on it. I glanced over and he was running some flavor of Linux with a Gnome 3 desktop. At the time, Linux pretty much didn't work *at all* on Surfaces and Surface Books so I was curious what he was running. I tried to avoid making it obvious that I was checking out his screen because it looked like he was doing some work on the plane. I asked him about the Tux and other Linux themed stickers on the back and he kind of lit up and got excited. He was a programmer for Microsoft and was running an in-house version that they designed and he had some kind of part in. This was about a year after Windows 10 was released and I was already in the process of getting ready to move completely to Linux for home/personal use. To help the conversation I told him that I was bouncing around distros but I really liked Ubuntu Mate on my laptop (fuck me, right?). He turned right off. I saw that he wasn't about to talk to me anymore about Linux. I brought up that I was a DBA and basically lived in Oracle Linux, our CentOS environment and it all connected to another handful of Windows Servers that was hosting our MSSQL servers for reporting services but he wasn't having it. The rest of the 6 hour flight he plucked away on his keyboard, drank like it wasn't a 9am flight, and didn't say a word to me.
 
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He was a programmer for Microsoft and was running an in-house version that they designed and he had some kind of part in. This was about a year after Windows 10 was released and I was already in the process of getting ready to move completely to Linux for home/personal use. <snip> He turned right off. I saw that he wasn't about to talk to me anymore about Linux. <snip> The rest of the 6 hour flight he plucked away on his keyboard, drank like it wasn't a 9am flight, and didn't say a word to me.

1000% FWIW since I was not there. However, is it possible that he had stuff to do and didn't want to open a conversation potentially shitting on his employer? One year in, Windows 10 was taking a full public beating. They could have thought it was going to segue into rants of how Windows 10 sucks and nuances of different distros. If it felt that way, I could see shutting that down if I were an Azure dev with some work to get done.
 
It's pretty bad when you find another Linux user, they ask what distro you use, and if you say any Ubuntu flavor, Manjaro, or Soulis, they turn their nose up to you. I shit you not I was on a plane from Seattle to go to Microsoft Ignite a couple years ago. I was sitting next to a guy who had a Surface Pro with Linux stickers on it. I glanced over and he was running some flavor of Linux with a Gnome 3 desktop. At the time, Linux pretty much didn't work *at all* on Surfaces and Surface Books so I was curious what he was running. I tried to avoid making it obvious that I was checking out his screen because it looked like he was doing some work on the plane. I asked him about the Tux and other Linux themed stickers on the back and he kind of lit up and got excited. He was a programmer for Microsoft and was running an in-house version that they designed and he had some kind of part in. This was about a year after Windows 10 was released and I was already in the process of getting ready to move completely to Linux for home/personal use. To help the conversation I told him that I was bouncing around distros but I really liked Ubuntu Mate on my laptop (fuck me, right?). He turned right off. I saw that he wasn't about to talk to me anymore about Linux. I brought up that I was a DBA and basically lived in Oracle Linux, our CentOS environment and it all connected to another handful of Windows Servers that was hosting our MSSQL servers for reporting services but he wasn't having it. The rest of the 6 hour flight he plucked away on his keyboard, drank like it wasn't a 9am flight, and didn't say a word to me.

Yeah I don't get the distro hate thing. To each their own in the long run. I mean seriously...who gives a shit what distro a person is using. I'm just happy they're using Linux. ;)
 
This is an absolutely accurate explanation of why it is a pain in the hole to get help from the Arch community.


For example, Arch Wiki did previously have a basic install guide and it was removed. Not because it was outdated or not useful - but because it allowed people who didn't understand Arch to install Arch.

I'm not sure what guide your talking about, but here is the installation guide.
 
I'm not sure what guide your talking about, but here is the installation guide.

And that guide is only a shell of what it used to be.

Previously the install guide was so comprehensive and complete a first time linux user could build an Arch system without many issues.

It was literally line by line commands that did the entire install for you.
 
And that guide is only a shell of what it used to be.

Previously the install guide was so comprehensive and complete a first time linux user could build an Arch system without many issues.

