ArchLinux:Installation

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: The document is currently being modified!

The following tutorial is a collection of notes on how to install the Arch Linux distribution. This guide is mainly suited for use with servers and embedded machines. This tutorial originally started as a YouTube video I had made in early 2012 called How to Install Arch Linux. I then remade this video in late 2012, due to major changes in the installation process, renamed as Arch Linux: System Installation. This tutorial is the spiritual successor to those videos and has been created via the recording notes from said videos.

Following the Arch Linux philosophy, these tutorials are geared at being simple and efficient.

Booting the Installation Media

Place the copy of the Arch Linux image you burned to a disc in your machine and reboot. Enter BIOS if necessary to modify the boot device order in order to boot from the media.

You should be looking at the EFI boot menu, which will auto boot the Arch Linux ISO in a few moments. When your system has finished the boot up process you will be at the console. You may also notice you have been automatically logged into the root account.

For the creation of this tutorial I used the following environment:

VirtualBox 5.1.22 r115126 archlinux-2017.07.01-x86_64.iso

Pre-Installation

There are a few things that you may choose to go through before you begin your installation. None of these are required, but may be extremely useful.

To start sync the systems time and date.

root ~ # timedatectl status

Verify Boot Mode

Verify that the motherboard has UEFI enabled. If this outputs a list of variables, the computer has successfully booted into EFI mode.

root ~ # efivar -l

Keyboard Keymap

If using a non-US keymap, specify which keymap to load.

root ~ # ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/

Organization is laid out in directories as Machine Type / Keyboard Type, take the filename without the extension and plug it into the command loadkeys.

root ~ # loadkeys de-latin1

Networking/Wireless

Make sure the network is connected and internet access is working (for wired network connections, dhcp was loaded on boot).

root ~ # ping archlinux.org

Performing the installation over wireless requires manual setup. To do so, get the name of the interface, usually wlan0, and then check to see if your wireless interface is activated.

root ~ # iw dev root ~ # ip link show wlan0

If the interface is in state DOWN bring it up first.

root ~ # ip link set wlan0 up

With the interface activated, get a list of all available access points (AP) nearby.

root ~ # iw dev wlan0 scan | less

Depending on what type of encryption the AP is using for the network, connect with one of the following methods:

• No Encryption

root ~ # iw dev wlan0 connect "YOUR_SSID"

• WEP

root ~ # iw dev wlan0 connect "YOUR_SSID" key :YOUR_KEY

• WPA/WPA2

root ~ # wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c <(wpa_passphrse "YOUR_SSID" "YOUR_KEY")

Verify that the wireless network was brought up properly.

root ~ # iw dev wlan0 link

Installation via SSH

Installing remotely from another computer using SSH can be a lot faster, but requires the use of another machine. Remember, copy and paste work over SSH.

To start ssh in the installation environment, start the openssh service with systemd and then set the root password.

root ~ # systemctl start sshd root ~ # passwd

Use the ip addr command to find the IP address assigned to the machine. Logging in remotely as the root account with the password setup previously should now be possible.

Hard Drive Setup

If you are installing Arch in conjunction with Mac OS X and/or Windows, partitions will be Apple Core storage and HPFS/NTFS/exFAT respectively.

Before we can begin the installation we must partition and format the hard drives that will be used in the installation. For this we use the GPT partition scheme. GPT (or GUID Partition Table) came about due to the inherit 32-bit limitation in MBR limiting the maximum addressable storage space to 232 x 512 bytes or 2TB. The operating systems (OS) that cannot boot from GPT are Windows XP and all prior versions. Given that GPT forms part of the UEFI standard it will be the defacto choice if you have UEFI enabled.

Pull up a list of all of the disks in your system.

root ~ # lsblk

We can safely ignore the ones mounted from /run/archiso as these are the live disc image we booting from.

Having located the drive we are going to be using for Arch, make note of the device node the disks uses.

Partitioning

Filesystem	Mountpoint	Size	Description
Linux	/	*	root partition
EFI System	/boot	200M	boot partition

For the rest of this guide I will be referring to the hard drive you are installing to as sdX, yours will likely be sda, sdb, or some other such variant.

Before we begin it is always good practice to zero the disk out.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1k count=2048

WARNING: This will wipe the entire disk! Skip this step if you are only using part of the disk for Arch Linux.

With that taken care of we can begin partitioning with sgdisk. Delete the current partition table, although dd should have taken care of this.

# sgdisk -z /dev/sdX

Write a new GPT partition table with protected MBR.

# sgdisk -o /dev/sdX

Create our Arch Linux partition (use everything but the last 200MB) and then our EFI System partition with the final 200MB; might as well setup the partition types in the same command.

# sgdisk -n 1:0:-200M /dev/sdX -n 2:-200M:-0 -t 1:8300 -t 2:ef00 /dev/sdX

For posterity we can set some names to help identify the partitions.

# sgdisk -c 1:"Arch Linux" -c 2:"EFI Boot" /dev/sdX

Just in case we want to boot in Legacy mode we will also set the legacy boot attribute.

# sgdisk -A 2:set 2 /dev/sdX

If you are a keen observer, you will notice we have not made use of a swap partition. That is because we will be using a swap file instead.

If sgdisk has been complaining that the linux kernel is caching partition information, you should reboot before continuing.

Formatting/Mounting

With the partitions setup, they now need to be formatted.

For the root filesystem, using metadata_csum will enable metadata checksums for added protection against disk corruption.

# mkfs.ext4 -O metadata_csum /dev/sdX1

Format the EFI System partition with FAT32.

# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdX2

Mount the partitions, take care of the order.

# mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt # mkdir /mnt/boot # mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt/boot

Installation

Now that the disk(s) are setup and mounted in the correct directories, begin the Arch Linux bootstrap process.

Base Packages

Install the base and base-devel package groups, the rEFInd Boot Manager and the sudo and vim packages. When not using WiFi, the dialog and wpa_supplicant packages can safely be removed from the list.

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel dialog efibootmgr refind-efi sudo vim wpa_supplicant

Fstab

Generate an fstab file so that Arch knows what to mount on boot. Using the -U option will use UUIDs for the source partitions, this has the advantage of not changing if the hard drive is plugged into another computer.

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

Be sure to confirm it was generated correctly (UUIDs line up).

# blkid /dev/sdX1 && blkid /dev/sdX2 && cat /mnt/etc/fstab

In order to ext4 journal data structures also gain checksums add ,journal_checksum to the mounting options on boot.

# sed -i 's/data\=ordered/data\=ordered,journal_checksum/' /mnt/etc/fstab

Again confirming this change is not a bad idea.

If you are using an SSD you might want to consider adding ,discard to the mounting options as well.

Chroot into Install

Change root into the new system.

# arch-chroot /mnt

Begin configuration by setting a root password.

# passwd

Modify the mkinitcpio.conf in order to load the required kernel module for ext4 checksums on boot and then create the initramfs (initial RAM disk filesystem) image.

# sed -i 's/^MODULES\=\"\"/MODULES\=\"crc32c-intel\"/' /etc/mkinitcpio.conf # mkinitcpio -p linux