 One of the oldest Arch Linux based distributions is a distribution called Arch Bang. It's been around for something like 10 or 12 years. And for a few years, it really was the way to install Arch Linux. If you didn't wanna install Arch Linux, the Arch way, right? Because Arch Bang had a pretty easy installer and it came with a nice pre-configured open box window manager desktop. And it just was great. It was just a fantastic distribution. And in recent years, you know, it doesn't get the kind of credit, the kind of shine that it used to because there's so many Arch Linux based distributions now. There's just bazillions of them. People kind of have forgot about Arch Bang. But recently they had a new release come out just a few days ago. And I noticed that Arch Bang has decided to move away from open box as the default window manager over to I3 as the default window manager. So I thought that was pretty neat. So I went ahead and downloaded the latest release of Arch Bang, the release version is 0111. And this is the first stable version of Arch Bang to actually feature I3 as the default window manager. So I'm gonna run through a quick installation inside a virtual machine. I'm gonna install this inside Vert Manager. So I'm gonna run through a quick installation here. So I'm gonna just go ahead and boot directly into the live environment. The live environment is gonna be the I3 window manager. And this may take a minute to boot up the live environment. Typically when you're running directly off the ISO, sometimes boot up times can be a little slow. This is essentially like booting directly off a USB stick is what we're doing here. All right, and we got to the desktop. And we have a cocky here that gives us some shortcut keys. Super T brings up a terminal. Super W brings up a web browser. Super Z launches the Xen installer. And since that's exactly what I wanna do is run through the installation. Let me do Super Z. And it doesn't look like Super Z actually did anything. So I'm not exactly sure how to get to the installer. It looks like Super D runs D menu. So let's do Super D. And let me search for Xen installer. There it is. Now let me hit enter. And nothing happens there either. That's very weird. If I can't get it installed then I can't really do much else. Well, what happened? Please wait, loading the Xen installer. Okay. Wow, that took a long time. And I don't know if it's launching it from when I hit Super D from D menu and try to run it from D menu or from Super Z. Either way, it took forever. It took almost a minute probably for that to launch after trying to launch it through the key binding. It says, please wait, loading Xen installer. So I think it actually registered both times I tried to launch it. I think it just takes a long time. I think it's just one of those things it just takes a long time. Whoops, I'm moving the window here. This is actually the VM window here. Let me get this situated back right. And then I'm gonna run through the installation here. We're asked about automatic partitioning and manual partitioning. I'm just gonna do automatic partitioning. Then we need to select what drive we're installing to in this VM. I only have the one drive. It's labeled VDA and it's a 20 gig drive. So let me go ahead and tell it to format and install to that drive. And it's warning us that it's gonna erase all the data on that drive because it's gonna format and install to it. But that's correct. So I'm gonna hit yes. Says it's creating our partitions for BIOS. Then we need to select our country code. So for fastest mirrors, I want all the mirrors in the US and select the locale English US is correct for me. Would you like to change your keyboard model? The default is PC 105. You know, that's just a generic keyboard and that's fine for me. I actually clicked yes instead of no though. So I guess I would actually have to go in here and pick my keyboard model. I'm just gonna go in here and pick PC 105. Select your layout, which is a two character country code. So obviously I need to pick US here. And then would you like to change your keyboard variant? I'm gonna click no on that. Do you see your key map in any of the previous options? So I'm gonna say yes. And we need to choose our country and zone now this is for a locale again. For me, I always choose America slash Chicago. Now I'm not actually in Chicago, but Chicago is in the central time zone in the US. I'm in the central time zone in the US. But no, this is not a Chicago accent. Now, would you like to use UTC or local time UTC is their default? So I will leave that. And then we need to choose a host name for this system. By default, it looks like it wants to name it revenge. I'm gonna name it ArchBang and click okay. Please enter a username for our user. I'm gonna call my user DT. Then we need to create a root password. So this needs to be a strong and complicated password for the root user. Hit okay. Then re-enter that strong and complicated password for the root user. Hit okay. Then please enter a password for the DT user. Let's create a strong and complicated password again and then confirm it. All right, what shell would you like to use? So the default shell for the system's default shell is always gonna be bash, typically on an ArchBase system, but it's asking the DT user