It was literally line by line commands that did the entire install for you.

To be fair he has a point. I was mistakenly meaning the old Beginner's Guide, not the old Install guide.

That said, note the differences between the old beginner's guide:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100706145738/http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide

And the present beginner's guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Beginners'_guide&redirect=no



The Installation Guide itself is also far less comprehensive and helpful than it used to be:

2010 Install guide - https://web.archive.org/web/2010070...g/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide

2007 Install Guide: https://web.archive.org/web/2007101...hlinux.org/static/docs/arch-install-guide.txt
 
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Yup. And that's a "new" (compared to the old one) page - the edit history only goes back to 2013.

Here's the 2007 Arch Install guide via wayback:

https://web.archive.org/web/2007110...hlinux.org/static/docs/arch-install-guide.txt

Deep, comprehensive, explained in-line and generally far more helpful than the present approach of redirecting a user to 500 other pages to understand the one term they didn't grok immediately on the first page.

Wow I had never seen the 2007 version...that's ridiculously comprehensive. Even more so the install guide I first used to install Arch which was really comprehensive.

I actually like the guide now because it makes the user actually have to work a bit to get Arch installed which is a good thing. There are also plenty of other guides out there that can be found with a simple Google search that are very comprehensive. I keep one around in my bookmarks for installing with LUKS because I don't do it very often and forget certain things. ;)
 
Working through the linked guide now, but in a Hyper-V VM...

So far it's a failure, can't get past GRUB, but hey, GRUB!
 
I get the word 'GRUB' and a blinking cursor...

So the infamous blinking cursor error?

At work, will play with it later.

It's Arch, I expect it to be obtuse, and don't expect 'the community' to be of much help.

The chance that someone will answer affirmatively that Arch can by run in Hyper-V, and if so, what adjustments might need to be made...?

:ROFLMAO:
 
I get the word 'GRUB' and a blinking cursor...

So the infamous blinking cursor error?

At work, will play with it later.

It's Arch, I expect it to be obtuse, and don't expect 'the community' to be of much help.

The chance that someone will answer affirmatively that Arch can by run in Hyper-V, and if so, what adjustments might need to be made...?

:ROFLMAO:

I learned to install it via VirtualBox (along with Gentoo) many moons ago before I moved to it on bare metal so it does work. But haven't done it in a VM in a long time now. ;)
 
I don't know about Hyper-v but in VirtualBox and many PC's in EFI mode grubx64.efi needs to be moved or copied to bootx64.efi
 
I've definitely had some stuff shit the bed by running it in a VM; no major Linux distros though.

I always try to throw stuff into a VM before building out on metal.
 
I get the word 'GRUB' and a blinking cursor...

So the infamous blinking cursor error?

At work, will play with it later.

It's Arch, I expect it to be obtuse, and don't expect 'the community' to be of much help.

The chance that someone will answer affirmatively that Arch can by run in Hyper-V, and if so, what adjustments might need to be made...?

:ROFLMAO:
Boot to rescue mode and check the logs what went wrong.
 
Well, I'll admit that my log-fu is near non-existent. Add it to the list.

But I was able to get it going after some experimentation.

Basically, had to use gdisk (I think) to set partition types after redoing the partitions, with a BIOS partition first, then data, then swap, and then installing grub and running its configuration.

That got me booting!

Now for stuff like GUIs...
 
Well, I'll admit that my log-fu is near non-existent. Add it to the list.

But I was able to get it going after some experimentation.

Basically, had to use gdisk (I think) to set partition types after redoing the partitions, with a BIOS partition first, then data, then swap, and then installing grub and running its configuration.

That got me booting!

Now for stuff like GUIs...

The GUI install for Arch was pretty frustrating for me.

Please, for the love of god, make sure after you install X and your video driver you run Xorg :0 -configure to generate your xorg.conf file.

After you generate it, you'll need to copy xorg.conf.new from the /root directory to /etc/X11/xorg.conf using cp.

