As most of you probably don’t know, my prefered Linux distro is Arch Linux. I use it on almost every computer I have:
- On my desktop computer (Intel Core 2 Duo with embedded Intel Graphics Card)
- On my laptop (Acer 5920G)
- On my server (AMD Athlon X2) – a virtualized instance of Arch Linux
- On my girlfriend’s laptop (Asus M51SE) (OK, I must admit that I’m responsible for installing software and configuring the laptop – and in the end, that’s quite the best solution, she avoids issues with Linux and I’m sure she has a well configured laptop, but she’s the one who uses this and she’s accustomed to it now, I would even bet she wouldn’t switch back to Windows if she could…)
In this article, I’ll explain how I configure my Arch Linux PCs.
/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Here I uncomment the Belnet lines (as I’m in Belgium) and some other German- and French-based servers.
/etc/pacman.conf
Here I only add the archlinuxfr repository:
[archlinuxfr] Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/x86_64
/etc/mkinitcpio.conf
As I already use btrfs (but unfortunately I still haven’t figured out how to use it as root), I’ve modified the modules list to:
MODULES="crc32c libcrc32c btrfs zlib_deflate"
This is my HOOKS list:
HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata filesystems btrfs resume consolefont"
And finally I uncommented the line:
COMPRESSION="lzma"
/etc/makepkg.conf
Here I optimized the compilation flags to:
CFLAGS="-march=native -mtune=native -O3 -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-march=native -mtune=native -O3 -pipe" LDFLAGS="-Wl,--hash-style=gnu -Wl,--as-needed"
MAKEFLAGS="-j3"
These optimizations are useful in two cases: when I install packages from AUR which are built from source and when I use srcpac instead of pacman, to compile the packages myself instead of installing precompiled binaries.
I usually use srcpac when I install software that is often used, like the kernel (package kernel26), the QT 4 libraries (I always use the latest KDE), hal, vlc, kdebase-workspace, konsole, chromium (that has become my favourite web browser) and so on. This recompiles and optimizes software for my PC architecture thus I’m sure the performance is high.
/etc/rc.conf
In this file I’ve made little changes. I won’t show the modules and daemons lists, as they depend on the software one installs on a PC.
I use terminus-font as the console font:
CONSOLEFONT=”ter-v16b”
