Arch is pleasant in that it let’s you take control of the installation process. You can install what you want to install, and skip what in your opinion is bloat.
When installing Arch always use the official documentation, the process changes.
Keyboard,
loadkeys sv-latin1
If you want to e.g. vertically rotate your screen,
echo 1 > /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate_all
UEFI is a replacement for BIOS and if your motherboard is configured for it you have files here,
ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
If you have a wifi connection you can run “wifi-menu”, otherwise ethernet is automatically working. Check connection,
ping magnushansson.xyz
timedatectl set-ntp true
timedatectl status
Look at your disk structure,
lsblk
There are several ways to set up a partition structure, and one could argue that it’s better to have one for boot, one for root, one for home and so on, if something goes wrong in the system.
Usually a regular partition structure is,
| Mount point | Partition | Size |
|---|---|---|
| /mnt | Linux | Remainder of space |
| [SWAP] | Linux Swap | +12G |
The swap partition should be around x1.5 of your memory. To partition the disk you can use fdisk or cfdisk, in which cfdisk is graphical and more intuitive,
cfdisk
Select dos,then primary partition and bootable for the Linux partition and primary for the swap. Change the swap partition to be of type “Linux swap”. Check with “lsblk”.
If you do not get a menu in “cfdisk” to select label of the disk you may want to change the label to dos (given that you want to use dos and not gpt for UEFI system),
parted /dev/sda
mklabel msdos
quit
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkswap /dev/sda2
swapon /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
vim /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Pick mirrors that are close to you. The higher up one the list a mirror is the higher priority it is given. This file will be copied in the installation process.
Install the distribution and any other programs that you want,
pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware
Generate file system table file,
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
vim /mnt/etc/fstab
You can see in the file that the option -U selected the UUID option and the /dev/sda is commented out.
Change root into your new system,
arch-chroot /mnt
ls /usr/zoneinfo
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Stockholm /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc
Generate the locales and edit the config,
locale-gen
vim /etc/locale.conf
Write “LANG=en_US.UTF-8”. Make the keyboard layout permanent,
vim /etc/vconsole.conf
write “KEYMAP=sv-latin1”.
vim /etc/hostname
Write your hostname, e.g. “ArchServer”.
vim /etc/hosts
Edit this file with the following information,
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 myhostname.localdomain myhostname
Set password for the user that you are logged in as, we are logged in as root,
passwd
One thing that is not in the Arch installation guide is configuring the network internet settings. If you do not do this you will not have an internet connection when booting into your new system.
systemctl enable dhcpcd
or
pacman -S networkmanager
systemctl enable NetworkManager
useradd -m magnus
passwd magnus
Sudo is not installed by default as can be seen,
whereis sudo
pacman -S sudo
Add user to groups, the wheel group gets you root access in Arch,
usermod -aG wheel,audio,video,optical,storage magnus
groups magnus
visudo
Uncomment “# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL”.
pacman -S grub
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
exit
shutdown