So the complete command is cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
 
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I'll try that, thanks- biggest issue with the video driver is that this is a Hyper-V VM and I'm not quite sure which driver Arch is going to want for that.
 
So I was having an issue with Xfce popping up an error message when loading and it took me a while to find an answer.

The message: "no running instance of xfce4-panel has been found"

After some research I discovered a recommended solution here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111887

To save you some reading though, basically do the following:

Logout of Xfce

cd ~/.cache/sessions

delete the files in the folder

restart xfce with startxfce4 command

After deleting the cache files, Xfce loaded with no error messages.
 
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So once again I ran into the joy of trying to figure out Alsa. *sigh* What a hot mess.

First I installed alsa-utils which contains alsamixer. ALSA mixer is a CLI (command line interface) mixer to control your devices.

However, as I typically run into, there doesn't seem to be a way to set an audio device as default directly by ALSA.

Per the Arch wiki all channels are muted by default so I went into ALSAmixer and found yep, every channel was muted. So, as I began unmuting stuff, I saw an option to list devices and sure enough, the default device wasn't the one I was using. So in ALSAmixer I switched to the device I wanted and then unmuted all of those channels, but no go; still no sound.

So rather than beat my head against a wall, I decided to download old faithful; pulseaudio.

A little pacman action; sudo pacman -S pulseaudio, then sudo pacman -S xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, then sudo pacman -S pavucontrol

I then added the PulseAudio button to a panel, but it just sat there with a blank screen, so after all the installing I figured it needed rebooting.

After reboot the PulseAudio button opened the control panel and sure enough sound was trying to output on one of the HDMI channels of my video cards.

Now with the PulseAudio mixer I'm able to select output device, which specific output on a specific device I want to enable, disable, etc.

I set output to the Optical of the built in sound card and voila! Sound is up and running.
 
ALSA is never what you want to run for DE sound.

For that you want a sound server, pulse. So ya you need to setup both. They aren't duplicated things... ALSA is a low level kernel sound system, Pulse is a sound server very much like windows audio.

Glad you figured it out. All the ragging on arch you are proving their exact point... they aren't holding your hand they want their users to figure out how Linux works under the hood a little. Take that for what it is.... arch isn't intended to be a regular user distro. Some people like to pile on the arch people for not being nice to new Linux users... but they make it very clear they aren't making a distro for new Linux users, you will learn a ton of stuff setting arch up if you are a newer user. But they aren't looking to compete with Ubuntu or Mint. I'm sure newer users trying ti install rolling debian and having issues would run into the same minimally helpful support from Debian gear heads. :)

Good luck with your further exploration of arch JS it might never be your daily driver... but you'll learn a few things about Linux that might come in handy at some point.
 
ALSA is never what you want to run for DE sound.

For that you want a sound server, pulse. So ya you need to setup both. They aren't duplicated things... ALSA is a low level kernel sound system, Pulse is a sound server very much like windows audio.

Glad you figured it out. All the ragging on arch you are proving their exact point... they aren't holding your hand they want their users to figure out how Linux works under the hood a little. Take that for what it is.... arch isn't intended to be a regular user distro. Some people like to pile on the arch people for not being nice to new Linux users... but they make it very clear they aren't making a distro for new Linux users, you will learn a ton of stuff setting arch up if you are a newer user. But they aren't looking to compete with Ubuntu or Mint. I'm sure newer users trying ti install rolling debian and having issues would run into the same minimally helpful support from Debian gear heads. :)

Good luck with your further exploration of arch JS it might never be your daily driver... but you'll learn a few things about Linux that might come in handy at some point.

What is DE sound? Default?

I'm slowly working toward it being my daily driver. I've learned a lot since I started my test last year and I appreciate your input and encouragement.

Right now, stealth dependencies are driving me nuts but I'm guessing I'll learn more about that as I go.
 
What is DE sound? Default?

I'm slowly working toward it being my daily driver. I've learned a lot since I started my test last year and I appreciate your input and encouragement.

Right now, stealth dependencies are driving me nuts but I'm guessing I'll learn more about that as I go.

