arch xorg and alsa
Configuring xorg and alsa went without much to write about. But since I’m posting tedious details, here’s the not much.
With help from hal, the latest xorg stuff is reported to work without a config file for a lot of people. After installing X, I tried that. X started, but with the wrong resolution, and the system froze with me staring at the lovely twm with clock and xterms. Now that I think of it, it’s possible I hadn’t yet configured the hal daemon to run at boot, and maybe I forgot to start it. But I didn’t check that at the time, I just ran nvidia-config. This time I got a working X, but the wrong resolution again.
I saved the xorg.conf from nvidia-config and then copied my old xorg.conf over from the Slackware install. That worked fine. There were a few [EE] errors logged, all just from stuff that’s been deprecated. After deleting the deprecated stuff from xorg.conf, everything is fine.
At some point, I did get hal all set up (at least I think there aren’t any problems with it), so I’ll try the xorg-without-xorg.conf thing again if I remember. Update: I did try it again. The resolution wasn’t right, but I copied the minimal default xorg.conf file from xorg’s log and changed the driver from nv to nvidia and everything worked. I guess I should mention that I have an nVidia 8600GT and an ordinary Logitech wired USB keyboard and wireless USB mouse. From running some xscreensaver hacks, it looks like accelleration is fine, and all of KDE4′s eye candy seems to work. (More on KDE4 later.)
Alsa config went without a hitch. I’m using the Intel HDA on my motherboard. I can’t recall which specific chipset it is, but alsa works fine without worrying about it.
The Arch wiki has good pages for xorg and for alsa, but I really only needed them to make sure I wasn’t forgetting something that would haunt me later. At some point, I’ll go through the Arch wiki post-installation tips, which looks like a very good checklist of stuff I may want to set up.