we created, what should his default shell be? And we have a choice between bash, ZSH and fish. I love that they offer this choice. I'm gonna choose fish. I'm gonna click okay. What kernel do we wanna use? Do we wanna use the standard Linux kernel, the LTS kernel, the hardened kernel or the Zen kernel? Just the standard Linux kernel, please. And would you like to add spooky repo to your slash etsy slash pac-man.config? I don't know what the spooky repo is, but it says right here it contains a few extra packages such as Spotify and Pamac. I don't need anything like that, so I'm gonna choose no on that. Would you like to enable multi-lib repositories on your system? So this is 32-bit stuff, mainly for gaming. So if you're gonna do steam, wine, proton, in any kind of gaming, you may need those 32-bit libraries, so you're gonna wanna choose yes if you're a gamer for me, especially in a VM. I'm just gonna choose no. Would I like a graphical package manager? No, I install and remove all my software at the command line. I never use graphical package manager, so I'm gonna choose no here. Would you like to install support for the arch user repository? It's gonna install the yay, a UR helper. Absolutely, I want yay. Would you like to install perner support? No. And what display manager would you like to use? LXDM, SDDM, GDM or default, LXDM, the one that comes with LXDE. I've always liked that. It's just pretty simple and easy to use. So what desktop would you like to install? And it gives us an option. You see, I thought it was just gonna automatically install I3, but I guess it gives you an option. I3 is an option, but other options include GNOME, Plasma, XFCE, LXDE, LXCute, Mate, Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepen, Enlightenment, JWM, OpenBox and I3. I'm gonna choose I3 gaps here because that's kinda what they're defaulting to anyway. At least that's what the live environment was. So that's what I'm gonna install here. I like to install Firefox. Yeah, I probably need a browser. Which Firefox? So I guess we have to choose a localization here, internationalization. I want Firefox internationalization in US. There we go. That's the one. Click OK. Would you like to install LibreOffice? Not in this VM. If it was on physical hardware, I might. What other stuff do we wanna install? Pick a category. So let's choose the internet category and see what our options are. More browsers, more email clients, bit-to-art clients, yeah. Now typically I probably would install stuff from that category, but here I'm just showing you what's available. Let's pick the media category. Now again, if this was my machine, I would definitely install GIMP, VLC. I probably would go ahead and then install Restretto for image viewer, Audacity definitely for audio editor. I would definitely install Kaden Live for a video editor. But since I'm not actually doing this on physical hardware, this is a VM, I'm not gonna take the time to install all that software because I'm not actually going to use any of it. The one category I really need to go to is utilities because this is stuff that I will need. For example, I know I'm gonna need H-top. I'm gonna need some kind of terminal emulator, byte-a-fault, X-term as always there typically on any X11 system, but I might want something other than X-term. It looks like Terminator is an option. I'll also check out what else is available for me. Genie as a text editor, as a graphical text editor, just in case I need one. I'll go ahead and throw that on here. Anything else, it looks like the only terminal emulator they offer here is Terminator. I'm not sure why that's the only one, but hey, I'll go with it. We have a customization category. Let me see what that's all about. Some theming, do I actually want these themes? Not really, I'll pick one just to have a theme just in case there's nothing else there. And let's do the finished category and see what that does. And would you like to install the bootloader? Okay, yes. Please give me a bootloader. So which device do you actually wanna install Grub to? For me, I only have the one device slash dev slash VDA. Do you have any other operating systems on your device that you'd like Grub to detect? So if you're dual booting, I don't have any other operating systems on that device. So click yes, and sorting the Pac-Man mirrors to get us the fastest mirrors. And then it's gonna install all the software. This may take a few minutes. I'm gonna pause the recording. I'll come back once this portion of the installation has completed. And the installation has completed. I'm gonna click okay. And then it asked us, do we want to restart or not? And of course we need to restart the system to complete the installation. So I'm gonna click okay. And let's reboot into our freshly installed ArchBang version 0111 with the i3 window manager and LXDM of course is our login manager. Remember, we got to select that. Now desktop, it says default, default i3 and i3. Well, what is default? If I just try to log into the default desktop, it kicks me back out. So I guess there is no default. So they probably should change that and because it's set to default out of the box, but you can't really log into it. So they probably should make sure that that's not even an option there. So let me log into i3, which