Desktop environment. In general if you are going to have a GUI DE your going to want to allow more then one program access to the sound system at a time. That is where a sound server like Pulse comes in.

ALSA (advanced Linux sound architecture) is the kernel level sound system. That directly talks to your sound devices. Its basically a pure hardware driver. Yes their are alsa mixers ect... but really if you want to have multi plexing sound you want a sound server. Pulse is that sound server. It basically takes all the audio output from all your software and feeds it to the ALSA hardware driver. Windows and Mac have the same type of services (windows audio, coreaudio).

They all work pretty much the same way there. Linux/Windows/Mac have a driver level sound system that talks to the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) then they have user space sound servers that programmers will code to. Someone writing software for windows that needs audio uses the windows audio extensions... Mac Core audio... Linux Pulse. The sound system then direct the traffic to the HAL level audio systems... in the case of Linux its ALSA.

Lots of people misunderstand the Linux audio system and think its doing something odd by having multiple sound out put methods. Which just isn't true. Linux started with OSS (Open sound system) ALSA as a project started later and at some point it was decided it was superior and replaced OSS. Pulse is a user land sound server.... and Jack which we haven't talked about was designed to be a Low latency audio input server. Windows has the same issues with windows audio not providing low latency input which is why every windows using musician is familiar with Steinbergs ASIO. Its also why musicians tend to love Macs.... Apple without a doubt has the absolute best sound system. Coreaudio basically provides everything all in one. A lot of computer musicians believe it or not suck with computers lol... Macs are the most plug and play pro audio computing devices around. With a Mac plug it in and it will work... no messing with third party sound systems, and hinkey micro kernel hardware drivers. In general on a Mac you plug your high end audio stuff in and it just works with low latency... and ends up being much more reliable and stable.

I hope at some point the Linux sound system becomes as refined as Apples CoreAudio. Apple has the advantage of being the be all and end all say on the subject of Mac Audio. They also prioritized professional audio as that is one area where Macs have always been a market leader. So Core audio from day one was aimed at low latency stream and midi input ect. What is exciting for Linux audio coming down the pike is Pipewire.... its a Red hat backed project (Red Hat has been a big part of Linux audio for awhile now they employee Lennart Poettering the main person behind Pulse.. and pulse development has slowed as I would assume Lennart has been moved to Pipewire) Pipewire has been designed to replace both Pulse and Jack... basically being a Linux version of Core Audio. I'm excited to see Pipewire hit the mainstream distros soon.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PipeWire-2019-Looking-Good
 
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I started setting up a dual boot on my laptop which doesn't have a wired ethernet port, so yeah, wireless. On Linux. : /

So, after boot from the USB live image I of course had no internet. No internet means no install.

So, after beating my head on a wall for a few hours I finally came up with this solution.

1. I enabled broadcast on my network SSID and disabled all security. Trying to setup wireless security and connect to the wireless network from a live image was way to complicated to just get an install done. I'm in a relatively rural neighborhood so the short time without security hopefully won't be a problem. Hopefully. lol

2. After boot to the live image, I first type ip link to get my adapter name.

3. Next, I had to turn it on with ip link set wlp2s0 up

4. Next, I then connect to the wireless network with iw dev wlp2s0 connect SSIDName.

5. And finally, run dhcpcd. Just typed dhcpcd and it worked.

6. ping google.com and my device is connected.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of disabling security, but wpa supplicant doesn't seem to be connecting very well to WPA2 even though the wiki says it is supported. I'll deal with that after the install is up and running
 
I started setting up a dual boot on my laptop which doesn't have a wired ethernet port, so yeah, wireless. On Linux. : /

So, after boot from the USB live image I of course had no internet. No internet means no install.

So, after beating my head on a wall for a few hours I finally came up with this solution.

