I have been trying to install the Manjaro Architect 17.0.2 OS, but have been getting only minor successes. This iso is not for the beginner. I have an old 14 year old circa 2003 P3 800 desktop, 500mb ram, which can currently run Puppy Tahr Linux as well as Debian 8 Jessie with the Enlightenment E17 desktop. I had originally wanted to load the Enlightenment E17 desktop, which I could not find. I was able to load E20, but it was far too slow to run. I deleted E20. Then I tried the minimal LXQt, which did not start. Now I’m having to reinstall Manjaro from scratch and will try to install LXQt from their disk.
Manjaro is based on Arch Linux. As Arch is pretty difficult to install. I would even say it is difficult to troubleshoot, but all of Linux does have its challenges. Manjaro is based on Arch but is easier to install. There is also ArchBang, which is an easier installer, but they stopped their 32 bit version in February 2017, so now out of date. I really could try ArchBang 32 bit from Feb 2017.
There are Manjaro iso disks that you can just pop in and let it install. A friend Dave did this with Manjaro Deepin and he had no issues. I wanted to try the Manjaro Netinstall, which has a minimal CD with the rest downloaded from the internet. This worked out well with by Debian 8 Jessie netinstall, so I thought I would try it again with Arch.
The Manjaro Architect iso is a non-gui install, meaning that it is not command line but does not have fancy install screens. The install screens are simple and DOS-like, with just plain text. What is complex is that some of the questions are unique to Arch. Even with experience in Ubuntu and Debian, Arch is quite different and more technical.
Arch Linux Differences from Debian/Ubuntu
The first difference was that you need to configure the Arch download mirror sites:
in /etc/pacman-mirrors.conf
OnlyCountry = Canada,United_States
Since I am in Canada and we are small I usually install from somewhere in the US. Nowhere mentioned that you need an underscore “United_States”. Because of this I could not find a live downloads site and my installs were failing. Live and learn.
The other difference is that you need to select the linux kernel you want. I had to research this. My Debian 8 Jessie install used Linux 3.16 kernel. I did research the different Linux kernels, which gives you info about the differences from the last kernel version. I decided to go with one up, 3.18.
yaourt
Kernel Linux 3.18
Getting Arch to connect to the internet
Even though Manjaro installed packages from the internet, for some reason Arch would not connect once the install was completed. Though RJ45 connected I had no eth0. The reason, I found out, was that Arch used enp0s17 instead of eth0. I did this command and it connected to my dhcp server, gave me an ip address and connected to the internet. I check this using ping.
dhcpcd en0s17
ping 192.168.1.1
ping google.com
Installing Enlightenment E20
The standard install of Enlghtenment is version E20. I had heard that it was slow and would not be suitable for older desktops. Still, I needed to try.
The install is not complex:
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-init
pacman -S enlightenment
Log in, do a “startx” and Enlightenment E20 comes up. Unfortunately the desktop was so slow that even my mouse was lagging. It was terrible for my old computer. I uninstalled it.
pacman -Rns enlightenment
Attempted Install of from Arch Archive E17
Arch does have an archive of older packages, so I thought it would be easy to install from Arch Archive. Was I wrong. Yes, the packages can install from the archive with pacman.
pacman -U https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/ … packagename.pkg.tar.xz
Unfortunately there are so many dependencies that are also now archived. I went down to 4 layers until I gave up. For example, E17 requires elementary that requires evas_generic_loaders that requires gstreamer0.10-base, that requires… You get the idea? I gave up.
Manjaro and LXQt Desktop Environment
I gave up on installing Manjaro and E17 as uninstallable. I reformatted the partition and then did a fresh install of Arch and tried LXQt from their installer. This failed, says it ran out of disk space. I only have a swap of 1G, which works well with Debian. The recommendation is 2 times your memory size. As I have 500mb, 1G should be sufficient. It seems like the Manjaro installer uses the swap partition to store temporary files, it ran out of room and then died. Ok, I continued with the rest of the install.
I was concerned about Manjaro killing my Debian bootloader as I had installed Debian 8 Jessie on another partition. The Manjaro install did not ask me about the Debian partition and I thought it killed it, but when I rebooted Manjaro had put itself as first, followed by Debian 8 Jessie. The bootloader was now branded with the Manjaro graphic.
I rebooted and Manjaro came back up. I followed the manual install of LXQt, with no errors, but when I rebooted LXQt would not start. It just sat there for 5 minutes doing nothing.
Manjaro/LXQt Install Version 2: 5G /root, 5G /swap
I had Manjaro on a 10G disk with a 1G swap. This did not install LXQt. Instead I repartitioned to 2 5G partitions, one for Manjaro and one for /swap. The install went further but it still ran out of space and died. The installer froze. I was forced to badly abort the install. This screwed up my bootloader, which I did fix with the Ubuntu Boot Repair.
Manjaro/LXQt Install Version 3: 10G /root, 3G swapfile
Reinstalled again, this time instead of a swap partition, used a 3G swapfile. Yet the installer again failed. It again said I had run out of space. This probably means that I do not have sufficient ram for the install of LXQt. The installer closed normally, so the system bootloader was done Ok.
Manjaro/Arch base only
Repartitioned back to 5G. I reinstalled Arch and used my regular 1G swap file. Arch base installed in 1.33G disk space. The bootloader was written correctly. What I will do for a desktop remains to be seen. Maybe Openbox?