I installed Arch Linux some days ago. – I’ve been getting used to (K)Ubuntu’s everything-just-works magic recently, but having to do some things on my own is more refreshing than it is annoying.

Here’s my personal list of things I had to do manually, not counting application package installs like firefox/chromium, amarok et al (to be extended):

• create a new user and make home dir
• install KDE and Xorg (the latter not being pulled automatically when installing KDE!)

  pacman -yS kde xorg
  

  then, set the default runlevel to “boot to X” and set the X window manager to kdm in /etc/inittab

• make the scroll area of my touchpad work:

  pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics
  cp /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/
  

  and after that, editing /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi

• set the bash option to make “ls” display different things in different colors:

  echo "alias ls='ls --color=auto' " >> ~/.bashrc
  

wanted to install critterding, but there doesnt seem to be an ubuntu package.

had to install some packages:

sudo apt-get install autoconf libtool g++ libfreetype6-dev libsdl-dev

downloaded sources, went to source directory:


touch aclocal.m4 # necessary?
autoreconf -fi
./configure
make


now execute:

src/critterding

yay!