Arch first-boot configuration. Setup the first user, sudo, vm tools, and enough of a dev env to support AUR+yaourt

arch-firstboot.md

OpenSSH daemon

pacman -S openssh
systemctl start sshd
systemctl enable sshd.socket

Sudoers

pacman -S sudo

Use sed to uncomment the wheel group from sudoers, then hijack the EDITOR variable to copy the modified version back via visudo.

sed 's/# %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL/%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL/g' /etc/sudoers > /etc/sudoers.new
export EDITOR="cp /etc/sudoers.new"
visudo
rm /etc/sudoers.new

Create a non-root user

useradd -m -g users -G wheel -s /usr/bin/zsh cerebral
passwd cerebral

(If running under VMWare) Install VM tools

pacman -S open-vm-tools
pacman -S open-vm-tools-dkms

Check pacman output for the dkms version that needs to be installed, then

dkms add open-vm-tools/9.4.0

Start + Enable the daemon

cat /proc/version > /etc/arch-release
systemctl start vmtoolsd
systemctl enable vmtoolsd

(optional) Sync time to the host, alternatively set up NTP

vmware-toolbox-cmd timesync enable

NTP

pacman -S ntp
systemctl start ntpd
systemctl enable ntpd

Install webmin

pacman -S webmin
systemctl start webmin
systemctl enable webmin

Install dev tools for AUR

pacman -S --needed base-devel
pacman -S wget

Install Yaourt

Assuming the user cerebral has created, is in the "wheel" group, and sudoers has been set up as above. Package builds should NOT be done as root.

su cerebral
cd ~
mkdir builds && cd builds

wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pa/package-query/package-query.tar.gz
tar -xvzf package-query.tar.gz
cd package-query
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U package-query-*.xz

cd ~/builds
wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ya/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz
tar -xvzf yaourt.tar.gz
cd yaourt
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U yaourt-*.xz

exit