Automating Arch, I3, and Terminator to do the right thing at startup
I’m currently on my second clean install of Arch Linux. On the whole I’ve been glad that I ditched most of my old configuration when I installed Arch to the new SSD I got for my laptop at the beginning of the school year. However, I’d been procrastinating on re-implementing a few things which worked last install without me really knowing which of my many attempts had fixed them. This time, I know what I’m doing and what questions to ask.
Desired Behaviors
- Start ssh-agent automatically at login
- Start X automatically at login
- Automatically connect to wifi if I’m at home
- Open a terminal in workspace 1 and Firefox in workspace 2
Preemptive Troubleshooting
Certain types of error when you’re testing commands to auto-run at login will immediately log you out again, with no error message displayed. The easy way to fix these problems is to have at least one other user account on your system with sufficient permissions to edit your account’s startup scripts. That way if you end up in such a failure loop, you can just login as them, alter the offending line, and immediately test logging in as yourself again.
If you’re testing automatic behaviors at login for the only account on your system and the root account doesn’t have its own password and things break, the best ways I’ve found to get a bad line out of your config files are to either reboot into a recovery mode or boot any old distro off of a USB drive if you happen to have an old install disk sitting around.
Starting programs at login
The wonderful Arch Wiki has an entire page on how to start X at login.
In summary, just add exec startx to the end of ~/.bash_profile.
ssh-agent is a special snowflake and causes things to fail silently if you try to invoke it along the lines of exec ssh-agent && exec startx. However, the arch wiki comes to the rescue again, citing a ssh-agent tutorial that explains you can run ssh-agent as a wrapper:
exec ssh-agent startx
(which of course goes as the last line of your ~/.bash_profile).
Automatically connecting to one wifi network
The Arch Wiki’s page on netctl has the relevant line buried, as usual, in a huge wall of otherwise-extraneous information.
Note that I’ve been manually connecting to networks with wifi-menu before, so I already have profiles with saved passwords for the networks to which I wish to autoconnect.
If the SSID is My Network, there’s a file in /etc/netctl/ with a name something like wlp3s0-My Network.
To make it autoconnect, just give the command:
sudo netctl enable wlp3s0-My\ Network
Note that if the profile ever changes, such as for a change in password, you’ll have to netctl reenable it in order to automatically connect.
Automatically connecting to the right network out of several
The netctl enable stuff works great if the first enabled network is in range when the system boots, but fails and doesn’t try others if it isn’t. At this point I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to be possible to autoconnect to multiple networks with netctl at all.
When I asked some other Arch users how to get netctl to do the multiple networks thing, they reported having used network-manager instead:
yaourt -S networkmanager
yaourt -S network-manager-applet
yaourt -S gnome-keyring
sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
sudo systemctl start NetworkManager.service
The wiki page on networkmanager explains how to set up permissions so users without root can add networks, but that step solves a nonexistant problem for me since I’m the only person who should be changing network configuration on my laptop.
Whenever I need to add a new network, I start nm-applet through dmenu and add the network. When I’m at home or school, the networks I’ve already added can autoconnect and I don’t have to have the nm-applet icon cluttering up my toolbar.
Automatically Starting Stuff in Terminator and I3
The stuff to start is a terminal with the command to ssh to my VPS and reconnect to my IRC screen, and Firefox.
Since you can’t start terminator with a bash alias in the --command argument, and my irc alias is long and contains quotes itself, I’ve created a custom Terminator profile for launching irc. Either my Google-fu is weak or you can’t have Terminator profiles inherit from one another, so I added a new [[irc]] profile to my .config/terminator/config file, with copies of the settings I care about from my default profile:
[[irc]]
scrollbar_position = hidden
use_system_font = False
cursor_shape = ibeam
background_image = None
show_titlebar = False
color_scheme = green_on_black
font = Mono 10.5
use_custom_command = True
exit_action = hold
custom_command = ssh -t -p XXXX me@myvps.net "screen -dr irc"
Note that the -t flag to SSH forces it forces it to allocate a psuedo-TTY, preventing the Must be connected to a terminal error which would otherwise occur.
Adding the following lines to the start of ~/.i3/config causes the desired behavior when i3 is started:
exec --no-startup-id i3-msg 'workspace 2; exec firefox'
exec --no-startup-id i3-msg 'workspace 1; exec terminator -p "irc"'
Note that I exec firefox first and terminator second, so that the terminal which needs my VPS password to be entered in order to reconnect to irc is in the active workspace immediately after startup.
As an added bonus, digging these commands out of my old config reminded me how to automatically set a background image: Just add the following to ~/.13/config:
exec feh --bg-scale ~/background.jpg
Making Terminator pick the right font size
The default font size that Terminator has been using causes my screen to be a little under 160 characters wide. This causes the 80-character lines on which I standardize my writing to wrap annoyingly, and means I have to manually zoom out by one ctrl-minus in each pane when I split my terminal.
The fix is two lines in ~/.config/terminator/config:
[profiles]
[[default]]
...
use_system_font = False
font = Mono 10.5
You have to manually override the default use_system_font=True setting for any font changes in your terminator config to apply. After hearing good things about the font Inconsolata, I gave it a try, but found that it looks unpleasantly blurry at the small sizes that I prefer to use. I’m sure there’s a setting somewhere to fix that, but my needs are met equally well by switching back to the Mono font as they would be by shaving the font display yak.
The Results
Based on IRC timestamps, it now takes me roughly 13 seconds and [ctrl+shift+e] + [laptop username] + [laptop password] + [vps password] of typing to kill X, log in, automatically connect to available wifi, and reconnect to IRC. This is an improvement over my previous process.