Page Category: Arch Family

How to Build a Giocoso Pro Server with Arch Linux

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso Pro is the name given to a MySQL (or MariaDB) database that provides details of what music files exist and what plays of them have taken place, shared amongst all your computing devices that might be involved in playing classical music. It is a very lightweight implementation of a relational database, with just two tables and not a lot of relations between them! Running such a database therefore requires very little in the way of hardware resources: it's recommended to have a dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk space, though more of any of these resources is always handy 🙂

Since it is a server, there is no need for a fancy graphical desktop to make things look 'nice': a Linux distro that provides the bare minimum of computing capabilities whilst managing to run the database is all that is really required -and that makes Arch an ideal distro for implementing Giocoso Pro, because it starts out about as barebones an operating system as it's possible to get. You choose what to add to it (not much, as it turns out!) and the end result remains extremely minimalist, yet fully functional. As such, this article sort-of reproduces my earlier article on how to build an Arch desktop, but simplifies things dramatically, as no desktop environment is involved. [...] 

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Installing Giocoso on Garuda Linux

1.0 Introduction

I don't really know a lot about Garuda Linux, apart from the fact that its logo is pretty neat! Garuda being a Hindu word for 'Eagle, King of Birds', it's quite fitting, too! It is a 'child' distro of Arch, but fits that otherwise quite tricky-to-install distro with a nice graphical installer, making it far more approachable. Logos aside, Garuda using the "dragonised" KDE Plasma desktop is notable for using a completely bonkers desktop theme, involving colours and colour-combos that first went out of fashion in the 1960s (but seem to be back in fashion now!) I don't honestly think I could live with it as a daily driver, but I thought the screenshots would look cool, so decided to run with it for the purposes of this article! Saner -but very beautiful- desktop themes are available, however, when using desktop environments such as Cinnamon, XFCE and so on: the specific choice of desktop doesn't really matter, though: Giocoso will run on all of them equally well.

For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk and proceeded to install Garuda Linux using the full 'dragonised' KDE ISO available from the Garuda Linux website. [...] 

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Installing Giocoso on EndeavourOS

1.0 Introduction

For many years, though Arch was widely considered a great distro, it was also widely regarded as too hard to install properly! A number of 'derivative' distros were spun up to rectify that problem, perhaps chief amongst them being Antergos: Arch with a GUI installer, basically. Unfortunately, back in 2019, Antergos developers announced they were pulling the plug, and the distro died. Except that, as in most things Linux-y, it didn't really die but was transformed by a group of keen former Antergos enthusiasts, into EndeavourOS... still Arch+a nice GUI.

I can't say I use EndeavourOS myself (I'm more a Manjaro man!), but it certainly has its attractions and as such, deserves to be able to run Giocoso in a supported manner. So, from Version 2.x onwards, Giocoso supports installations on this distro. [...] 

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Installing Giocoso on Manjaro

1.0 Introduction

Manjaro has been, for many years, my own personal distro of choice (with occasional bouts of infidelity that were swiftly rectified!). It offers all the power of Arch, but presented in a user-friendly manner, with most software packages you could ever want to use being readily and easily available. It makes for a fine platform on which to run Giocoso, basically, and there will be zero issues arising when you attempt to do so!

For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk and proceeded to install Manjaro+KDE and the Plasma desktop, using the full ISO available from the Manjaro website. That said, the choice of desktop is irrelevant from Giocoso's perspective: it will run perfectly fine with any of their other desktop environment options, too. [...] 

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Installing Giocoso on Arch

1.0 Introduction

By default, of course, Arch doesn't install with any graphical components at all: you're meant to add your own desktop environment 'on top of' a basic, command-line only Arch installation, as I documented quite a while ago in this earlier article. It is accordingly quite hard to document Giocoso running on Arch -because the operating system installation itself can be so unique and non-standard. For the purposes of this article, I built a new VirtualBox virtual machine, using 4GB of vRAM and a 2-thread virtual CPU, plus a 40GB virtual hard disk. After the base OS install, I  issued the following command:

sudo pacman -S --needed xfce4 mousepad bc
sudo pacman -S --needed xfce4-goodies file-roller network-manager-applet lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings
sudo pacman -S --needed virtualbox-guest-utils
sudo systemctl enable lightdm
sudo enable NetworkManager
reboot [...] 

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