Installing Arch Linux on Honor Magicbook

2020-12-02T21:11:32+01:00

Last week I bought a Honor MagicBook 14 laptop. This blog post documents setting up an Arch Linux system on this machine.

Hardware information

Tech specs for the Honor MagicBook 14 with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SDD:

CPU: AMD Ryzen ™ 5 3500U Prozessor
Graphic card: Radeon™ Vega 8 Graphics
Display: 14”, 1920 x 1080, 157 DPI

Outputs produced by common diagnostic tools: lspci lscpu lsusb

Base system installation

Get an archlinux image (not the bootstrap image) from https://www.archlinux.org/download/

Calculate the checksum.

$ sha1sum archlinux-2020.12.01-x86_64.iso 
aea95a15c9f034d10e665247cfe782bccb5b306e  archlinux-2020.12.01-x86_64.iso

Copy image on a USB drive. This is surprisingly simple on a Linux system (be careful to specify the right device).

# cat archlinux-2020.12.01-x86_64.iso > /dev/sdg

Other methods are described here

After we are done, the USB drive can be restored with

wipefs --all /dev/sdX
fdisk /dev/sdX 
# create a primary partition with code 'b'
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1

Enter the BIOS by pressing F1, F2, or Del (I pressed all these keys, don’t know which one worked). Change settings to booting from USB device. Disable secure boot. Restart.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide

loadkeys de-latin1

No idea why verifying the boot mode is important. I apparently booted in the UEFI mode. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_boot_process

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

Wifi connection setup

iwctl

Connect by follwing this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Iwd#Connect_to_a_network

Saying goodbye to Windows

Get rid of every partition except the EFI one.

fdisk -l

Repartition and create new file systems.

Device            Start        End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1     2048     206847    204800   100M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2   206848   33761279  33554432    16G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p3 33761280 1000215182 966453903 460.8G Linux root (x86-64)

Mount root and swap, and pacstrap with some additional packages from https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archiso/-/blob/master/configs/releng/packages.x86_64

Keyboard map and locale

Set and generate locale. Save config to /etc/locale.conf

Set keyboard layout in /ect/vconsole.conf

KEYMAP=us

Other layouts are listed here:

ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/**/*.map.gz

Boot loader installation

Install grub and efibootmgr packages. Follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB for UEFI systems.

Configuration

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/General_recommendations

Add a user.

useradd -m -G rfkill,wheel julian

Networking

Enable iwd.service. Connect to a wireless network using iwctl. Enable DHCP feature of iwd in the config file /etc/iwd/main.conf:

[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true

[Network]
NameResolvingService=systemd

Finally:

systemctl enable --now systemd-resolved.service

Xorg

Graphic card driver package: amdgpu https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU

Display manager: None – just use .xinitrc and startx

Window manager package: i3-wm

Setting the right DPI

According to the tech spec, the DPI of the display is 157. Xorg doesn’t detect this automatically as can be seen from the xpdyinfo output

screen #0:
  dimensions:    1920x1080 pixels (508x285 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch

There are many ways to set a DPI value. For example, using .xinitrc, we can do

xrandr --dpi 144
exec i3

i3 window manager

Volume and mute keys work out-of-the-box. This is not the case for screen backlight hotkeys. See the “Power management” section.

dmenu had a weird-looking fonts setting (huge distances between letters). Following solution posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/fxz4hj/help_the_letter_spacing_in_my_dmenu_bar_is_weird/

Terminal emulator

Decided to try kitty, after having some trouble with fonts in urxtv.

Kitty terminal emulator

Color themes can be cloned right into the config directory

git clone --depth 1 git@github.com:dexpota/kitty-themes.git ~/.config/kitty/kitty-themes

Also, to convince i3-sensible-terminal to use kitty per default we need

export TERMINAL=kitty

Vim configuration

Zenburn colors are not shipped as a part on any standard package. Do git clone https://github.com/jnurmine/Zenburn.git and copy the colors directory to ~/.vim/colors to get the scheme definition.

Here is my .vimrc file.

ssh agents

Generate ssh keys (for Github, Gitlab etc.) using

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C 'julian@wergieluk.com'

Append AddKeysToAgent yes to .ssh/config to have the new keys managed by the ssh-agent automatically. I decided to start the ssh-agent using a user systemd service. Copied the service file from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSH_keys#Start_ssh-agent_with_systemd_user

Testing the connection:

ssh -T git@github.com

Power management

Is there a way to measure whether these settings bring anything?

Add the line options snd_hda_intel power_save=1 to /etc/modprobe.d/audio-powersave.conf to susspend sound card if not used.

Another recommended way to save power, is to blacklist modprobe modules of unused devices. For that I created a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf with a list of modules, and included that file in the FILES array of /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:

FILES=(/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf)

Blacklisted modules:

ccp for “[AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) Platform Security Processor”
btusb for bluetooth.

Screen brightness

xev events when pressing the brightness-up and brightness-down keys:

KeyRelease event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x2200001,
    root 0x6ab, subw 0x0, time 49258531, (-1,720), root:(963,742),
    state 0x0, keycode 232 (keysym 0x1008ff03, XF86MonBrightnessDown), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x2200001,
    root 0x6ab, subw 0x0, time 49263961, (-1,720), root:(963,742),
    state 0x0, keycode 233 (keysym 0x1008ff02, XF86MonBrightnessUp), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XFilterEvent returns: False

Set user permissions to modify screen brightness:

gpasswd -a julian video

With these permissions in place, the backlight intensity can be set using

$ echo 100 > /sys/class/backlight/amdgpu_bl0/brightness

or a specialized utility listed on https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/backlight#Backlight_utilities

I ended up using brightnessctl which is written in C and has no dependencies. Wiring the brightnessctl invocations to keysyms listed above can be done in the i3 config file (note the 5%- notation).

bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl set 5%-
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl set +5%

Webcam

Works.

Hardware accelerated video decoding

Misc

Sound works out-of-the-box after installing pulseaudio and pulseaudio-alsa.

Conclusion

Setting Arch Linux with a non-standard window manager like i3 clearly requires some effort and knowledge. I didn’t hit any major roadblocks like missing hardware drivers. Most of necessary steps are clearly described on the Arch wiki. I learned some interesting details about Xorg while working on this installation.