An Experiment with Arch and i3 Tiling Window Manager - Intro

I’ve needed to do something with my Dell Precision M4800 laptop for a while now. I had previously attempted to install Arch Linux on it, but ran into trouble with getting Bumblebee installed in order to properly handle the dual video cards in the laptop.

That was about a year ago, and I’m ready to jump back into it and try again. I’ve been using Linux and Emacs a lot at work, and now I really want to work out of an environment where I can use the keyboard much more and keep the OS out of my way when I want to work. For that reason, I plan to try Arch again and combine it with the i3 Tiling Window Manager. I plan to do something similar to my Desktop at some point, but I figured it would be nice to have something more mobile in my laptop to carry my work with me while the summer remains.

So, here goes nothing! This post will service as both the introduction and sort of a “Table of Contents” of my, hopefully, future posts on the subject.

• Part 1 - Adventures with Xorg!
• Part 2 - External Woes
• Part 3 - Looking Good