Running Arch Linux on the Framework Laptop 13 | Hacker News Reader

Running Arch Linux on the Framework Laptop 13

rubin55.org

53 pointsrubin5533 comments

    systemctl enable gdm.service
    systemctl start gdm.service

can be combined in one command:

    systemctl enable --now gdm.service

additionally this is atomic (well, as in it's one command, it's not atomic internally)

In what way is it atomic? “One command” doesn’t have anything to do with being atomic.

yes it does? consider running a bash script, or piping commands over ssh. if you lose the connection only the first command might send. (bash is line and command oriented of course, so this is pretty obvious...)

I don’t think atomic operations mean what you think it does.

I'm not even sure I want to know what nightmare bug would cause someone to consider if that was atomic or not!

Ah thanks for that, updated!

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Framework_Laptop_13

In case those that didn't know, the FW laptop is so popular amongst Arch users that it has its own dedicated Wiki page (and thread on the Framework discus)

Lots of laptop models have their own page on the Arch Wiki; it's not really saying all that much.

For example many ThinkPad models do: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo but also a number of ASUS machines: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/ASUS etc.

There really is no correlation between the wiki page and adaption rate. It's because the arch wiki has such depth that there is a page on it :) thank your contributors and maintainers daily.

I wrote an article about using Arch Linux with the (new, probably as valid for older ones) Framework Laptop 13. Should prove useful to any Linux-running peeps in any case!

Thanks for sharing, also running Arch on the Framework (11th gen). I will review and compare some of the conf to mine to see if there's anything interesting I've missed recently.

I was hoping to upgrade but the queues are minimum 3 months for anything and might wait a bit more hoping they'll be able to scale up production (or maybe I'm just dreaming)

I just bought a 13th gen Framework and it shipped in 3 days. I think it’s only the AMD models that have the really long waits.

I'm not really familiar with virtualization on a linux laptop - can you run a vm and let your screen/keyboard be hijacked by the VM?

maybe pointers to virtualization ideas?

VirtualBox runs fine with all features working.

Hey, yeah sure! Erm, let's see. So I use libvirt and QEMU/KVM, where libvirt is essentially an api that makes interfacing with QEMU and KVM more consistent and nicer.

Then I use virsh (command-line) and/or virt-manager (gui) to create virtual machines (these in turn talk to libvirt). The machines kan be anything Qemu supports, so you can emulate PA-RISC, Alpha, Mips, ARM, i386, AMD64, you name it. You can then install OS'es on them. There are some freaks out there that have been running Windows NT MIPS and HP-UX 10.20 for PA-RISC on it.

Most of my machines are doing KVM, which essentially is hardware-assisted virtualization. This requires the VM to be AMD64 though.

I currently run 10 virtual machines:

castel (rhel6) - chimera (chimera-linux) - dragon (dragonflybsd6) - falcon (freebsd13) - gygax (guix) - haiku (haiku) - nomon (netbsd9) - seven (win7) - square (winnt) - xenon (alpine)

You have a gui to these things (and SSH of course) through Spice. With the right drivers and agents (not available for all operating systems) you even have automatic guest display resizing, mouse in/out, copy/paste, etc.

thank you, that is a lot of hints :)

with all the tdp configuration that you have, may you please share how long does the battery last on a typical usage? thank you!

Hey, yeah sure, let's see. I started working this morning at 07:45, it's now 13:45. I had a 20 minute video conference call and watched two 15 minute videos on Youtube. At idle, I had ~3 watts, doing small typing things, coding, I had ~5 watts. During the conference call I had ~15 watts and during the Youtube videos powertop reported ~9 watts.

So have been going for 6 hours, definitely some heavier CPU usage during the conference call and youtube videos, current battery is at 33% and indicates (based on my current usage: updating my blog and firefox'ing around) 3 hours and 45 minutes left.

thank you! so generally good enough to _almost_ go through the entire day.

Over the years I have scripted my arch linux setup. https://github.com/prabirshrestha/simple-arch-installer

i wish there was a way to do this declaratively, like:

“here is the partition structure i want, here is the filesystem, the users, the packages i need installed and the services i need running”

Setting up machines and customizing installations would be a breeze.

I believe this is the goal of nixos but I haven’t been able to get beyond the syntax.

Ansible is pretty good at this. A huge library of Python-fu that takes declarative statements on how things should be

Doing some things idempotently can be an interesting challenge

You can, I'm going through this exercise now. Look at nixos-anywhere and disko. It's not easy though, NixOS is a rabbit hole.

I'm planning on running Arch on the newer model so thanks for this writeup

How many hours of battery life with standard use?

I have answered to another poster in a bit more detail, but a conservative estimate with moderate to a few moments of heavy usage is ~9 hours. I have done 11+ on pure-coding stints (no video, no games).

just a simple suggestion: i think it would be easier to the eyes if the command snippets are written in multi-lines.

Yeah, good point. I wrote them as ``` ``` blocks in markdown, and it doesn't wrap apparently. Will look into if I can tell Jekyll to do something there (would not prefer to escape everything hard-coded to 80 lines or some-such).

Update: Ha! I got this working. I added a "code { white-space: pre-wrap !important;}" css line in the <style> section of my custom html header. Seems to look much better.

thank you very much. I didn't think it'd take so many effort from your part. sorry.

How is the battery life?

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