Arch Linux with Simon

[Simon]

Pulled from: Simon Blogs, Caffeine Withdrawal

Locale

I use the en_US.UTF-8 Linux locale for everything. I don't want my computer to know that I'm German; all software should be in English so that I can websearch the error messages. The decimal sign is the dot . and the thousands separator is the comma , and that should be adopted worldwide.

Nonetheless, some features of the US locale are horrendous, such as starting the week on Sunday. This affects GUI calendar tools in the desktop panel. Here is how to make Monday the first day of the week:

sudo vi /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_US
Directly after LC_TIME, insert the following two lines:
first_weekday 2
first_workday 2

Save and exit.
sudo localedef -f UTF-8 -i en_US en_US.UTF-8
reboot

(Month and week should still be abolished worldwide in favor of the heek, the hexadecimal chunk of days, even though Nepster didn't like it.)

-- Simon

[Simon]

Reinstalling Pacman

It's Sunday night, you trashed your Arch system during a system update, and you have work tomorrow. How to reinstantiate?

If only the keyring is outdated, see:

The solution is updating archlinux-keyring first:
$ sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring

If that's not enough and you have to reinstall Pacman from the ground up, read on.

Warning: Take everything here with a grain of salt. I am not responsible for any damage you do to your machine. Always read the installation guide and the Pacman wiki page.


Prepare a reasonably fresh Arch installation ISO USB drive. I had one with the ISO from early-mid 2022, and that was already too old in February 2023. It's probably possible to use an old ISO, but you won't always be able to follow the wiki when stuff changes.

Boot from the USB drive.

# loadkeys colemak --- only if you're Simon
# dhcpcd
# mount /dev/yourRootPartition /mnt

Run the pacstrap line from the Arch installation guide, but add pacman to the list of things to reinstall:
# pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware pacman

That fixes Pacman itself, but you might still have other problems. You'll want a full system upgrade. We'll use the just-fixed Pacman, but first we'll install the nice fresh mirrors that the drive just fetched.

# cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /mnt/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
# arch-chroot /mnt
# pacman -Syyu

Exit from the chroot and shutdown:
# exit
# shutdown -h now

Remove the USB drive. Boot the old system, and happy Simon.

-- Simon