German III Wiki

How to Install Arch Linux

9 min read

Arch

This is the second last Linux distribution that I have hopped into and made me stay. The AUR is just so vast that everything I need is there. Currently, I am using EndeavorOS so that I wouldn’t have to go through the tedious (too lazy to make a script) arch install. But if you still want to install to learn, read ahead!

Before you start

The Arch Wiki is the most important and comprehensive(?) documentation that you could use to install arch. The Arch Package Repository, and the Arch User Repository is also where you can browse possible packages that you can install without needing to [manually build] them

Things You Need To Have

  • A flashdrive
  • A keyboard
  • Any bare computer with an HDD
  • The willpower to continue on the arch installation XD

Setting up

Create a bootlable Arch image

You can use tools like rufus or balena etcher to make this easy, but if you already have a linux installation, you can also use dd

Using dd

  dd bs=4M if=path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso of=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-My_flash_drive conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

After the above is done, boot into the arch image (assuming you already know how to do that)

Set the console keyboard layout and font (optional)

If you are using a non-US keyboard, you would like to go through this step.

List and Set Keymaps

# To set the keyboard layout, pass its name to loadkeys(1). For example, to set a German keyboard layout:
localectl list-keymaps
loadkeys de-latin1

List and Set Consolse font

ls /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/
setfont ter-132b

Verify boot mode (Optional)

You only need this if you are using old machines, or weird machines that YOU did not setup. But most of the time, modern computers are already using x64, so you can omit this step

cat /sys/firmware/efi/fw_platform_size

Connect to the internet (optionally mandatory)

If you are in a hurry, just skip this step and fetch the latest packages later. If you have ethernet cable and can connect to your network directly, you can also skip this step.

You can connect to the internet via Wi-Fi by following the steps below:

Open iwctl in interactive mode:

iwctl

When in interactive mode, list the devices/interfaces

[iwd]$ device list
 
  # You should see something like this:
  #
  #                            Devices
  # -------------------------------------------------------------
  #   Name          Address          Powered    Adapter    Mode
  # -------------------------------------------------------------
  #   wlan0         ...              on         ...        ...

Search for Wi-Fi networks

[iwd]$ station YOURDEVICE scan

Connect to your Wi-Fi. If you have a password on your Wi-Fi, you will be prompted for it.

[iwd]$ station YOURDEVICE connect YOURSSID

Update the system clock

If you have internet you can run timedatectl to synchronize your clock to the internet. Optionally, you can enable systemd-timesyncd later on to automatically sync it.

Disk Partitioning

This is my favorite part of the installation, once this step is done, any changes you make will be permanent and there is no going back.

List out the disks connected to your computer.

fdisk -l
 
# or
 
lsblk

NOTE

The output of the above commands usually contain text like /dev/sda, /dev/nvme0 or /dev/mmcblk0. Depending on your hardware, it will correspond to what is printed:

  • sd* for Hard disks or Solid State disks
  • nvme* for NVME disks
  • mmcblk* for eMMC disk

TIP

If you find it hard to determine which is which, I suggest you remove all the disks in your system and only leave in the disk you want to install arch into. Anyway, you can set it up later to boot with all disks automatically mounted.

Start the partitioning process (in my case it is /dev/sda)

fdisk /dev/sda

Partition Layouts

Generally, there are two ways to partition your disk, [GPT] for [UEFI] and [MBR] for [BIOS]. The one you choose is based on what boot type you used in your BIOS. Most of the time in modern computers use [UEFI], so just check it in your BIOS first before proceeding.

GPT
Mount PointPartition TypeSuggested Size
/bootefi1 GB
/swaplinux-swapHalf of System Memory
/linuxRemainder of device
BIOS
Mount PointPartition TypeSuggested Size
/swaplinux-swapHalf of System Memory
/linuxRemainder of device

Formatting Partitions

There are multiple ways you can format your partitions, also multiple types of filesystems like [btrfs], [zfs], etc. For this guide, we will be using the ol’ ext4 filesystem.

When you finish partitioning, you can run lsblk or fdisk -l again to see the partitions on your disk.

Format the root partition

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 # depending on output of lsblk / fdisk -l

Format the swap partition

mkswap /dev/sda2 # depending on output of lsblk / fdisk -l

Format the efi partition (if applicable)

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda3 # depending on output of lsblk / fdisk -l

Mounting

In order for us to interact with the filesystem, we need to mount it first.

