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Arch Linux Installation

Introduction

This guide starts by booting into the live USB environment.

If you need help with the install, you need a USB formatted as FAT32 with the Arch ISO written in the MBR partition scheme. You can use Rufus or Etcher to write the ISO to the USB.

I'm at the terminal, now what?

Let's set the font to an easier to read size.

setfont ter-132n

Check internet connection.

ping -c 3 archlinux.org

If you're on a wired connection, you should be good to go. If you're on Wi-Fi, you'll need to connect to your network by the following:

iwctl
device list

Verify wlan0 shows up. If it does, show all nearby networks with the following command:

station wlan0 get-networks
station wlan0 connect ${Network name}

Enter the network passphrase

After entering the passphrase, wait about 5 seconds and press enter again

exit the iwctl tool

exit

Check internet connection again.

ping -c 3 archlinux.org

Synchronize the package database.

pacman -Sy

Install arch keyring.

pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring

Creating the partitions

List all disks and figure out your disk identifier.

lsblk

Note USB drives and SATA SSD drives will show up with the SD prefix.

NVMe drives will show up with the nvme prefix.

Grab your disk identifier which will be the items without any children partitions inside of them sda, sdb, nvme0n1, etc.

Prepare the disk for partitioning.

cfdisk /dev/${disk_identifier}

Look for the Free Space option and press Enter.

You need at least 2 partitions and maybe an extra for swap RAM. The first partition is of the EFI system type and should be 1GB in size. The second partition is the root partition, which uses the default type of Linux Filesystem and should be anything 20Gb or higher.

Then select Write and type yes to confirm your partitions changes.

We still need to format the partitions.

Replace ${disk_identifier} with your disk identifier and match the ${partition_number} with the partition number. As long as you created the 1GB EFI partition first, this partition number will be N and the root partition will be N+1.

So in order it would be:

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/${disk_identifier}${partition_number}
mkfs.ext4 /dev/${disk_identifier}${partition_number}

Mounting the root partition ${disk_identifier}${N+1}.

mount /dev/${disk_identifier}${partition_number} /mnt

Create a directory inside the /mnt directory for the EFI partition.

mkdir /mnt/boot

Mount the EFI partition ${disk_identifier}${N}.

mount /dev/${disk_identifier}${partition_number} /mnt/boot

Run lsblk to verify the partitions are mounted correctly.

Installing the base system

pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware git sudo vim neofetch htop amd-ucode networkmanager

Accept the defaults and wait for the installation to finish.

Now lets mount the partitions off the live USB session with the following command:

genstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Verify the contents of the fstab file.

cat /mnt/etc/fstab

Lastly chroot into the new system.

arch-chroot /mnt

The prompt should change to reflect the new root directory.

Set your root password

passwd

Create a standard user that you will use

useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power,video,audio -s /bin/bash ${username}

Set the password for the new user

passwd ${username}

Enable the new user to use sudo

EDITOR=vim visudo

Uncomment the line %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL and save the file.

Optional

Verify the new user can use sudo

su - ${username}

Your shell should change again to reflect the new user. Simply type exit to return to the root user.

Configuring the system

Set the timezone

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime

Sync the hardware clock

hwclock --systohc

Edit the locale.gen file

vim /etc/locale.gen

Uncomment the line en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and save the file.

Generate the locale

locale-gen

Create the locale.conf file

vim /etc/locale.conf

Add the following line to the file: LANG=en_US.UTF-8. Save the changes and exit.

Set the hostname

vim /etc/hostname

Add your hostname to the file and save it.

Edit the hosts file

vim /etc/hosts

Add the following lines to the file:

127.0.0.1  localhost
::1        localhost
127.0.1.1  ${hostname}.localdomain ${hostname}

Installing grub for multiple OS booting