A Personal Arch Installation Guide
1.0.0
This is a personal guide so if you are lost and just found this guide from somewhere, I recommend you to read the official wiki! This guide will focus on systemd-boot, UEFI and a guide if you want to encrypt your partition with LUKS/LVM. This guide exists so that I can remember a bunch of things when reinstalling Archlinux.
Before installing, make sure to:
The default console keymap is US. Available layouts can be listed with:
# ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/**/*.map.gz
To modify the layout, append a corresponding file name to loadkeys, omitting path and file extension. For example, to set a US keyboard layout:
# loadkeys us
If UEFI mode is enabled on an UEFI motherboard, Archiso will boot Arch Linux accordingly via systemd-boot. To verify this, list the efivars directory:
# ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
If the command shows the directory without error, then the system is booted in UEFI mode. If the directory does not exist, the system may be booted in BIOS (or CSM) mode.
We need to make sure that we are connected to the internet to be able to install Arch Linux base and linux packages. Let’s see the names of our interfaces.
# ip link
You should see something like this:
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp0s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
link/ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
link/ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff permaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00
enp0s0 is the wired interfacewlan0 is the wireless interfaceIf you are on a wired connection, you can enable your wired interface by systemctl start dhcpcd@<interface>.
# systemctl start dhcpcd@enp0s0
If you are on a laptop, you can connect to a wireless access point using iwctl command from iwd. Note that it's already enabled by default. Also make sure the wireless card is not blocked with rfkill.
Scan for network.
# iwctl station wlan0 scan
Get the list of scanned networks by:
# iwctl station wlan0 get-networks
Connect to your network.
# iwctl -P "PASSPHRASE" station wlan0 connect "NETWORKNAME"
Ping archlinux website to make sure we are online:
# ping archlinux.org
If you receive Unknown host or Destination host unreachable response, means you are not online yet. Review your network configuration and redo the steps above.
Use timedatectl to ensure the system clock is accurate:
# timedatectl set-ntp true
To check the service status, use timedatectl status.
When recognized by the live system, disks are assigned to a block device such as /dev/sda, /dev/nvme0n1 or /dev/mmcblk0. To identify these devices, use lsblk or fdisk. The most common main drive is sda.
# lsblk
Results ending in rom, loop or airoot may be ignored.
In this guide, I'll create a two different ways to partition a drive. One for a normal installation, the other one is setting up with an encryption(LUKS/LVM). Let's start with the unecrypted one:
Let’s clean up our main drive to create new partitions for our installation. And yeah, in this guide, we will use /dev/sda as our disk.
# gdisk /dev/sda
Press x to enter expert mode. Then press z to zap our drive. Then hit y when prompted about wiping out GPT and blanking out MBR. Note that this will zap your entire drive so your data will be gone - reduced to atoms after doing this. THIS. CANNOT. BE. UNDONE.
Open cgdisk to start partitioning our filesystem
# cgdisk /dev/sda
Press Return when warned about damaged GPT.
Now we should be presented with our main drive showing the partition number, partition size, partition type, and partition name. If you see list of partitions, delete all those first.
Create the boot partition
EF00. Hit enter.boot. Hit enter.Create the root partition
8300).root.Create the root partition
home.Lastly, hit Write at the bottom of the patitions list to write the changes to the disk. Type yes to confirm the write command. Now we are done partitioning the disk. Hit Quit to exit cgdisk. Go to the next section.
LUKS/LVM
Let’s clean up our main drive to create new partitions for our installation. And yeah, in this guide, we will use /dev/sda as our disk.
# gdisk /dev/sda
Press x to enter expert mode. Then press z to zap our drive. Then hit y when prompted about wiping out GPT and blanking out MBR. Note that this will zap your entire drive so your data will be gone - reduced to atoms after doing this. THIS. CANNOT. BE. UNDONE.
Create our partitions by running cgdisk /dev/sda
# cgdisk /dev/sda
Just press Return when warned about damaged GPT.
Now we should be presented with our main drive showing the partition number, partition size, partition type, and partition name. If you see list of partitions, delete all those first.
Create the boot partition
EF00. Hit enter.boot. Hit enter.Create the LVM partition
8e00. Hit enter.lvm. Hit enter.Lastly, hit Write at the bottom of the patitions list to write the changes to the disk. Type yes to confirm the write command. Now we are done partitioning the disk. Hit Quit to exit cgdisk. Go to the next section.
