This ALMA preset installs a fully usable and persistent Arch Linux system on a LiveUSB containing a range of software setup for computer music production and audio work including:
- SuperCollider (with sc3-plugins)
- Csound
- Tidal
- Pure Data
- Reaper
- Sox
- Flucoma
- Jack (with both the GUI jack manager
qjackctl
and the terminal basednjconnect
patcher) - Realtime kernel (and added realtime priviliges for your user)
This version includes both the i3 tiling window manager and the sway tiling window manager as the Desktop Environment. You can choose which of these to use at login.
Provide ALMA the preset directory, specifying the ALMA_USER
, TIMEZONE
and ALMA_LOCALE
environment variables:
$ ALMA_USER="computer" TIMEZONE="Europe/Oslo" ALMA_KB_LAYOUT="dk" sudo -E alma create --presets preset
Alternatively, create img file from preset:
$ ALMA_USER="computer" TIMEZONE="Europe/Oslo" ALMA_KB_LAYOUT="dk" sudo -E alma create --presets preset --image 10GiB arch-computermusic-usb.img
And then when you are ready, flash it to a drive:
$ sudo dd bs=1M if=arch-computermusic-usb.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress
If you've installed alma on your usb before, you may get "filesystem already present" type errors when trying to install alma on to it, even after wiping partitions in fdisk
, cfdisk
or gparted
.
In my experience, the only way to get rid of it is to completely bomb the drive using dd
.
You can use these commands but BIG FAT WARNING: Make sure sda
is replaced with the correct drive name (found using lsblk
for example). Otherwise you may do irreparable damage.
# Unmount
sudo umount /dev/sda*
# Zero out everything on drive
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress && sudo partprobe
The user given by ALMA_USER
is created with a home directory and XDG directories, and given passwordless sudo access.
The root password is also set during installation.
Both Intel and AMD microcode is installed (the correct one will be loaded on boot).
NetworkManager and dhcpcd are installed.
nm-applet is run on startup.
AMD, Intel and Nvidia (proprietary) drivers are installed. The correct one should be loaded according to your system.
This preset uses Xorg, not Wayland. A Wayland installation could be created by modifying the Xorg and i3 components (for Wayland and sway respectively).
PulseAudio is installed.
In the additional presets, bluez is installed for bluetooth headsets (use bluetoothctl
to connect and pair devices).
pavucontrol can be launched with Meta+v to control the volumes and output devices.
alacritty is the default terminal emulator and can be launched with Meta+Enter.
Urxvt is also installed in the additional presets.
i3 is installed, a sample configuration is included in this preset.
Meta+r can be used to launch programs via dmenu.
i3status is also installed as a status bar, a sample configuration is included in this preset.
vim and gvim are installed, along with the MiniVim configuration.
emacs and nano are also installed in the additional presets.
zsh is installed, along with the oh-my-zsh configuration.
Firefox is installed.
In the additional presets, chromium is also installed, and lynx and elinks are installed for use on the CLI.
thunar is installed, and can be launch with Meta+f.
gparted and ntfs-3g are installed for working with NTFS partitions and resizing partitions.
The openssh client is installed.
git is installed.
In the additional presets, mpd is installed for playing music, along with the ncmpcpp and Ario frontends. The default music directory is set to ~/Music.
mpv is installed in the additional presets.
In the additional presets, KeepassXC is installed for password databases.