With Arch Linux installed, it took very little time to get my configuration to the way that I had it on my old Asus eeePC. That said, I didn't have a fairly complicated setup to begin with.
Configuration
One of the biggest reasons I chose the Acer C720, over possibly one of Acer or Asus' budget laptops with similar specs, was the touted battery life of the machine, that usually clocks in around 7-8 hours on a full charge. Fortunately, this can easily be achieved in Arch Linux with a Power Management service. I usually use TLP for it's focus on laptops, and sane defaults. For the C720 I didn't even have to make any changes to TLP's default configuration, and I can easily get the advertised run time, unless I'm running an unusally large workload.
One of the other differences Chromebooks have from their Laptop/Ultrabook
brethren, are their non-standard keyboards. For starters, the top row has only 10
function keys, meant for browser functions and volume/brightness adjustments.
The C720 in particular also lacks dedicated Pg Up/Down
, Delete
, Insert
, Home
,
and End
buttons, in order to save space on it's already small keyboard, something
not unusal for laptops of it's size, but it also does not include Fn
hardcoded key combos
to make up for this, unlike most machines that lack these buttons. Fortunately,
the last difference is more of a positive change; that change being the complete
removal of the Caps Lock
button, and replacing it with a dedicated "search"
key. In Chrome OS this would pull up a search box, but on Arch Linux, it's
recognized as the Super
/Windows
key.
(Image provided by Ars Technica)
This atypical keyboard setup means that most users, including me, prefer to make some modifications to the default configuration. In Arch Linux, the "media keys" act as normal function keys (in Chrome OS they are technically function keys too, just remapped to perform the media functions), but I wanted to have some of them perform their media key functions instead. Since I don't use a DE that would automatically map these, I had to do a bit of extra configuration. Fortunately, Simple x hotkey daemon (sxhkd) makes this very simple to do. The setup I wanted only needed a slight modification from the one shown in the Acer C720 Arch Wiki page for it to work with my i3 configuration.
~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc
# toggle fullscreen in i3
@F4
xte 'keydown Alt_L' 'key f' 'keyup Alt_L'
#toggle container layout in i3
@F5
xte 'keydown Alt_L' 'key x' 'keyup Alt_L'
{F6,F7}
xbacklight -{dec,inc} 10
F8
amixer set Master toggle
{F9,F10}
amixer set Master 5{-,+} unmute
Adding in the missing Page Up/Down
, Delete
, etc., functionality however has
been much trickier than I expected, and I currently don't have it working.
When using sxhkd
to execute an xte
command for Page Up/Down
, X doesn't
seem to register the action, and nothing happens. This is most likely due to
how xte works, since xkvbd
is able to properly emulate a Page Up/Down
event
at least in graphical apps (it does not work in my terminal). If or when I
figure out a workaround, I will write about it.
Since I only have 32GB of space on the SSD, I settled on a 32GB Sandisk Cruzer
Fit USB flash drive, mainly for it's very small form factor. Since it protrudes
only a cm or so, I can keep it in the machine at all times. To make it more
easily accessible from within Arch, I installed
Lightweight Device Mounter (ldm) to automount it at boot. My main reason
for choosing ldm was the fact that it can use user specified mount points, since
I wanted this drive to be directly accessible from my /home
directory. I
could have also used systemd's automount capabilities, but with ldm I could
instead have any arbitrary flash drive or external HDD I use also be accessible
from my /home
directory, which I found to be a more attractive prospect.
The only real downside of keeping the flash drive plugged in in at all times is that
SeaBIOS automatically tries to boot usb drives before the SSD, so if I have it in,
in addition to having to do Ctrl + l
to start SeaBIOS, I also need to press
Esc
and select the SSD instead of the USB drive. From what I have read, this
is something that has to be configured in SeaBIOS at compile time, and then
reflashed, an not an option that I can toggle. A minor annoyance, but still
an annoyance none the less.
As I mentioned earlier, I do not use a Desktop Environment, or a display manager
for my GUI needs. I currently use i3, started from a TTY, more out of preference
than necessity, since other have reported GNOME and KDE running happily on this
machine. Since most of the time my workflow consists of Firefox, and a terminal
window with tmux
running, I so rarely ever run into an issue with only having
2GB of RAM, that I don't even have any sort of swap enabled.
In the 2 months I've owned this machine, I have had a largely positive experience running Arch Linux on it. Despite the inial hurdles of getting everything up and running, the Acer C720 makes a fantastic Linux machine, all things considered.
permalink