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Hacking on Practicalli content

I am enjoying my 2 week at home vacation (stay-cation) and have already completely rewired my desk, laptops, Monitors and NAS storage devices on the electronic standing desk. It feels a lot more organised and easier to find everything as everything has its place.

Now I can focus on getting lots of Practicalli content done (as well as catch up with shows on Paramount+ and maybe a little Polybus on the Playstation4 VR headset)

I am interested in switching to the Hyprland, although its changing fast so I dug out an older laptop and installed Arch Linux with Hyprland using the archinstall tool. Unfortunately the laptop I used doesnt seem to support Hyprland or something is missing from the install.

I am taking a stay-cation as I am still recovering from Covid and the weather is also quite grim. I am getting out for walks and will cycle if any days are dry enough...

Practicalliλ︎

Plans for content development for the next two weeks

Neovim - using neotree to navigate - Backspace to navigate up the tree - Enter to navigate into a directory - . to set the current directory as root (so actions become relevant to the project, e.g. file and word searches)

Neovim - Neogitλ︎

Ensure the common git workflows are captured in Practicalli Neovim

  • create local tracking branch for a remote branch
  • stage lines, hunks and files
  • commit & commit amend
  • signed commits and showing the signature is good (locally and on GitHub)
  • use rebase interactive to squash commits, e.g. some commits shouldnt be separate, managing commits that were not signed correctly.
  • apply a patch file

AstroNvim updates - neogit

  • 6837a5d Feature: Two new user commands, :NeogitLog and :NeogitCommit can now be used to show all log entries for a specified file, or range within a file, and NeogitCommit can be used to show a detailed commit view for a specified SHA/commitish value (2 days ago)

Hyprlandλ︎

Hyprland is a very appealing wayland compositor with dynamic tiling window manager. As Hpryland is a rapidly moving project, so using Arch Linux will be useful to follow along with the rapid updates.

There is a useful video that simplifies the install and saves time reading of Arch Wiki that would otherwise be required.

Hyprland failed to run after install

I assume the laptop I installed Arch and Hyprland doesnt have the right hardware (video card) to run as its over 16 years old now.

The laptop does run Gnome with wayland though.

Installing Archλ︎

Arch Linux downloads page provides a magnetic link (opens in torrent client) or a .torrent file download.

Either approach should see the 1.17GB Arch ISO download in a few minutes.

Get a USB stick with 2GB or more memory and plug into the laptop that has the ISO image (make sure there is nothing important on the USB stick as it will be erased).

Copy Arch ISO to USB Stick

Show the name of the USB stick 

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/usb-*
Copy the ISO image to the USB stick 
dd bs=4M if=/home/practicalli/Downloads/archlinux-2024.10.01-x86_64.iso of=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Generic_Flash_Disk_22F1D320-0:0 conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

Output of dd command 
1166016512 bytes (1.2 GB, 1.1 GiB) copied, 96 s, 12.1 MB/s
279+1 records in
279+1 records out
1173389312 bytes (1.2 GB, 1.1 GiB) copied, 96.724 s, 12.1 MB/s

Insert the USB stick in the computer to install Arch Linux upon and switch that computer on.

The Arch Linux splash screen shows, Enter to start installing. Once finished, a minimal Linux OS is ready to use.

Configure Archλ︎

There is a long and quite dull installation guide for Arch which would be of interest if you do not already know Linux.

The quicker approach is to use the Arch install command

Install Arch packages and Hyperland

archinstall
  • Archinstall language: English (default)
  • Mirrors: United Kingdom
  • Locales: uk, en_GB, UTF-8
  • Disk configuration > Partition: use best-effort > Select computer drive > Select filesystem kind: ext4 > separate home partition: no
  • Root password: set
  • User account: added practicalli
  • Profile: Desktop > Hyprland

Select install and sit back for a few minutes

Arch install prompts about chroot into the newly installed system, e.g. to install additional packages or configure stuff.

Hardwareλ︎

The buttons on my Logitec MX Ergo trackball were not working so well, so I investigated replacing the switches.

Michael Stapelberg has a nice guide to replacing the default buttons with Kailh GM 8.0 switches, which are described as 'ultra high life'. Replacing the switches does require soldering.

For now, I ensure I keep a decent charge in the Logitec MX Ergo trackball which seems to help greatly.

Thank you.

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