An opinionated arch installation guide.

Installing Arch isn't hard, but it can be overwhelming if you're not familiar with all the technologies that compose a (productive/userspace) linux system. I recently built a new computer and had to refamiliarize myself with all the little things I did with my installation to make the system I'm familiar with, my goal with this page is to create a simple (but very opinionated and direct) installation guide that is useful to myself and anyone else coming across this page.

This page is still very much W.I.P, I will probably add more stuff beyond the simple "base installation" eventually.

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Some initial notes

Please don't use this guide as a definitive resource for an installation, every computer (and user) is different - you may have other needs. For example, I'm running soley AMD as my experience with NVIDIA/Intel on linux has been nothing short of hellish - and thus I won't be talking about how to work with those devices.
Additionally, arch has a lot of defaults that work for me. For example, I use an American English keyboard, which requires no additional configuration for a keyboard layout.

All that being said, make sure you're also referencing the arch wiki installation guide. This guide should be more-so considered my personal reccomendation on how to go about each individual step.

Also, I consistently advise those with limited experience to try installing arch to a virtual machine first, before bare-metal. If you're able to do it once, in a safer enviorment, it helps a lot with your confidence and understand of what's actually going on.

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Assumptions / Goals

By the end of this guide, you should have a baseline arch linux system installed with the following (opinionated) configuration;

• Installing to a fresh machine (or seperate hard drive)
• GRUB (UEFI)
• Only two partitions / and /boot/
• swapfile
• basic helper stuff (networkmanager, bluez)

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Getting started

Use balena etcher to flash the arch iso
Make sure secure boot is off in your BIOS. Set your USB as the boot drive and get started :)
Wi-Fi is slow and often a pain to configure, if you can, use ethernet. Otherwise I reccomend using your phone as a USB tether (this is always how I install on a laptop). Both methods are plug-and-play.
Run a quick ping google.com to make sure everythings working okay.

skipping the keyboard layout stuff and EFI verification... (BAD FORESHADOWING)

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Da' Disks

The arch-wiki will reccomend using fdisk. I hate fdisk. Instead, we will be using cfdisk, which is also already installed on the archiso - it is a TUI interface for partitioning that makes your life significantly easier.

First, run lsblk to find the name of the disk you want to install to. In my case this is vba (since im demoing this on a VM), but on bare-metal you'll typically either see sdX or nvmeXnY. For the duration of this guide im gonna abbreviate this as DX, just replace that with whatever diskname you have.
Now, we can run cfdisk to partition our disks...
Select the GPT label here, First make a 1GB partition, set to EFI System. This will be our /boot/ partition.

Then, make partition the rest of the disk to be linux filesystem

Finally, select write to apply these changes and select quit. You can run lsblk again to verify you know now have two partitions, Now we need to format these partitions to their respective needed filesystems. The 1GB EFI partition needs to be FAT32, and can be formatted with the following command;

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/DXp1

In my case, that looks like this; Next, we need to format our "root" linux filesystem partition to be ext4;

mkfs.ext4 /dev/DXp2

In my case... Now we have to mount the drives, you can do that with the following commands; (make sure you use the right partition numbers!)

mount /dev/DX2 /mnt mount --mkdir /dev/DX1 /mnt/boot

Once again, you can verify this was done properly with lsblk

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Installing the system

Once the disks are mounted, the main system packages can be installed using pacstrap. To get our system started, run it with /mnt as our target and with the following package names;

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware vim

If you're not familiar with the basics of vim, you can replace it with nano instead.

Now make yourself a nice cup of tea while it installs :) Once that's done, we need to generate the fstab file. This is just a fancy table that tells arch how to mount disks at boot.

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

You can verify that it was properly generated by cat'ing the file. After this, we can 'get into' our installation by using arch-chroot;

arch-chroot /mnt

The look of your prompt should change;

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Making a "swapfile"

Typically, guides will reccomend that you make a swap partition. I beleive this is unnecessary and adds additional annoyances to the partitionng scheme. Instead, we can make a swap file that lives in the root directory and is loaded after the main filesystem.

First, allocate some space for the swapfile - I usually do 2GB on bare metal, but I'm just gonna do 500Mb on this VM...

fallocate -l <amount> /swapfile

Then change the permissions of the file to 600...

chmod 600 /swapfile

Convert it to a swapfile with mkswap...

mkswap /swapfile

Enable the swapfile with swapon...

swapon /swapfile

Lastly, we need to add our swapfile to the fstab file so arch will mount it upon boot;

/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

Together, the process looks like this. (And once again, you can verify stuff with cat)

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Set timezone

Setting the timezone is relatively straightforward, just run these commands;

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime hwclock --systohc

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Set Locales

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other needed UTF-8 locales.
Then, generate the locales by running locate-gen
Then make locale.conf to set your locale;

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

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hostname and hosts-file

This is the most important stage of the installation, naming your computer!

echo "<hostname>" > /etc/hostname

Let's name this demo VM "watashiato" Then edit your /etc/hosts file to look like this (use vim/nano)

# Static table lookup for hostnames. # See hosts(5) for details. 127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 localhost 127.0.1.1 <hostname>.localdomain <hostname>

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Set root password

Pretty self-explanatory;

passwd (type in password)

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Bare minimum packages to get you started

Install packages with pacman -S. I reccomend the following for the basis of a system;

pacman -S grub efibootmgr networkmanager network-manager-applet wireless_tools wpa_supplicant dialog os-prober base-devel linux-headers reflector git bluez bluez-utils xdg-utils xdg-user-dirs

Additionally, if you're lazy and just want to install a Desktop Enviorment at this point, add it's bundle name here as well. gnome for gnome, plasma for KDE, xfce4 xfce4-goodies for xfce4.
Personally, I'm insane and build my UI up from nothing with i3wm a bunch of other stuff, but no judgement for using a DE (unless it's gnome xd).

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GRUB

Like most, I use GRUB for my bootloader, it can be set-up with the following commands;

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

To be honest, GRUB is usually where shit goes wrong for 99% of people. I didn't have OVMF shit installed for my VM (and forgot) so this is where I stop providing screenshots from my VM.

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Some final stuff before we reboot

Quickly enable a couple services so they're ready to go when we reboot;

systemctl enable NetworkManager systemctl enable bluetooth

Create your local user, and add them to the wheel group...

useradd -mG wheel <username> passwd <username> (type in password)

You also need to edit the sudoers file such that the 'wheel' group actually means 'sudo privilages.' Run EDITOR=vim visudo (or EDITOR=nano visudo) and uncomment the following line;

%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

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REBOOT AND PRAY

First, type exit to exit out of chroot into your iso. Then type umount -a to unmount everything (ignore any 'busy' messages). Finally, type reboot to restart the system.
If everything went well you should reboot into GRUB, and from here into a working arch installation :D

then login...
Then connect to the internet with nmtui (or with your DE if you installed one).

And finally, run pacman -S neofetch && neofetch. Take a picture and share for bragging rights - you installed arch linux!

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IOU: Post-installation stuff, getting a cool i3wm desktop configured.