May 2nd, 2019

Welcome to my guide on installing Glorious Arch Linux! For some background, I have been using arch for the last and it is still my only machine that I use as a daily driver. Arch Linux is a lightweight DIY type of distro that does not assume what kind of person you are and thus just lets you be yourself.

The whole system comes with a pre-compiled kernel (Linux), package manager (pacman), and some basic coreutils (GNU). That does not seem a lot, but this is just enough to make some great things. It installs a barebone system which allows the user to customize their system to smallest details and making it their own. Not like ubuntu with all the whistles and bangs included.

This guide has an exact copy of steps I use when installing Arch Linux. Installed it over ~25 times. The beauty of arch is that no installation is considered the best one. Every installation can be unique and bespoke. This guide only shows how to setup a complete arch environment with simple and straight-forward steps. If you want to know more about each step and different options you can go with, please consult with the official Arch Wiki. They have everything and more than you will ever need.

Open the Arch Linux Official Website and download the latest image file. Later on just take a flash drive and burn it with rufus on Windows or with dd on Linux. To save you some trouble, here is an example dd command to burn the image

This part is quite easy. The only thing that you should do is to tell your BIOS to boot from Flash Drives instead of bootloader and other drives. This process is different for every BIOS Version and motherboard, however, this is really easy as all the entries in the BIOS menu are self-explanatory.

Just plug in your flash drive and power on/reboot your device. Now, you will see a systemd prompt asking to boot. Choose the boot option that includes Arch Linux in it. You should see a prompt of this form:

Okay, now we need to partition our hard/state drive. How do we do that? Actually, there are many ways to to it, however I prefer to use cfdisk. It has pseudo-GUI, which is easier to work and operate with. Before partitioning, we should find the name of your drive. For that, in your command line type.

You will see a list of available storages. Ignore everything that ends with: boot, root, include, etc. What you are interested in is the biggest available drive. For example, my laptop has integrated SD Card 27GB and it is called /dev/mmcblk0. For the sake of simplicity, let’s use notation /dev/sda for the name of the drive. Okay, good. Now, launch cfdisk by typing

You will enter pseudo-GUI interface. Select gpt and now you will see your drive’s partitions. Next, we need to create 3 partitions: EFI System(/dev/sda1), Swap memory(/dev/sda2) and Root Directory (x86\_64)(/dev/sda3). I don’t create home partitions, as I just don’t like it.

By the rules, your swap should be 2xRAM and EFI System 512MB. Everything else can be given to Root Directory. Now, exit cfdisk by choosing QUIT.

We need to format partitions appropriately and accordignly. Your EFI System should be FAT32 formatted, because we use systemd-boot. To do that, type

Your swap partition should be formatted as swap memory (obviously)

Your main directory should be formatted as ext4, so to use all your files further on

Very good, our partitions are properly formatted and we can go on.

Now, we should mount our partitions. Firstly, we should mount our root partition

Then, we should mount the EFI System, so the system would know where is the boot point. We also need to create boot directory on our own.

Awesome, everything is mounted, now we can start installing the system

This part is quite easy. However, when I was installing my system, I had a problem with downloading speed, it was something like 20-50KB/s. Awful. To fix that and get the maximum download speed, do the following:

Now, you will be connected to the fastest mirrors in your location. Hurray!

Now we will install the base system. Here, we will intall base and base-devel packages, because it will get us enough packages to start using Arch Linux. It may take a while. Sit back, take a cup of coffee and relax.

Now, the system is installed on the device and we need to tell our OS and Bootloader about the partitions of our disk. To do so, perform:

If you have come this far, congratulations! You have installed the raw version of arch and essential tools. We have to perform some number of necessary configurations to make it usable as a daily driver.

Log in to the newly installed system with

We need to set your local time. Find your timezone in /usr/share/zonenifo and use it instead of _Region_ and _City_

% echo 127.0.0.1 localhost\n::1 localhost\n127.0.1.1 myhostname.localdomain myhostname > /etc/hosts

Small but important things swept out of the way, we have to configure one of the most important parts of this installation. Usually only arch and gentoo people have to work with manually setting up a bootloader. Bootloader is a small program that boots your actual OS after motherboard’s BIOS gives you control over the system. In this installation, we are going with systemd. It is the most compatible bootloader with Arch system in general. Also, my laptop’s hardware does not work with other bootloaders. Systemd is getting some bad fame because it is bloated, massive, and way too complicated. I agree with it but this is the best we have right now. Just like C++.

Assuming you have an intel chipset, run the following

Use vi or nano text editor to write down the following:

And for the second file:

You are exactly two commands away from a complete Arch Linux installation!

You need to exit chroot by runing % exit and reboot with % reboot

When you turn your machine back on, you should see some text popping out on the screen (that’s systemd) and finally, you should see the following prompt:

If you see this, then Congratulations! + You have completed the installation. Everything is terminal based, if you want to install X Window Server for GUI and other shiny stuff, please follow to teh Post-Installation chapter.

I hope you enjoyed this installation guide. After the last step, you should be able to have an actual working and stable system. I will not go into details how to set up your Desktop Environment or Window Manager. It should be unique and this is your adventure now. I will give you a list of useful commands just to get started. Also, further reading links will be included.

I hope you enjoyed the installation process and I am sure you were able to learn something new about Linux and yourself.

See you next time.

IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS. ◼︎