I hope actually works, yes. And you have not configured i3 yet. Do you wanna generate a config at dot config slash i3 slash config? Yes, so I'm just gonna hit enter. What do we want as our modifier key, our mod key? So do you want the super key, the windows key? Or do you want the alt key? I want the super key. So all I need to do here is just hit enter. No confirmation or anything, but the window goes away. I'm assuming all is good here. I'm gonna do super enter to bring up a terminal and this is terminator and I'm gonna run a X render, XR and R. You get a list of all our available resolutions here and I'm gonna choose 1920 by 1080. Let's get a proper screen resolution there. All right, and how do you zoom in in terminators? It's super shift plus nine. It is very cool, clear the screen. Let's run H top and let's see. 178 megs of RAM of four gigs that I gave this VM. That is very, very lightweight. But remember, not much is going on on the system because we didn't install hardly any software. What we installed through that installer, the Zen installer, that's about all that's available on the system. This is gonna be very, very slim as far as the number of packages that were installed. Let me quit out of this. Let's do a uname dash R to get the kernel. Very recent kernel, 5.9.6. Let me also check the number of packages installed. So I believe that's Pacman dash capital Q. Now that will give us a list of all the packages installed but really I want a line count. So I'm gonna pipe that through WC space dash L to get a line count. 487 packages are installed. So that is a very, very minimal installation and I think that's perfect for those of you that are wanting to install Arch Linux and then go window manager only and then install all of your own programs after that. ArchBang makes total sense because it's almost like an Arch install except you didn't have to go through the Arch install, right? And it's almost like an Arch install and that at the end of the day, really all you have, you have Xorg installed, you have i3 installed but really nothing else. Now I'm looking at the homepage for ArchBang because I was checking out their release announcement and they say that Super G should give us a list of all the keyboard shortcuts available to us here in i3. So if I do Super G, it does nothing. Now I think the problem there is it's gonna give us a list of key bindings for Super G. I think it opens that up in a text editor and we didn't install one. Remember when we went through all the categories of software I really didn't choose anything other than a few really basic utilities like H-top and Terminator. I didn't use anything else. So I didn't install any kind of graphical text editor which is probably what it would open up to show us those key bindings. So that's a problem. Super D is supposed to launch D menu. Super D does not launch D menu because let's see if D menu is even installed. If I do D menu underscore run, no. We get an error because it's not there. So what I'm gonna do is let me go ahead and install my personal build of D menu because I have it on my GitLab. I also have it as a package build in the AUR. So I'm gonna do yay dash capital S, D menu dash distro tube. And let me just tab complete and see if yay finds it. It does. So I'm gonna do yay dash capital S, D menu dash distro tube dash git and install that package. And it's asking for a root password. So let's give it a root password and let it proceed with that installation. So you got to install a couple of fonts as well because those fonts are dependencies for my build of D menu because it expects a couple of different fonts to be installed on the system. And now that we've done that, let's do super D. And now I actually have D menu here. So you can see I can actually start searching for stuff such as terminator, which is the only terminal we have installed on the system is X term here. I would assume X term is also available to us. Yeah, but X term is just a standard X term. It's not configured in any way, which means that's really, really small font and black text on a white background that doesn't look good. So super shift Q to quit out of a window here in I three. And it looks like it's a very vanilla I three, right? It's super two to go to the second workspace. You know, it's not even setting a wallpaper. The panel at the bottom is kind of like a standard default kind of panel. Really no configuration done. So I was actually expecting this to be configured like it was gonna be because their open box is such a interesting open box desktop. I thought the I three desktop would have some work done to it, but it doesn't appear to be the case. So if I CD into dot config slash I three and then do an LS, you see, we have our config fall there. That's your I three config. So let me open that in VM. And let me scroll down here and just gonna check out the key bindings to see if they actually do anything different than like a standard I three config. And it looks exactly like a standard I three config, including the ridiculous default I three key bindings. I hate the change focus and the move focus window key bindings because I three, instead of using the default VM motion keys, which are HJKL, they shift it over one key. They use JKL semicolon. And that's horrible because if I