First blog post and Welcome!
Hi there, this is my first blog post and I would like to start with my experience with Manjaro Linux.
I've always had the thought of installing Arch on my Asus UX305CA ultrabook someday but never had the courage to dive deep into the Linux world. I've have experience with many other distros including Fedora, Ubuntu (17.10, KDE Neon), but I felt bored after using them for a while. Don't get me wrong, these are great distros, Fedora for its up-to-date software and not to mention the polish on GNOME DE, meanwhile Ubuntu for its easy to use apt commands and peace of mind.
Enough of the chit-chat, lets get right into the installation.
Before jumping ahead, I'm using the KDE variant of Manjaro and downloaded the latest version from the Manjaro website. If you do decide to follow this guide, you will lose all of your data! Also, I've install Manjaro before on my lappy but that was a while ago.
Firstly, I loaded Manjaro onto a 4GB USB stick using RUFUS on Windows and then I hit a roadblock. The official wiki said to use the GPT partitioning for UEFI, which I had selected, which only can be selected on ISO mode. Booting up to USB would lead to a GRUB rescue mode error, which I then tried using DD imaging method, and then voila! I could get into the initial setup screen before booting into the USB.
Firstly, I loaded Manjaro onto a 4GB USB stick using RUFUS on Windows and then I hit a roadblock. The official wiki said to use the GPT partitioning for UEFI, which I had selected, which only can be selected on ISO mode. Booting up to USB would lead to a GRUB rescue mode error, which I then tried using DD imaging method, and then voila! I could get into the initial setup screen before booting into the USB.
I then proceeded into the live session and then promptly went into the install GUI. When I got into the partitioning page, I selected manual partition (being the only option available), then reused the EFI partition from my last distro, select format (should be VFAT), and marked the boot flag to EFI. Then I partitioned the rest of the disk for swap and for root / partition (linuxswap and ext4 respectively). I like to keep swap so I can keep hibernate even though this ultrabook takes only a few seconds to boot.
Proceeding the installation, it took roughly 5-10mins to install.
On first boot, I noticed how nicely integrated the Manjaro tools are into the KDE DE. If you don't know already, Manjaro includes their own tools that provide easier kernel switching and driver management (which is a really neat feature to have). I first ran to check for updates using their GUI frontend for pacman, octopi. Updating via octopi was quite painless and installing extra packages (having an option to choose AUR is awesome btw) was fantastic.
Next thing I checked was the fstab mounting parameters used for all of the partitions. After running the cat tool in /etc/fstab, I've found that continuous discard was used. Not great but also not hard to fix. So I remove the discard option from all partitions, used the systemd settings to enable the fstrim.timer service to trim the ssd once every week.
That's it right for tweaks? Well, not yet.
If you've read about the default choices in Manjaro, you'll know that BFQ is the default IO sched used in their kernels. Good right, for SSDs and HDDs? Well, yes, maybe, I dunno. I prefer deadline for that little extra performance especially on SSDs where they don't have any moving parts.
And that wraps up all of the setup I've done on my zenbook. Other stuff not mentioned is probably optional or just a personal matter.
Proceeding the installation, it took roughly 5-10mins to install.
On first boot, I noticed how nicely integrated the Manjaro tools are into the KDE DE. If you don't know already, Manjaro includes their own tools that provide easier kernel switching and driver management (which is a really neat feature to have). I first ran to check for updates using their GUI frontend for pacman, octopi. Updating via octopi was quite painless and installing extra packages (having an option to choose AUR is awesome btw) was fantastic.
Next thing I checked was the fstab mounting parameters used for all of the partitions. After running the cat tool in /etc/fstab, I've found that continuous discard was used. Not great but also not hard to fix. So I remove the discard option from all partitions, used the systemd settings to enable the fstrim.timer service to trim the ssd once every week.
That's it right for tweaks? Well, not yet.
If you've read about the default choices in Manjaro, you'll know that BFQ is the default IO sched used in their kernels. Good right, for SSDs and HDDs? Well, yes, maybe, I dunno. I prefer deadline for that little extra performance especially on SSDs where they don't have any moving parts.
And that wraps up all of the setup I've done on my zenbook. Other stuff not mentioned is probably optional or just a personal matter.
Comments
Post a Comment