Part #2: Setup your Artix user environment

Following up our previous post on installing Artix Linux, we need to configure our user environment to be able to run graphical apps and more. Because we’re not using either systemd or elogind, it will be harder but if you follow this guide, you’ll have all the necessary tools to properly manager your sessions, seats and dbus!

Seat tracker

We previously installed seatd, you just need to add your current user to those groups

doas usermod -aG seat $(whoami)

You can check you groups using the groups command.

Enable the service as ROOT

doas dinitctl enable seatd

We now have proper seat support. During your use of the system, you might install elogind as a dependency. You can forcefully remove it by running

doas pacman -Rdd elogind

Dinit user services

Now that we have a seat tracker, we need a login tracker, that’s where turnstile comes in clutch. Execute the following commands

doas pacman -S turnstile turnstile-dinit

Make sure you have this line in /etc/pam.d/system-login if it wasn’t added automatically at the end of the file

session    optional    pam_turnstile.so

Once you’re sure that the line was added, open /etc/turnstile/turnstiled.conf and change the value of manage_rundir from no to yes

Next enable the service AS ROOT

doas dinitctl enable turnstiled

Exit your current session and log back in. You can now use dinitctl list as a non-root user. If you want to add your user services, place them in ~/.config/dinit.d/ and symlink to ~/.config/dinit.d/boot.d if you want to start them when you log in.

Dbus as a user

Because we’re not using elogind, we don’t have proper user dbus support. We’re going to install a package that does that for us

doas pacman -S dbus-dinit-user

This service will now start when another service like pipewire requires a dbus session.

AUR

Artix is capable of using Arch Linux’s AUR. We’re going to setup yay to use it. Keep in mind that we’re using Artix linux and NOT Arch Linux. It means that some packages that have systemd dependencies will not work on our system.

Doas & Sudo

First, we need to configure makepkg to use doas. Open /etc/makepkg.conf, uncomment and add at the end of the file

PACMAN_AUTH=(doas)

We also need to create an alias in our ~/.bashrc to run doas instead of sudo for yay

alias yay='yay --sudo doas --sudoflags -- --save'

Now we are ready to install yay.

Yay it works

Yay is an AUR Helper that will install packages from the Arch AUR. Clone the repository and build it.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si
cd ..
doas rm -r yay

Add additional repositories

This is an example for adding the universe repository from Artix Linux. Go to /etc/pacman.conf and add at the bottom

[universe]
Server = https://universe.artixlinux.org/$arch

Run this to update your pacman

doas pacman -Sy

Arch repositories

Artix Linux supports the use of the Arch Linux repositories.

doas pacman -S artix-archlinux-support
doas pacman-key --populate archlinux

Append your /etc/pacman.conf and add whatever Arch Linux repository you want, for example the extra repository.

[extra]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist-arch

If you want the community repository, all you have to do is change the extra to community.

doas pacman -Sy

You can now install packages from the extra Arch repository.

Fonts

Fonts are an integral part of your system. They are located in /usr/share/fonts. We’re going to add a few fonts that we’ll be using in our system using yay and the extra repository we just installed.

Nerd fonts

Nerd fonts are fonts patched with icons and all kind of crazy. Here is an incomplete list of fonts we can install. For example ttf-dejavu-nerd

doas pacman -S ttf-dejavu-nerd

Emojis

We also need to add atleast one emoji font on our system. I’m using the AUR package called openmoji but you can install any emoji pack you want

yay -S otf-openmoji
fc-cache

You now have correctly setup your user environment like a champ! You’re ready for the next step which is to setup a graphical interface. Stay tuned for the next post of this guide by following me!