If you are deploying many virtual machines, templates can be leveraged to save time and even storage if using thin provisioning.

The process of creating a template is two steps:

1. Create and configure the base operating system image
2. Use sysprep to remove system-specific settings

Once completed we can create virtual …

ZFS is both a filesystem and a volume manager. If you have extra RAM in your system it will increase the read speed of your system dramatically by caching the system's most-used files in RAM.

How to use ZFS:

1. The easiest way to use ZFS with Arch Linux is to …

See Creating a custom lockscreen with i3lock to setup the lockscreen script

Add a service file to run the script when the computer sleeps or suspends

Create a file /etc/systemd/system/[email protected] with the following contents. (Change the username to be your local user account name)

[Unit]
Description …

Instead of the default i3 lockscreen (which is just a plain white screen), you can show an image as the background. You can create a script to show a blurred image of the content on your screen to get the following effect.

Create the script

The short script below will …

Configuration overview

The last setup of this machine was an UNRAID install with virtual machines using PCI passthrough. For this setup I am going to run Arch Linux with a root install on ZFS. The root install will allow snapshots of the entire operating system.

Array hardware

• Boot Drive        - 32 …

Adding ZFS to the iso can save you some time when you are experimenting with the setup as you will not have to add the repository and install each time you restart the machine this way.

Download archiso

# switch to root
$ sudo -i or su root

# Install archiso
$ pacman -S …

Had to switch secure boot off of windows mode in the bios

set keyboard layout with # loadkeys dvorak

partition the disk with gdisk gdisk /dev/sda o (create new partition table) n (add new partition) # Needs 2 partitions: EFI (ef00) roughly 500Mb Linux? w (write partition to disk)

make filesystem …

• configure internet connection
• set up partitions
• create filesystems (ext4 ...)

Mount partitions:

(mount root) mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
(mount home) mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/home

• select a mirror from /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Install base and base-develop

 pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel

Generate fstab

genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc …

install cups, gsfronts hplib

    pacman -S cups gsfonts hplib

    hp-setup -i

when running the hp-setup command it gave an error that no PPD file was found I also had to change the usb port from a front port to a port on the motherboard for whatever reason. I had to …