open up two windows and wanna shift focus, I'm assuming that super H is gonna move focus over to the left window. But of course, super H is doing nothing there. It's actually super J, which is the down key in VM. But in this case, super J is the left key. So the down key is the left key. And then the semicolon, which is nothing is actually, I hate that, I hate that, I hate that. So the very first thing I'm gonna do because I'm gonna keep making this mistake all through this video, I'm gonna change all of these. So JKL semicolon, we're gonna change J to H. Then we're gonna change K to J. We're gonna change L to K. And finally, let's do a change word here and change semicolon to L. So I like that. And then when we need to do that one more time down here for the moving focus windows, we need, I'm gonna do R for replace H to replace a J there. And I'm gonna do RJ, RK, and get to the word semicolon and do CW for a change word and then just do it L. Hit escape, I'm gonna colon W to write, let's do a super shift R to restart I3. And we get an error. Show the error, please. It doesn't like the key binding that involves the H, which I kind of knew it wouldn't because that would be the only key binding that I could have messed up because we were already using key bindings for JK and L, right? The only one that we added really was the H because JK and L, then we changed what they do but those key bindings were already in use. So mod H is already in use somewhere else. So I'm gonna do a search for mod plus H and there it is. Mod plus H was already used to split horizontally to do a horizontal split. Well, what we're gonna do is instead we need to change mod H to mod some other key. And since horizontal has a Z in it, it makes sense to replace H with Z. Now let me do a colon W to write and then restart I3 and it restarted without any errors. So now when I open up some windows, so let's open up three windows here. Super H should move to the left. Super H should move to the left. All right, super L moves to the right, super. Okay, now all the world is right. Super Z splits horizontally. So now the next window I open is in a horizontal split. I hope that makes sense. Super V splits vertically. And now if I do super enter to open up another terminal, you know, we'd get that vertical split there. Now super Q, super Q. Now let me open up a couple of more terminals because I'll launch H top in one of them just so we have three different things going on. Let's talk about the layouts here because mod S is stacking. Mod W is tabbed and mod E toggles the split layout. So mod S puts everything in a stacking layout. You see, I have three title bars here and I can switch from Vim to H top to just the fish shell. And of course you can do that with HJKL in my case. So if I go up with mod K and mod K, mod J to go back down, mod J. Now of course that's because I changed the keys. You guys, if you want to stick to the default I3 key bindings for some reason, I don't know why you would go up with what L and you go down with K, that's so strange to be. But anyway, that was mod S to get you in the stacking layout. Mod W gets us in the tabbed layout. Now instead of having the title bar stacked on top of each other, they're in a tabbed layout you see here. And of course you can click on it with the mouse or if you prefer, you can actually use super and then the motion keys. So where I'm at right now, super H moves me left, super H moves me left. If I go super L, I could go back the other direction and will it restart? If I do super L one more time, will it go back to the beginning? It will, okay. So that's pretty neat there. And then finally super E puts you back in a tiling layout, a split layout, which is what we started in. Let me super shift Q to close that window and super shift Q to close that window, taking a look at some of the other config things here. It really is just a plain Jane vanilla I3 config. There is nothing special here. It's just all the default configs. So really I thought it would be configured a lot more than it is. It actually hasn't been configured at all and that's okay. Because I do think this actually does serve a purpose. For those of you looking for a really easy, quick arch Linux installation that doesn't install anything out of the box. Remember just 480 packages are installed. So it's really just the base arch system. It's the base arch system, X11 and the I3 window manager. And that's basically all you get. And I think that that makes sense. For those of us that wanna run arch based systems and then install a window manager on top of it. Maybe we already have our own configs or whatever. Arch bang is a great starting point. If for some reason the standard arch install, you know, installing by the book, by the Wiki. And for some reason you don't wanna do that. I think arch bang makes a lot of sense. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Devin Fran, Arch 5530 at Commie, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Gregory, Kellogg, Devils, Lewis, Paul, Scott and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at arch bang with the I3 window manager wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these fine ladies and gentlemen that helped support my work over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.