Use lsblk again to check the partitions we created. We? I thought I'm doing this guide for myself lol
# lsblk
You should see something like this:
| NAME | MAJ:MIN | RM | SIZE | RO | TYPE | MOUNTPOINT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sda | 8:0 | 0 | 477G | 0 | ||
| sda1 | 8:1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | part | |
| sda2 | 8:2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | part | |
| sda3 | 8:3 | 0 | 175G | 0 | part |
sda is the main disksda1 is the boot partitionsda2 is the swap partitionsda3 is the home partition
| NAME | MAJ:MIN | RM | SIZE | RO | TYPE | MOUNTPOINT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sda | 8:0 | 0 | 477G | 0 | disk | |
| sda1 | 8:1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | part | |
| sda2 | 8:2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | part |
sda is the main disksda1 is the boot partitionsda2 is the LVM partition
Surprise! Surprise! We will not encrypt the /boot partition.
Format /dev/sda1 partition as FAT32. This will be our /boot.
# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
Format /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 partition as EXT4. This will be our root and home partition.
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4
Format /dev/sda1 partition as FAT32. This will be our /boot.
# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
Create the LUKS encrypted container.
# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda2
Enter your passphrase twice. Don't forget this!
Open the created container and name it whatever you want. In this guide I'll just use cryptlvm.
# cryptsetup open --type luks /dev/sda2 cryptlvm
Enter your passphrase and verify it.
The decrypted container is now available at /dev/mapper/cryptlvm.
Create a physical volume on top of the opened LUKS container:
# pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptlvm
Create the volume group and name it volume (or whatever you want), adding the previously created physical volume to it:
In this guide, I'll just use volume as the volume group name.
# vgcreate volume /dev/mapper/cryptlvm
Create all your needed logical volumes on the volume group. We will create root and home logical volumes. Note that the volume is the name of the volume we just created.
Create our root. In this guide, I'll use 100GB.
# lvcreate -L 100G volume -n root
This will create /dev/mapper/volume-root.
Create our home sweet home. I'll just assign the remaining space to it.
# lvcreate -l 100%FREE volume -n home
This will create /dev/mapper/volume-home.
Format the logical partitions under the LVM volume.
Format our root and home partitions.
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/volume-root
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/volume-home
Mount the /dev/sda partition to /mnt. This is our /:
# mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
Create a /boot mountpoint:
# mkdir /mnt/boot
Mount /dev/sda1 to /mnt/boot partition. This is will be our /boot:
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
Create a /home mountpoint:
# mkdir /mnt/home
Mount /dev/sda4 to /mnt/home partition. This is will be our /home:
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/home
Mount the /dev/mapper/volume-root partition to /mnt. This is our /:
# mount /dev/mapper/volume-root /mnt
Create a /boot mountpoint:
# mkdir /mnt/boot
Mount /dev/sda1 to /mnt/boot partition. This is will be our /boot:
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
Create a /home mountpoint:
# mkdir /mnt/home
Mount /dev/mapper/volume-home to /mnt/home partition. This is will be our /home:
# mount /dev/mapper/volume-home /mnt/home
We don’t need to mount swap since it is already enabled.
Now let’s go ahead and install base, linux, linux-firmware, and base-devel packages into our system.
# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-zen linux-firmware
I will install linux-zen since it has necessary modules for gaming.
