Installation Notes for Giocoso 3 on Arch

Arch not really having the concept of a 'live' CD, I created a full-on Proxmox virtual machine and booted it with archlinux-2023.10.14-x86_64.iso. I then followed my own installation guide, except using KDE as the desktop rather than Gnome, to build a functional, but minimal, Arch PC.

Each Arch installation is going to be unique, of course, since it's pretty much the definition of a 'blank slate' distro! That makes it tricky to be sure about what will and won't be part of any given 'virgin' Arch installation, so your mileage on that front will likely vary quite a bit from mine. For the avoidance of doubt, therefore, I followed my own advice and issued the following command as part of the VM build:

pacman -S xorg xterm plasma plasma-wayland-session which firefox make gcc binutils git linux-headers wget bc networkmanager kde-applications

Additionally, note that my installation article includes instructions on how the non-root user should be made a member of the 'wheel' group, so that s/he can acquire root privileges when needed: that's an essential requirement for the Giocoso installation to succeed properly. Anyway, once the VM was built in the manner described, the Giocoso installation followed the usual pattern (i.e., wget doco.absolutelybaching.com/gioinst and bash gioinst) without incident.

The installation results in a desktop launcher for Giocoso. There is also an equivalent entry in the main menu, listed under Multimedia, where it conceptually belongs! Both serve to launch Giocoso equally well: you can just right-click-and-delete the desktop one if you want to (editing the main menu is a bit harder!). Everything appears to work from that point on just fine:

...with even in-terminal album art being displayed properly (which not all distros derived from Arch manage to do at times!

So, the parent distro of the 'Arch family' works well as a Giocoso host, largely because it's built from scratch and with intrinsically up-to-date packages. This is not the case for the rest of the family, where the distro developers bundle things up for you and make available an ISO which may be quite a bit out of date by the time you get to use it. In those circumstances, the Giocoso installation experience can be a lot worse than Arch's own: see the links below for more details!


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