So, I just installed Arch Linux onto my laptop, but I’m having a few issues. I don’t really know what information to provide you with, so if you need something else just ask. This install is UEFI based with the Grub boot loader and BTRFS for the root file system. My laptop is a Dell XPS 15 with a Skylake i7 and a Nvidia GTX 960. On to the issues.
1.) I can’t seem to figure out how to get X11 to start on startup. So I’m stuck logging in through the console each time I start my system.
2.) XFCE also doesn’t start on startup. My attempt to remedy this was to create a .xinitrc bash file that’s executable in my home directory, as there wasn’t one in existence oddly. This is what I have currently minus the quotations “exec ck-launch-session startxfce4”. I’m assuming this will work, however it’s being prevented because of X11 not starting on startup. If I need to do something else let me know please.
3.) I have no display manager as XFCE doesn’t come with one by default. I installed SDDM, but need to know how to start this on startup and connect it to XFCE if that makes sense. I haven’t reseached this much.
4.) While testing audio I discovered that I have none. I’ve installed alsa-utils and pauvcontrol and ensured that my volume channels are raised, but still have no audio.
Needless to say for the most part I just need to figure out how to get stuff to start by default excluding the audio issue of course. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks to everyone in advance!
I believe SDDM is Qt based, and recommended for KDE/LXQt. You may be better off trying something like LightDM. It has worked for me on Arch with XFCE in the past. The Arch Wiki has some helpful info. I vaguely remember trying a distro that used something other than SDDM with LXQt and it always had weird startup issues until I changed it.
No idea on the audio, as I never got that far involved with Arch. Did you follow a guide somewhere, or just use the wiki, or totally wing it? That info might be helpful to get an idea of where you have been and what you have done so far.
or any other display manager. If it works, enable it at boot with ‘enable’ instead of ‘start’
4: is pulseaudio installed? Pavucontrol should install it as a dependency but best to make sure, then check that you have the correct output settings in pavucontrol.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. Here’s an update along with some more information. To start I installed this system based of Arch’s official install guide. Since last night I was able to get SDDM working by doing using “systemctl enable sddm.service”. Thank you for the help on that front Baz. As you all mentioned this resolved most of my issues. However, in regards to the audio situation I have yet to find a solution. To clarify, I do have pulseaudio installed and have checked my output settings in pauvcontrol, as well as, checked my volume settings in alsa mixer.
Also @Trooper_ish I agree one hundred percent with Phantom. Most of my issues, if any aren’t realted to Arch, but the XFCE desktop environment and my lack of knowledge. For instance XFCE by default doesn’t have a network manage or a display manger, so it’s up to you to install and configure those. If I had installed a different desktop environment such as Gnome almost everything should have worked out of the box. The audio issue might have carried over, but it might not I can’t say for sure. Anyways good luck and keep on with Linux.
Thanks again everyone, any suggestions are still greatly appreciated!
Update/Edit: Out of the blue my audio just started working so I guess pretty much everything has been resolved.