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Note: This installation procedure utilizes systemd-boot as its bootloader as opposed to GRUB. I've made this decision as systemd-boot is more secure, and is generally better than GRUB, in my opinion.
If anything in this guide does not make sense to you, please consult the installation guide from the Arch Linux wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide
After booting from the live USB, connect to the internet. After executing this command, a GUI will launch. Follow its prompts to connect to wifi.
wifi-menu
Next, change the password for the root account of the live USB.
passwd
Now execute the following to refresh Arch's package manager repos.
pacman -Syy
At this point, we should refresh pacman's mirrorlist, to speed up the installation.
pacman -S reflector
Execute the following to refresh pacman's mirrorlist for your location. Simply replace Canada with your country of residence.
reflector -c "Canada" -f 12 -l 10 -n 12 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Now we must install Arch Linux onto the hard drive. Execute the following and locate your hard drive in the output presented. Take care to locate the path to the hard drive itself, rather than an existing partition on the hard drive (e.g. /dev/nvme0n1 as opposed to /dev/nvme0n1p1 for M2 drives, or e.g. /dev/sda as opposed to /dev/sdb for SATA drives).
fdisk -l
Now we will use the utility gdisk to create the partition on the hard drive. Execute the following to open a new gdisk session.
gdisk [harddrive]
Within this new gdisk prompt, certain letters represent certain operations. To create a new GPT partition table on the hard drive (and thus format it), execute the following. If you are installing Arch alongside Windows, skip to step 12, and do not execute commands 8, 9, 10, or 11.
o
Now we will create the EFI (boot) partition. Enter this command to begin the process of creating this partition.
n
Now we will specify the size of this new partition. The first prompt will ask for the start block - simply press enter whenever this is asked as we want to leave no gaps in the GPT partition table. For the second prompt, each time use the format +[INT][GB/MB] to specify what size the partition will be. For this step, we are creating the EFI partition, or the boot partition. A minimum size of 512MB is reccomended for this, and the partition should not exceed 1GB.
+512MB
Now we will enter the hex code for the type of partition we are trying to make. In this case, the hex code for an EFI partition is the following.
EF00
Now we will create the swap partition. This command will begin the process of creating this partition by saying we want to create a new partition.
n
While there is a lot of advice online and otherwise about what size to make swap artitions I find that in 2019 it is most appropriate to set your swap partition size to approximately half the size of the amount of RAM in your system. Here I set it to be 8GB, as an example.
+8GB
Now we must enter the hex code for the type of partition we are making. In this case, the hex code for a swap partition happens to be the following.
8200
Second to last, we create the root partition. While you may choose to not seperate your home and root partitions, I reccomend it as it makes the process of reinstalling your OS and keeping your files intact much simpler, should something go wrong with your OS or you simply wish to switch to a different distribution. Enter the following command to initiate the process of creating the new partition.
n
Now, we specify the size of the root parition. I reccomend setting it to be somewhere between 30GB and 100GB, depending on the amount of hard drive space available to you. We can use the default hex code for the type of partition we are making, so for that prompt simply press enter.
+60GB
Finally, we must create the home partition where personal files will be stored for each user. Enter the following command to initiate the process of creating this parition.
n
Simply press enter to all of the prompts at this point, to make use of the remaining hard drive space.
[Enter]
Finally, enter the following command to allow gdisk to write the changes you have specified to the disk itself.
w
Now that the partitions have been made, we will now format the partitions with the appropriate file format. Execute the following, replacing [EFIpartition] with your location of your EFI partition (from fdisk -l). If you are installing alongside windows, do not execute this command, and skip to step 21.
mkfs.vfat [EFIpartition]
Next, we will format the root partition with the format ext4.
mkfs.ext4 [rootpartition]
Finally, we will format the home partition with the format ext4 as well.
mkfs.ext4 [homepartition]
With our hard drive ready for installation of Arch, we will now mount the partitions to our /mnt directory in the Linux file system, so that we can write directly to these partitions. First, mount the root partition.
mount [rootpartition] /mnt
Now, mount the home partition. If Arch asks if you would like to create the /mnt/home directory as it does not exist, simply press Enter to agree. If the directory doesn't exist, simply run mkdir /mnt/home.
mount [homepartition] /mnt/home
Now, mount the boot partition. Again, in the case a prompt comes up, simply press Enter. If the directory doesn't exist, simply run mkdir /mnt/boot.
mount [bootpartition] /mnt/boot
With the hard drive ready to write to, execute the following to intall the base packages of Arch Linux, the optional base-devel package (to make your life easier), the dialog package (which will allow us to use wifi-menu while setting up the system), a text editor (in this case, I install emacs, but vim will also do just fine :) ), and the reflector package, so we can initialize our pacman mirrorlist during setup.
pacstrap -i /mnt dialog base base-devel emacs reflector
Now with our base arch installation complete, we will generate our fstab file
genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Now with our system actually setup, we will use what is called a chroot tool to get into our newly installed system, without restarting the computer.
arch-chroot /mnt
I reccomend setting the root password now.
passwd
Now, we will install some important packages. While linux and linux-lts are self explanatory, openssh will help us ssh into the system should we need to in the future and also help us do common things like generate ssh keys, linux-headers and linux-lts-headers will help us create custom kernel modules if wanted. linux-firmware contains the most common firmware needed, and wpa_supplicant, wireless_tools, dhcpcd, and netctl will help us connect to the internet during the installation process and beyond. Specifically, netctl gives us the util wifi-menu for quick setup, and dhcpcd gives us quick access to the daemon of the same name should we want to use an ethernet connection during install instead.