The base package does not include all tools from the live installation, so installing other packages may be necessary for a fully functional base system. In particular, consider installing:
software necessary for networking,
dhcpcd: RFC2131 compliant DHCP client daemoniwd: Internet Wireless Daemoninetutils: A collection of common network programsiputils: Network monitoring tools, including ping
utilities for accessing RAID or LVM partitions,
lvm2: Logical Volume Manager 2 utilities (if you are setting up an encrypted filesystem with LUKS/LVM, include this on pacstrap)Zram
zram-generatora text editor(s),
nanovimvipackages for accessing documentation in man and info pages,
man-dbman-pagesMicrocode
intel-ucode/amd-ucode
tools:
git: the fast distributed version control systemtmux: A terminal multiplexerless: A terminal based program for viewing text filesusbutils: USB Device Utilitiesbash-completion: Programmable completion for the bash shelluserspace utilities for the management of file systems that will be used on the system,
ntfs-3g: NTFS filesystem driver and utilitiesunrar: The RAR uncompression programunzip: For extracting and viewing files in .zip archivesp7zip: Command-line file archiver with high compression ratiounarchiver: unar and lsar: Objective-C tools for uncompressing archive filesgvfs-mtp: Virtual filesystem implementation for GIO (MTP backend; Android, media player)libmtp: Library implementation of the Media Transfer Protocolandroid-udev: Udev rules to connect Android devices to your linux boxmtpfs: A FUSE filesystem that supports reading and writing from any MTP devicxdg-user-dirs: Manage user directories like ~/Desktop and ~/Music
These tools will be useful later. So future me, install these.
# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Check the resulting /mnt/etc/fstab file, and edit it in case of errors.
Now, change root into the newly installed system
# arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
A selection of timezones can be found under /usr/share/zoneinfo/. Since I am in the Philippines, I will be using /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Manila. Select the appropriate timezone for your country:
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Manila /etc/localtime
Run hwclock to generate /etc/adjtime:
# hwclock --systohc
This command assumes the hardware clock is set to UTC.
The locale defines which language the system uses, and other regional considerations such as currency denomination, numerology, and character sets. Possible values are listed in /etc/locale.gen. Uncomment en_US.UTF-8, as well as other needed localisations.
Uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other needed locales in /etc/locale.gen, save, and generate them with:
# locale-gen
Create the locale.conf file, and set the LANG variable accordingly:
# locale > /etc/locale.conf
If you set the keyboard layout earlier, make the changes persistent in vconsole.conf:
# echo "KEYMAP=us" > /etc/vconsole.conf
Not using us layout? Replace it, stoopid.
Create the hostname file. In this guide I'll just use MYHOSTNAME as hostname. Hostname is the host name of the host. Every 60 seconds, a minute passes in Africa.
# echo "MYHOSTNAME" > /etc/hostname
Open /etc/hosts to add matching entries to hosts:
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 MYHOSTNAME.localdomain MYHOSTNAME
If the system has a permanent IP address, it should be used instead of 127.0.1.1.
Creating a new initramfs is usually not required, because mkinitcpio was run on installation of the kernel package with pacstrap. This is important if you are setting up a system with encryption!
```
# mkinitcpio -P
```
DO NOT FORGET TO RUN THIS BEFORE REBOOTING YOUR SYSTEM!
Open /etc/mkinitcpio.conf with an editor:
In this guide, there are two ways to setting up initramfs, udev (default) and systemd. If you are planning to use plymouth(splashcreen), it is advisable to use a systemd-based initramfs.
udev-based initramfs (default).
Find the HOOKS array, then change it to something like this:
HOOKS=(base udev autodetect keyboard modconf block encrypt lvm2 filesystems fsck)
systemd-based initramfs.
Find the HOOKS array, then change it to something like this:
HOOKS=(base systemd autodetect keyboard sd-vconsole modconf block sd-encrypt lvm2 filesystems fsck)
Regenerate initramfs image:
# mkinitcpio -P
DO NOT FORGET TO RUN THIS BEFORE REBOOTING YOUR SYSTEM!
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=2048 status=progress
Set the right permissions
# chmod 0600 /swapfile
After creating the correctly sized file, format it to swap:
# mkswap -U clear /swapfile
Activate the swap file
# swapon /swapfile
Finally, edit the fstab configuration to add an entry for the swap file in /etc/fstab:
/swapfile none swap defaults,pri=10 0 0
# pacman -S zram-generator
Let's make a config file at /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf ! I prefer having HALF of my TOTAL RAM as zswap size. My laptop have 4 cores, so I'll distribute it to FOUR zram devices. So I'll uthis config :
[zram0]
zram-size = ram/8
compression-algorithm = zstd
swap-priority = 100
[zram1]
zram-size = ram/8
compression-algorithm = zstd
swap-priority = 100
[zram2]
zram-size = ram/8
compression-algorithm = zstd
swap-priority = 100
[zram3]
zram-size = ram/8
compression-algorithm = zstd
swap-priority = 100
No need to enable/start anything, it will automatically initialize zram devices! Just reboot and run swapon -s to check the swap you have.
multilib and AUR
Enable multilib and AUR repositories in /etc/pacman.conf. Open it with your editor of choice:
Uncomment multilib (remove # from the beginning of the lines). It should look like this:
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Add the following lines at the end of your /etc/pacman.conf to enable the AUR repo:
[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch
pacman goodiesYou can enable the "easter-eggs" and goodies in pacman, the package manager of archlinux.
