ArchLinux installation | A couple of questions

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1

Hello,

I am planning on installing ArchLinux with Xfce
on my Lenovo 100e Chromebook Gen 3 Laptop:

Intel Celeron N4500 1.10GHz,
4GB LPDDR4x RAM,
32GB eMMC,
Intel UHD Graphics

I am a little hesitant about the following:

  • swap / no swap
  • user account only / both root and user
  • pulseaudio / pipewire
  • Linux / Linux-LTS
  • ISO network configuration / Network Manager
  • multilib / no multilib

I’d be grateful if someone could give me some advice.

Thank you.

2

Definitely don’t use swap since you have a non-replacable eMMC. Instead, use zram. I recommend using the zstd algorithm for zram with a 4x compression ratio (so 16GB zram).

1 Like
3

Thank you.

4

My recommendation is to use pipewire and zram, don’t think any of the other things matter. Just use what you like. Do you need multilib? Probably not.

2 Likes
5

Thank you.

6

But the steams…

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7

I have done the following (instruction found on youtube):

sudo pacman -S zram-generator

cd /etc/systemcd/

sudo nano zram-generator.conf

-----------nano-----------

[zram0]

zram-size = ram / 2

EOF

Now I have this:

NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/zram0 partition 1.9G 0B 100

How can I implement “the zstd algorithm for zram with a 4x compression ratio (so 16GB zram)”?

8

I have this:

[zram0]
compression-algorithm = zstd
zram-size = min(ram * 4, 65536)

Which means that zram size will be 4 x the size of ram, and a maximum of 64GB. So on your Chromebook, that would be 16GB. If you don’t want to limit the max you can just set zram-size = ram * 4

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9

Thank you!

10

Just wanted to make sure. Does everything look alright now?

zram

11

Yes

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12

Thank you!

13

The Arch Linux installer has added a couple of options. Could you please help me with the following?

  • separate partition for /home [yes or no]
  • bootloader [systemd-boot, grub, efistub, limine]
  • unified kernel images [yes or no]

Thank you.

14

Is this your first time using Linux?

Arch is a very hands-off distro, you’re going to be expected to make many decisions on configuration for yourself.

15

Yeah, for beginners easy-to-install distros like Fedora, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS are better. Another reason I don’t install Arch is because archinstall always fails.

16

Archinstall is fine. I just wanted to clarify a few things for myself. That’s all.

17

You should familiarize yourself with what those options actually mean.

Having a separate partition for /home seems to be a personal choice, I’ve tried both and since I backup my files anyway I don’t personally see a difference between having a separate partition or not.

18

Thank you.

I think I’ll go with:

separate partition for /home [no]
bootloader [grub]
unified kernel images [no]