pacman -S openssh linux linux-headers linux-lts linux-lts-headers linux-firmware wpa_supplicant wireless_tools dhcpcd netctl dnsmasq konsole
Next, we must generate our locale. Locale represents your region. Open the /etc/locale.gen file with your text editor of choice, and uncomment your locale (i.e. delete the # from the line #en-US.utf-8 if you are american, or en-CA.utf-8 if you are Canadian, etc.).
emacs /etc/locale.gen
vim /etc/locale.gen
Now execute the following command to generate your locale, and the command listed after to set your computers' hostname
locale-gen
Soft link locale to local time (replace with your personal location)
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Mountain /etc/localtime
Enable ssh (reccomended but not required)
systemctl enable sshd.service
Install bootctl
bootctl install
cd into loader directory and edit loader.conf config file with chosen text editor
cd /boot/loader
emacs loader.conf
Enter the following into the loader.conf file and save the file
default arch
timeout 5
cd into entries directory and edit arch.conf config file with chosen text editor
cd entries
emacs arch.conf
Enter the following into arch.conf and save the file. In [output of blkid], you must enter the partition identifier for your root partition, which is listed in the output of blkid. Directions for how to obtain the output of this command and read it into the file are found in brackets below for emacs and vim.
title ArchLinux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=PARTUUID=[raw output of blkid root partition code, no quotes] rw
(in vim - Esc :r !blkid [ENTER], in emacs, C-u M-x shell-command blkid [ENTER])
Now we need to confirm that our entries are valid before rebooting. To do so, run the command:
bootctl
And confirm that there are no warnings, such as the no file called vmlinuz-linux which will occur if you forgot the command earlier:
pacman -S linux
system (remove the USB drive containing the live environment after rebooting)
exit
umount /mnt
rebootLog into the system as root and set hostname
hostnamectl set-hostname [desired computer name]
Add a user account for your personal use
useradd -m -g users -s /bin/bash [username]
Then connect to the internet:
wifi-menu
If unable to use wifi-menu to connect to the internet, opt for an ethernet connection and execute the following instead:
systemctl enable dhcpcd
systemctl start dhcpcdNOTE: you will have to disable dhcpcd later if you want to use NetworkManager as this guide
does later.
Install the sudo command and use visudo to add yourself to the sudoers group by adding a line under the line specifying the rules for root with an identical line, only using your username instead of "root".
pacman -S sudo
visudo(Alternatively, you can manually edit /etc/sudoers using an editor - it just will let you save
the file without performing syntax validation on the file of course, which can be dangerous)
Then set a password for your user so that you can log in to the desktop environment later:
passwd [username]
Install vital packages for automatic network management
pacman -S networkmanager network-manager-applet
Install vital packages for xorg and graphical display drivers and backup drivers like mesa and vesa
pacman -S xf86-input-libinput xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-apps mesa xf86-video-intel xf86-video-vesa
If you are running and nvidia card, you might want to install that driver now and configure x to use that also:
pacman -S nvidia
nvidia-xconfigInstall the sddm display manager and the plasma KDE desktop environment. Alternatively, you can use the gnome-desktop DE and gdm display manager to run gnome, etc.
pacman -S sddm plasma wayland plasma-wayland-sessionOptional, but provides many helpful GUI apps:
pacman -S kde-applications
Install and start the ntp daemon, which will keep your system time in sync. Note that if you are dual booting, you will have to change your windows settings to avoid conflicts in general between Linux and Windows.
pacman -S ntp
systemctl enable ntp
systemctl start ntp
Enable the sddm display manager for initialization upon startup
systemctl enable sddm
Enable the network manager service for wireless access
systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
If you previously enabled the dhcpcd service, disable it now as NetworkManager will take care of automatic network management:
systemctl disable dhcpcd
Then reboot into your system:
reboot
Printer setup
[login]
[open terminal GUI app, e.g. konsole]
sudo pacman -S cups system-config-printer
sudo systemctl enable cups
sudo usermod -aG sys [username]
[open printers kde application to configure]Install pamac pacman GUI app and enable AUR support within it
cd /tmp
sudo pacman -S git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/pamac-aur.git
cd pamac-aur
makepkg -si
[open pamac]
[enable AUR]Install yay, a cli option for managing AUR packages, if desired:
cd /opt
sudo git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-git.git
sudo chown -R <type username here>:<type username here> ./yay-git
cd yay-git
makepkg -siIf you use a USB-3 dock, especially one with power delivery, you may experience a common issue where it connects buts every so often disconnects and reconnects. To solve this check the output of this:
cat /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend
If the output is 2, likely the issue is due to this and can be solved by running:
echo -1 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend
To fix the issue permanently (persist after reboot), add the kernel option usbcore.autosuspend=-1.
If you are using GRUB as your bootloader, you can do this by adding the option to /etc/default/grub
at the end of the line in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, then running sudo update-grub.
If you are using bootctl as this install prefers (e.g. if you followed this installation guide),
simply add the kernel option to the end of the line that ends with the root PARTUUID followed by rw
that you created earlier in arch.conf.
Install helpful AUR kde packages using pamac or yay:
sudo pacman -S kde-gtk-config libappindicator-gtk2 libappindicator-gtk3If you are ok with running 32 bit packages on your 64 bit system, enable the multililib repository to have access to more packages through pacman. (I reccomend doing this).
To do this, edit /etc/pacman.conf and uncomment these lines:
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlistFor the change to take effect, update pacman's database with the repository contents using
sudo pacman -SyyDue to having installed both X11 and Wayland and the dependencies needed to run KDE plasma with both, on the login screen you will notice a dropdown on the top left giving you the option to login to a Wayland session or X11 session. While Wayland is intended to supercede and replace X11 and allows for easier use of displaylink and fractional scaling differences between monitors, it still does have some issues in some situations, causing some users to prefer using X. Feel free to try both.