NOTE

During my first time, I was confused as to why I had to mount the disk itself. It turns out that the live system was sort of an “already installed (to the flashdrive)” version of arch on its own. So in order to make changes to your target disk, you would have to mount it to the live system.

Mount the root partition first

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Mount the efi partition (if applicable)

mount --mkdir /dev/sda3 /mnt/boot
 
# or
 
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/boot

Set the swap partition as swap

swapon /dev/swap_partition

Installing the Essentials

You have finally finished partitioning and formatting your target disk, now it’s time to move to your new home with [pacstrap]

TIP

linux can be any kernel you want, if you want to add additional kernels, add them here.

pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware

Of course, the command above is just really what you need to create a pure vanilla linux install.

NOTE

If you think you need more packages, consult the Arch Wiki for more information.

As a user, you would want to install also these packages:

  • CPU Microcode (depending on your system)
    • amd-ucode
    • intel-ucode
  • Bootloader
    • grub
      • efibootmgr
  • Filesystems support
    • fsck (mandatory)
    • bcachefs-tools
    • btrfs-progs
    • dosfs-tools vfat
    • exfatprogs
    • f2fs-tools
    • e2fsprogs
    • ntfs-3g
  • RAID support
  • LVM support
  • Networking Support
    • NetworkManager
      • nmtui
      • nmcli
    • iwd
      • iwctl
  • Text Editor
    • vim
    • neovim
    • nano
  • Arch tools
    • reflector

Initial System Configuration

After pacstrapping everything you need to the target disk, it’s time to do the initial setup.

Generating the FStab (File system table)

NOTE

Took me awhile to understand what fstab is, and I learned it the hard way.

Basically, the computer boots into the BIOS, tries to boot into the disk that you assigned with the highest priority, and runs the initiramfs boot process. In order for the BIOS to know what and where to boot from, the fstab file is defines which partition is which.

Remember earlier, it was mentioned that we can set the disks we want to automatically mount during boot. This is the part that explains how.

First, connect your drives one-by-one:

NOTE

If your disks are new, you need to partition and format them before you can mount them. You can use the linux filesystem type and mkfs.ext4 formatting.

# assuming I have 2 extra disks
mkdir /mnt/sdb1
mkdir /mnt/sdc1
 
lsblk
#or
fdisk -l
 
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1

After doing above, we can finally generate an fstab automatically with the following command:

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

The above commands automatically detects mount points in the given directory and appends it into our target disk’s /etc/fstab, so when we boot, it knows the drives and disks that also need to be mounted on boot.

It’s Chroot-ing Time

Now it’s time to “login” into our install. The first time I learned about this, I was really surprised that linux can do that. Basically, what chroot is, is that it enables the user to access another linux filesystem/install and make changes to it without booting from it. This is very useful later on when you brick your install.

In our case, the system is already bootable, at this point, and without rebooting the system, we can initially setup essential stuff before we reboot.

Set the Time

To show the current timezone selected

timedatectl status

To get a list of available timezones we can set

timedatectl list-timezones

To set the timezone

timedatectl set-timezoune Zone/SubZone

If you tried the above commands, you won’t be able to since it does not work in chroot. So do this one instead:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Zone/SubZone /etc/localtime

Set the Locale

Generate the locale

locale-gen

Set to your desired locale, for my case en_US.UTF-8

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

Set the Hostname of your computer

echo "hostname" > /etc/hostname

Initramfs (optional)

This is optional since pacstrapping and installing the linux kernal already does this in its script. The ramfs is just a small but important part of the boot process which is run before mounting the disks. It contains essential tools to boot Arch.

mkinitcpio -P

Set the root password

passwd

Install a bootloader (mandatory)

This part is important since after mounting everything, you will need something that would load up Arch. In our case we use GRUB.

pacman -S grub efibootmgr # if not included in pacstrap
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Cleanup and Reboot

So we’re basically done, just exit out of chroot, unmount /mnt and reboot.

chroot$ exit
$ umount -R /mnt
$ reboot

Additional Steps

So you have just finished your Arch installation. If you once you reboot, it should bring you to a shell with a login prompt.

Here are some things you can do right after:

  • You can login as root and password to whatever you set it to during the Initial System Configuration.
  • Once you are in the shell, don’t forget to update your mirrors with reflector, and update your system with pacman -Syu.
  • You can also create a new user.
  • In the future, it would be better to create an install script that you can clone from github so you wouldn’t have to go through this again.

Happy Hacking!

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