1. I enabled broadcast on my network SSID and disabled all security. Trying to setup wireless security and connect to the wireless network from a live image was way to complicated to just get an install done. I'm in a relatively rural neighborhood so the short time without security hopefully won't be a problem. Hopefully. lol

2. After boot to the live image, I first type ip link to get my adapter name.

3. Next, I had to turn it on with ip link set wlp2s0 up

4. Next, I then connect to the wireless network with iw dev wlp2s0 connect SSIDName.

5. And finally, run dhcpcd. Just typed dhcpcd and it worked.

6. ping google.com and my device is connected.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of disabling security, but wpa supplicant doesn't seem to be connecting very well to WPA2 even though the wiki says it is supported. I'll deal with that after the install is up and running

For install from the live CD you can just use wifi-menu. Once you learn Arch better you'll also realize that you can install EVERYTHING during the chroot part of the install so after the initial reboot you can have NetworkManager and a DE already up and running making it much easier!
 
For install from the live CD you can just use wifi-menu. Once you learn Arch better you'll also realize that you can install EVERYTHING during the chroot part of the install so after the initial reboot you can have NetworkManager and a DE already up and running making it much easier!

Pretty sure I tried wifi-menu and it said it couldn't find it. I'll try again in a minute.

I actually did learn that today. I rebooted the live USB, chroot over to my install and installed a bunch of stuff. Unfortunately it still didn't work lol.
 
For install from the live CD you can just use wifi-menu. Once you learn Arch better you'll also realize that you can install EVERYTHING during the chroot part of the install so after the initial reboot you can have NetworkManager and a DE already up and running making it much easier!

Ok, looks like there are competing services for internet access. I was attempting to follow the Arch Wiki instructions for Wireless network configuration which uses IW or Wpa_Supplicant. The article doesn't even refer to their own internal project, netctl.

So, I disabled dhcpcd, ran wifi-menu, and bam, it just worked.

Thanks for that recommendation man. I was about to go crazy using iw. : /
 
So using wifi-menu -o I was able to generate a configuration file.

Using netctl enable profile_name sets the service to start at boot so now I don't have to run wifi-menu manually at startup. You are the man Vermillion! :D
 
Ok, looks like there are competing services for internet access. I was attempting to follow the Arch Wiki instructions for Wireless network configuration which uses IW or Wpa_Supplicant. The article doesn't even refer to their own internal project, netctl.

So, I disabled dhcpcd, ran wifi-menu, and bam, it just worked.

Thanks for that recommendation man. I was about to go crazy using iw. : /

Yeah the instructions for connecting to a wireless network while installing Arch is a kludge and far harder to understand now. The old wiki instruction guide that we were talking about earlier is how I know to use wifi-menu since that was in the step-by-step all those moons ago. ;) makes install far simpler.
 
So my laptop Windows 10 install was done in RAID mode, but Arch will only detect the hard drive in AHCI.

Thankfully, the ArchWiki for the XPS 15 9560 has some pretty good info overall for running Arch on the laptop

After manually changing BIOS settings a couple of times to boot between Windows and Linux, I definitely needed a solution. Well, thankfully, there is one.

These are the instructions I found for converting the Windows RAID to AHCI without having to do a complete Windows reinstall. This now allows me to set AHCI in the BIOS and boot to either Linux or Windows using the GRUB menu.

  1. Right-click the Windows Start Menu. Choose Command Prompt (Admin).
    1. If you don’t see Command Prompt listed, it’s because you have already been updated to a later version of Windows. If so, use this method instead to get to the Command Prompt:
      1. Click the Start Button and type cmd
      2. Right-click the result and select Run as administrator
  2. Type this command and press ENTER: bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
    1. If this command does not work for you, try bcdedit /set safeboot minimal
  3. Restart the computer and enter BIOS Setup (the key to press varies between systems).
  4. Change the SATA Operation mode to AHCI from either IDE or RAID (again, the language varies).
  5. Save changes and exit Setup and Windows will automatically boot to Safe Mode.
  6. Right-click the Windows Start Menu once more. Choose Command Prompt (Admin).
  7. Type this command and press ENTER: bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
    1. If you had to try the alternate command above, you will likely need to do so here also: bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot
  8. Reboot once more and Windows will automatically start with AHCI drivers enabled.
 
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