Installing Arch Linux (with helpful screenshots)

Who is this for?

Anyone interested in a modern Linux desktop environment, playing games in Linux(SteamOS / Steam Deck!!! But on desktop?), virtual machines and developers etc…

What makes Arch different?

• Arch strays a bit from the pack of typical Linux distributions, by requiring the users to make actual choices, not very hard ones, but choices none-the-less.

What does this mean practically? You will need to have actual opinions about how you want your system to run, as well as the applications that you want running.

• Rolling distribution model, no clear-cut versions. As long as you update, your always running the “current” version.
• Package management is done with pacman, I’ve written a couple other articles on pacman in the past if you want anymore information on the subject.
• AUR‘s (Arch User Repositories) are another incredible thing in the Arch world bridging the gap for installing projects not in the main archives.
• Documentation, their Wiki is a tremendous resource that only Gentoo comes close to.

New to Linux? Should you install Arch?

You totally can, farbeit for me to stop you, however it’s generally not recommended as a first Linux distribution choice. If your goal is to get up and running with Linux quickly, I’d highly suggest using Manjaro.

Installer?

While there is technically an “installer” I will not be covering that.

Whats wrong with other distributions?

Nothing, they all set out to do their own thing. They for the most part offer opinionated installations, with varying degree’s of sane defaults. Most distributions canned choices are often harder to trim down post installation than Arch is to configure from scratch which is why I’m going to go over the installation process, in the event that you are curious with the installation process and choices I’ve made while installing Arch.

Booting the installation media

Once you’ve booted the USB image, you’ll be greeted by the grub menu that looks like the following. From here you have several options, you can run memory tests, boot into existing OS’s or install Arch Linux. Lets choose that option.

root@archiso ~ #

Ok so now assuming you have internet access you can acccess the installation wiki by typing in installation_guide and reading along. You are now in whats commonly referred to as the ‘live’ (on usb, cd or ram) environment. From here we will be provisioning our system to run Arch Linux.

Alt-F1,F2,F3… are shortcuts you can use this to swich to alternate terminals to run other commands and return to reading the wiki.

Partitioning your disk(s)

As with most Linux installations your going to have to partition your disk. There are a number of tools at your disposal in the live environment that you can use to-do this.

lsblk listing the block devices that you have available will help you find the right names for your drives. Lets take a look at what we have available.

root@archiso ~ # lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
vda         259:0    0    40G  0 disk

Your entries may look different depending on if you have SATA, NVMe drives. Once you spot the drive that you want to use, you can proceed to the partitioning.

Note: that your disk will likely be named: /dev/sd* or /dev/nvme, mine in the examples are /dev/vda since I’m installing it in a VM since I’m already running Arch, and not installing it again while doing this tutorial.

Partitioning

Unless you have a specific use-case, you can just use a pretty generic partitioning scheme that I will outline below.

You will need a /boot (optional if your system will only have Linux installed), / (root) and swap partition at the very least. You may also want /var, /tmp and /home on their own partitions.

As a minimum, you will want to have at least 256MB for your boot partition, 512MB for your swap and the rest of your disk for your / (root).

cfdisk and fdisk are available for your partitioning needs, use whichever you like. I’ll show some screenshots of the partition process with cfdisk since I generally just use that.

cfdisk /dev/vda

Select the gpt label type.

You will want to select “New” on your free space, and create your boot partition, and enter the size you want. Repeat this for your swap and / (root) filesystems.

Once you’ve got those created, select “Write”, and then “Quit” and we can move onto formatting those partitions and mouting them for the installation. You should have something like the following:

Lets run lsblk again to see our partitions.

Now you can see the partitions that we created, now lets format them appropriately.

mkfs.vfat /dev/vda1

mkswap /dev/vda2

mkfs.ext4

swapon /dev/vda2

Mounting the filesystems

Firstly we will mount the root filesystem directly to /mnt, creat the “boot” directory and then mount the /boot partition in there with the following commands.

mount /dev/vda3 /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/boot
mount /dev/vda1 /mnt/boot

Verify that you have the partitions mounted properly with something like:

Installation starts!

Now the actual “installation” starts as in packages get fired onto your disk. And you get to start making some choices (or in this case see the ones I’ve made for my use-case).

Boot strapping

We will now bootstrap the installation. Installing the bare minimum required to get the OS installed (you can further tweak this later as well).

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware neovim grub efibootmgr

This installs the Linux Kernel the firmware packages used by most hardware and GPU’s along with a minimal set of tools used to strap together a minimal Linux system and Grub (our bootloader, optional if you want to install a different one).

Once that is finished you should see something like:

We can check now to make sure everything got installed correctly into our filesystem by checking out what got installed in /mnt.

Setting TimeZone

Since I’m in Halifax, I’m setting that TimeZone, but set whatever is appropriate for you.

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Halifax /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc

Setting your locale

echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf

DNS and Networking

To find out which network interfaces you have, you can run the following command.

ls /sys/class/net/

You will use this device name (not lo since this is the loopback device) in the following section.

echo "archbox" > /etc/hostname
cat << EOF > /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 archbox.localdomain archbox
EOF

cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/network/20-wired.network
[Match]
Name=enp6s0

[Network]
DHCP=yes
DNS=192.168.2.16
EOF

passwd