jopen

Setting Up Arch on an Old ThinkPad

Fri, 29 May 2026 18:00:00 +0330

Recently, I bought a used ThinkPad X230 for around $60. It came with a 3rd-gen i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 180GB SSD. Decent specs for a family laptop.

The previous owner had a fresh install of Windows 10 on it, and idle RAM usage was over 2GB:

While on Arch + XFCE, it dropped to under 1GB:

Here is how.

Hardware

Bofor installing Linux, I wanted to replace the thermal paste on the CPU and also swap the coin battery. This way, booting without the main battery (which was the upgraded 9-cell version, but completely dead anyway) would not require manually setting the date and time every time.

Alright, you got me. I had no reason to tear the whole thing apart. I just wanted to =)

Let the tear-down begin

I removed the old coin battery and replaced it with a new one:

Then I cleaned off the old thermal paste:

And replaced it with new paste (probably a little too much):

Software

Installing Arch

With the help of the Arch Wiki, I went to the official Arch Linux download page, picked a mirror close to my location, and downloaded archlinux-2025.08.01-x86_64.iso (around 900MB).

Then I plugged in a USB drive (8GB was enough) and opened Rufus to make it bootable with these settings:

Device: my USB stick
Boot selection: archlinux-2025.08.01-x86_64.iso
Partition scheme: GPT
Target system: UEFI (non-CSM)

Then I clicked START and selected Write in ISO Image Mode (Recommended)

After that, I switched the BIOS mode from Legacy to UEFI because apparently it’s the less painful option nowadays.

archinstall

After booting into Arch ISO, I connected to Wi-Fi using the iwctl network configuration tool.

Then I typed archinstall to go to the guided installer. Because I’m not a wierdo.

These were my settings:

Language/keyboard: en_US (added Persian later)
mirror regions::
- ~~Iran~~ (failed at first attempt)
- Germany
- Netherlands
- Sweden
- Finland

Disk: selected the 180GB SSD
Disk layout: Erase all
Bootloader: systemd-boot
Filesystem: ext4
Hostname: jfryusef
Root password: I’m not gonna tell you that
User account: created one and enabled (wheel) (admin)
Network: NetworkManager
Kernel: linux
Microcode: intel-ucode
Profile: Desktop → XFCE4 (light and stable)
Audio: ~~pipewire~~ (could not get it working at first)
Optional packages: firefox and a few others (optional)
Timezone: Asia/Tehran

Then I hit Install.

Once the installation finished, I rebooted the system and removed the USB drive. XFCE booted correctly and I could log in immediately.

The hard-freeze problem

Appearently, sometimes some old ThinkPads on modern Linux kernels hard-freeze because of aggressive C-states. Mine had it too.

Fix: add this kernel boot parameter: intel_idle.max_cstate=1

Installing stuff

I opened a terminal and installed these packages:

sudo pacman -S man-db man-pages
(built-in documentation system for commands)
sudo pacman -S fwupd
(firmware updater)
sudo pacman -S bluez bluez-utils
(Bluetooth stack)
sudo pacman -S gvfs gvfs-mtp
(virtual filesystem support + Android MTP support)
sudo pacman -S thunar-archive-plugin p7zip unzip unrar
(archive utilities + Thunar integration)
sudo pacman -S brightnessctl
(screen brightness utility)
sudo pacman -S pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber
(Linux audio stack)
sudo pacman -S blueman
(GUI Bluetooth manager)

Then I enabled the required services:

systemctl --user enable -- now pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber

sudo systemctl enable --now bluetooth

sudo timedatectl set-ntp true

I also needed an AUR helper, so I installed yay:

sudo pacman -S --needed git base-devel

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git

cd yay
makepkg -si

pacman	yay
`sudo pacman -S firefox`	`yay -S obsidian`
`sudo pacman -S obs-studio`	`yay -S anydesk-bin`
`sudo pacman -S qbittorrent`	`yay -S hiddify-app-bin`
–snip–	–snip–

Tweaking things

Keyboard shortcuts

Alt+T: terminal (xfce4-terminal)
Super: application finder (xfce4-appfinder)
Super+E: Thunar (thunar)
ThinkVantage button (Launch1): logout menu (xfce4-session-logout)

I also changed the volume step size to 10% in xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin.

