Bit flipping laboratory & Personal website
No sneaky cookies haunt these pages, but whether someone tracks you I do not know. Information flows through many channels, and every action leaves a trace.
After installing Arch Linux, I got google-chrome from the AUR running by way of installing sway, git, and yay. I configured these packages only minimally for getting started purposes.
Chrome needs a graphical environment to run in, such as a wayland compositor like sway. Install sway and choose gnu-free-fonts when the installation process asks about a font. Other choices probably work fine. Also install alacritty which is a terminal for sway. Copy the default sway configuration file to the user home directory. Edit the configuration file to set alacritty as the default terminal. Launch sway. Open a terminal by pressing the Win+Enter keys together. Continue to the remaining steps in the alacritty terminal.
# Install sway and alacritty sudo pacman -S sway alacritty # Use the default sway configuration file mkdir -p ~/.config/sway cp /etc/sway/config ~/.config/sway # Change "set $term foot" to "set $term alacritty" vim ~/.config/sway/config # Launch sway sway
Chrome is not available through pacman, only through the AUR. A straightforward way to use AUR is with the yay package. The most straightforward way to install yay is cloning it using git.
Install git. Optionally set the name for default branches. This avoids warning messages when cloning repositories. The common choice used to be master but recently seems to have shifted to main. Optionally set a name and email which will attribute authorship to future commits.
sudo pacman -S git git config --global init.defaultBranch main git config --global user.name "My Name" git config --global user.email "myemail@bitflippin.com"
Clone the yay repository. Build and install yay. Once installed the repository is no longer necessary. Interestingly yay seems to install itelf as a yay package!
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git cd yay sudo pacman -S base-devel makepkg -si cd .. rm -rf yay
All that remains is to install Google Chrome and run it. On wayland the additional flag below may be necessary. It is for me.
yay -S google-chrome google-chrome-stable --ozone-platform=wayland
Small usability gaps like having sway start on login, having google-chrome-stable launch without a terminal, and further customizations of sway still remain; however these steps are sufficient to get started.