Open /etc/pacman.conf, then find # Misc options.
To add colors to pacman, uncomment Color. Then add Pac-Man to pacman by adding ILoveCandy under the Color string. To enable parallel downloads, uncomment it too:
Color
ILoveCandy
ParallelDownloads = 3
To check if you successfully added the repositories and enable the easter-eggs, run:
# pacman -Syu
If updating returns an error, open the pacman.conf again and check for human errors. Yes, you f'ed up big time.
Set the root password:
# passwd
Add a new user account. In this guide, I'll just use MYUSERNAME as the username of the new user aside from root account. (My phrasing seems redundant, eh?) Of course, change the example username with your own:
# useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power,video,audio,rfkill,input -s /bin/bash MYUSERNAME
This will create a new user and its home folder.
Set the password of user MYUSERNAME:
# passwd MYUSERNAME
If you want a root privilege in the future by using the sudo command, you should grant one yourself:
# EDITOR=vim visudo
Uncomment the line (Remove #):
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
Yeah, this is where we install the bootloader. We will be using systemd-boot, so no need for grub2.
Install bootloader:
We will install it in /boot mountpoint (/dev/sda1 partition).
# bootctl --path=/boot install
Create a boot entry /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf, then add these lines:
```
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=/dev/sda3 rw
```
If your `/` is not in `/dev/sda3`, make sure to change it.
Save and exit.
Remember the two-types of initramfs earlier? Each type needs a specific kernel parameters. So there's also a two type of entries here. Remember that volume is the volume group name and /dev/mapper/volume-root is the path to /.
udev-based initramfs
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options cryptdevice=UUID=/DEV/SDA2/UUID/HERE:volume root=/dev/mapper/volume-root rw
Replace /DEV/SDA2/UUID/HERE with the UUID of your LVM partition. You can check it by running blkid /dev/sda2. Note that cryptdevice parameter is unsupported by plymouth so it's advisable to use systemd-based initramfs if you are planning to use it.
Tip: If you are using vim, you can write the UUID easier by typing :read ! blkid /dev/sda2 then hit enter. Then manipulate the output by using visual mode.
systemd-based initramfs
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options rd.luks.name=/DEV/SDA2/UUID/HERE=volume root=/dev/mapper/volume-root rw
Replace /DEV/SDA2/UUID/HERE with the UUID of your LVM partition. You can check it by running blkid /dev/sda2.
Tip: If you are using vim, you can write the UUID easier by typing :read ! blkid /dev/sda2 then hit enter. Then manipulate the output by using visual mode.
Update bootloader configuration
# vim /boot/loader/loader.conf
Delete all of its content, then replaced it by:
default arch.conf
timeout 0
console-mode max
editor no
Processor manufacturers release stability and security updates to the processor microcode. These updates provide bug fixes that can be critical to the stability of your system. Without them, you may experience spurious crashes or unexpected system halts that can be difficult to track down.
If you didn't install it using pacstrap, install microcode by:
For AMD processors:
# pacman -S amd-ucode
For Intel processors:
# pacman -S intel-ucode
If your Arch installation is on a removable drive that needs to have microcode for both manufacturer processors, install both packages.
Load microcode. For systemd-boot, use the initrd option to load the microcode, before the initial ramdisk, as follows:
# sudoedit /boot/loader/entries/entry.conf
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /CPU_MANUFACTURER-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
...
Replace CPU_MANUFACTURER with either amd or intel depending on your processor.
To enable the network daemons on your next reboot, you need to enable dhcpcd.service for wired connection and iwd.service for a wireless one.
# systemctl enable dhcpcd iwd
Exit the chroot environment by typing exit or pressing Ctrl + d. You can also unmount all mounted partition after this.
Finally, reboot.
If your installation is a success, then yay!!! If not, you should start questioning your own existence. Are your parents proud of you?