Workspace shortcut

Alt+1: workspace 1
Alt+2: workspace 2
Alt+3: workspace 3
Alt+4: workspace 4

Winndows management

Alt+F: maximize window
Alt+Up: tile window to the left
Alt+Down: tile window to the right
Alt+Page Up: tile window to the top-left
Alt+Page Down: tile window to the top-right
Alt+Left: tile window to the bottom-left
Alt+Right: tile window to the bottom-right

(later regretted using Alt+Left and Alt+Right because they interfere with browser navigation shortcuts. But I kept using them anyway.)

Ricing?

I used Open Sans + JetBrains Mono as my main fonts, and Gruvbox as the primary color palatte using this GTK theme.

For icons and cursors, I kept the default elementary theme.

These:

are the items on my panel (a 24px bottom row):

I set Smoothwall as my window decoration theme. A practical choice.

Then I switched my display manager from LightDM:

sudo systemctl disable lightdm.service

to Ly (a TUI login manager):

sudo pacman -S ly
sudo systemctl enable ly.service

I also installed this Gruvbox Firefox theme and this VS Code theme.

My Obsidian theme

Since I couldn’t find any good ones for my usecases, I created my own Obsidian Gruvbox theme that uses Minimal theme as the base.

Once again, feel free to share similar projects.

How I Made jopen?

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 18:00:00 +0330

jopen is a blog about mostly tech-related projects I do for fun. In fact, jopen itself is one of them! I wanted to take notes on the process of my projects, and there was no reason to keep them private. So, I made this blog, To Learn In Public.

I don’t like bloated CMSs. This stack is [almost] free, open-source, and lets me focus on writing in a tool I already use (~~Obsidian~~ VS Code). Plus, it’s plain text and future-proof.

Here’s how I made it:

Tools & workflow

~~Obsidian~~ for writing posts & local Markdown management
GitHub for cloud-based version control + repo hosting
Hugo (with Terminal theme) as the static site generator
Cloudflare Pages for free, automated deployment
Giscus to integrate a comment system via GitHub Discussions

Every push to GitHub updates the blog via Cloudflare and every comment shows up on GitHub as well.

Setup

A. Buying a domain

This was the only step in which I paid for something, purchasing this .link domain for ~$10 a year. But there were cheaper (even free) options as well.

B. Hugo site and Terminal theme

I customized the font family to JetBrains Mono and the color scheme to gruvbox-dark-hard-aqua using the Terminal CSS customizer, and chose ~~#282828~~ #1d2021 as the background, #ebdbb2 as the foreground, and #689d6a as the accent color. This generated a .css file, a favicon, and an OG image that I added to the site.

And here’s the list of changes I made to the /themes/terminal/config.toml file:

[params]
customCSS = ["css/terminal.css"]
centerTheme = true
showLastUpdated = true
updatedDatePrefix = "@"
readMore = ">"
# A reference from the movie Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope:
missingContentMessage = "This is not the webpage you're looking for."
minuteReadingTime = "min[s] read"
words = "word[s]"

[params.logo]
logoText = "jopen"

[menu]

[[menu.main]]
identifier = "about"
name = "About"
url = "/about"
weight = 10

[[menu.main]]
identifier = "tags"
name = "Tags"
url = "/tags"
weight = 20

[[menu.main]]
identifier = "search"
name = "Search"
url = "https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajfryusef.link+QUERY"
weight = 30

C. Creating a Git repo and connecting it to GitHub

I initialized the local Hugo files in Git and turned on Discussions as a feature on jopen’s GitHub repo (so I can use Giscus in step F).

D. Deploying via Cloudflare Pages

Added jfryusef.link and www.jfryusef.link as two custom domains.

E. Setting up Obsidian

I merged the Obsidian vault root and local files of Hugo, and every once in a while, I push its content to GitHub to sync manually because I couldn’t make the Git plugin to work properly.

Here is the list of all the core plugins that are enabled in my vault:

Backlinks
Bookmarks
Command palette
File recovery
Files
Graph view
Outgoing links
Outline
Page preview
Quick switcher
Search
Slash commands
Tags view
Template
Word count
Workspaces

And here is the list of the community plugins that I use:

Style Settings - to control and adjust theme, plugin, and snippet CSS variables
Minimal Theme Settings - to change the colors, fonts and features of Minimal Theme
File Explorer Note Count - to see the number of notes under each folder within the file explorer
Settings Search - to globally search settings in Obsidian

And here’s the metadata (frontmatter) for this post:

+++
title = "How I made jopen?"
date = "2025-06-20T13:41:37+03:30"
lastmod = "2025-07-19"
# This value can be configured for per-post date formatting‍:
#dateFormat = "2006-01-02"
author = "yusef"
cover = ""
tags = ["jopen", "Markdown", "Obsidian", "Git", "GitHub", "Hugo", "Website", "Software"]
description = "How I built a blog using just Markdown and Git"
showFullContent = false
readingTime = true
# Until the post is finished:
draft = true
+++

F. Enabling Giscus

Nothing special. I just enabled comments in almost every page, because why not?

<script
	src="https://giscus.app/client.js"
	data-repo="jfryusef/jopen"
	data-repo-id="[REPO ID]"
	data-category="Comments"
	data-category-id="[CATEGORY ID]"
	data-mapping="pathname"
	data-strict="0"
	data-reactions-enabled="1"
	data-emit-metadata="0"
	data-input-position="top"
	data-theme="gruvbox_dark"
	data-lang="en"
	data-loading="lazy"
	crossorigin="anonymous"
	async
></script>

Updates

A. Using VS Code instead of Obsidian

Recently I use VS Code + this md extension and this Gruvbox theme instead of Obsidian for writing posts & local Markdown management. It has built-in GitHub integration as well.

B. Showing full post content instead of summary in RSS readers

I noticed the full content of my posts didn’t show up on RSS readers, with the help of ChatGPT, I figured out it was because of the Terminal theme. So I made this custom RSS template in /layouts/_default/rss.xml which I think overrides the one in /themes/terminal/layouts/_default/rss.xml
I added the following content to the file:

{{- $pctx := . -}}
{{- $pages := where site.RegularPages "Type" "in" site.Params.mainSections -}}
{{- $pages = $pages | first 50 -}}
{{- printf "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>" | safeHTML }}
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>{{ site.Title }}</title>
    <link>{{ site.BaseURL }}</link>
    <description>{{ site.Params.description | default site.Title }}</description>
    <language>{{ site.LanguageCode | default "en-us" }}</language>
    <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>

    {{- range $pages }}
    <item>
      <title>{{ .Title }}</title>
      <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
      <guid>{{ .Permalink }}</guid>
      <pubDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" }}</pubDate>

      <!--  This is the key line that gave me FULL CONTENT -->
      <description>
        {{ $content := .Content }}
        {{ $content = replaceRE "<img( [^>]+)>" "<img$1 />" $content }}
        {{ $content | htmlEscape | safeHTML }}
      </description>
    </item>
    {{- end }}
  </channel>
</rss>

C. Using Cloudflare Email Routing

From now on, cloudflare will forward every email sent to mail@jfryusef.link to my main Gmail inbox. This way people can’t see my actual email address until I answer them.

D. Adding an intro card on top of my homepage

I created content/_index.md with this content:

---
title: ""
---

---

## Welcome to my little corner of the Internet =)

jopen is a blog about mostly tech-related projects I do for fun. In fact, [jopen itself is one of them](https://jfryusef.link/posts/how-i-made-jopen/)!  
I wanted to take notes on the process of my projects, and there was [no reason to keep them private](https://github.com/jfryusef/jopen). So, I made jopen, _to learn in public._

---

<!-- more -->

Feel free to share similar projects.

Hello World!

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 23:59:59 +0330

Header 1

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog;

URL test

There is pee without poop, but there may not be poop without "p".

Unchecked Item
~~Checked Item~~

{
  "firstName": "yusef",
  "lastName": "jfr",
  "age": 22
}