Installing Arch Linux
Posted on Wed 23 September 2020 in Programming
I'm installing Arch Linux on my computer.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. If you've known me for long enough, you'll know that every six months or so I get the urge to wipe my system and do a clean install. For me, it's that same clean feeling you get after spending a day cleaning your house, and I love it. At the same time, I also enjoy experimenting with new things, so oftentimes a reinstallation will end up with me trying a different Linux distribution than the one I was previously on.
If I had to document my history with Linux, the tl;dr would be something like
-
Late 1990s or early 2000s. Our family buys SUSE Linux, the predecessor to openSUSE. Being the child that I was, I use it for videogames like Frozen Bubble, and later, RuneScape.
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2010 or thereabouts (high-school). I install linux on a lab machine as part of an assignment. I get a good grade and feel like a hacker.
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2013, college. Most of the students in my computer science classes (myself included) are using Windows. A group of several top students are using Linux. In awe of their computing prowess, and wanting to fit in, I befriend them and they help me install Linux Mint on my laptop.
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2013-2015, college also. The command line is scary, but I commit myself to learning its ways by taking all of my notes in vim. My laptop dies and for a brief time and I use a Raspberry Pi (with the Raspbian OS) until I can get a replacement computer. The netbook I order arrives and I install Lubuntu on it. I also buy a desktop system for video games, but dual boot Windows with Linux Mint. Reinstall time! I dabble briefly with Ubuntu on my desktop, but finally settle on Crunchbang because the UI looks absolutely amazing.
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2015-2019. Work lets me install my own operating system and I choose Xubuntu because it's easy to set up and allows me to focus on what's important.
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2019+. I switch jobs and now use a Macbook. The command line experience is almost identical thanks to my heavy use of tmux, but the tiling window manager setup I had when I was using Linux daily is now gone and I miss it. On my personal computer, I install Arch Linux because it seems hard to do. Eventually, I get curious again and try Manjaro, i3 community edition.
Which brings me to today. I've used Arch before, but I'm drawn back to it for several reasons:
- I like the pacman package manager as well as the concept of a rolling release distribution
- The idea of having a minimal system that contains only what I want and nothing else is appealing to me.
This post documents the steps that I took to install and set up the system.
Prerequisites
Download and verify the latest Arch Linux
ISO and make a bootable USB drive with
the image. I did this with the dd command. Then: restart your machine, boot
from your new install media, and after a short while you will be greeted with a
single prompt.
#
And that's pretty much it. Unlike other operating systems, there is no graphical installer to guide you. There is no console based one, either. Instead, there is the ArchWiki's installation guide, which covers in detail the commands to run in order to install the system yourself. This spartan approach to installation can be intimidating to beginners and experts alike (myself included), but the end result is a system completely customized to the wants and needs of the owner.
Installation steps
Connect to the internet
Hard-wired connections shouldn't have to worry about this step, but if you're
connecting via wifi like me, you can use the interactive iwctl command to
connect
# iwctl
[iwctl] station wlan0 scan
[iwctl] station wlan0 get-networks
Available networks
------------------------------------------------------
Network name Security Signal
-----------------------------------------------------
One Cute Cottage psk ****
XFINITY 8021x ***
Prejudice psk ***
Pride psk **
Andromeda_2.4GHz psk **
Bassoon psk *
Bhaati - 2.4GHz psk ***
[iwctl] station wlan0 connect "One Cute Cottage"
Enter passphrase:
and then verify the connection with ping archlinux.org.
Installation guide
At this point, if you need to refer back to the guide, you can optionally run
Installation_guide which opens up the Arch Wiki's Installation
guide in w3m, a
command line web browser. It's not the best user experience but it gets the job
done, especially if you don't have another device with which to access the
guide. Use alt + (left or right) to switch to a new virtual console and
continue the installation from there.
NTP server
Just like how wall clocks slowly become out of sync with the current time, so too, does your computer. To fix this, your computer can use the Network Time Protocol to synchronize itself with a list of known accurate time servers to prevent itself from drifting.
# timedatectl set-ntp true
Verify with timedatectl status
Drive setup
One of the most important steps, and also the one that will vary the most among
installations. To keep things simple, I'll walk you through the approach that I
took: A single encrypted filesystem with a separate /boot partition.
With cfdisk, create two partitions.
- A 300M EFI partition that will be used for
/boot - The rest of the space will contain the Linux filesystem. I have enough RAM on my machine that I don't want or need swap.
# cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1
If you're unsure of your drive name, you can use lsblk to find out.
You can additionally use it to verify the your partition changes were
successfully written to disk.
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1 259:0 0 476.9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 300M 0 part
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 476.6G 0 part
From here, ensure the boot partition is formatted as fat32.
# mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1
Encrypt the root partition and format the opened drive as ext4.
# cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2
Enter password:
Verify password:
# cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/cryptroot
Chroot
The goal of this section is to configure your system just enough so that
restarting the computer will allow it to boot without the help of the install
disk. We can do that by performing a chroot, a command that tricks a subshell
into thinking the filesystem root directory is that of our formatted drives,
rather than the usb-drive we booted from, and then configuring the operating
system from there.
However, before chrooting, we must first mount the filesystem
# mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot
generate the filesystems table
# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
and install a few packages into our system. At a minimum, this should be
# pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware
This will give us the very basic set of commands post-chroot. Finally, we can enter the system
# arch-chroot /mnt
At this point, you will see the prompt change from a # to a $, indicating
we've left the install media and are now running a shell from within the
filesystem we just set up.
Set the root password
$ passwd
and install any additional packages you need that weren't included in the
previous pacstrap step. For me, I need an editor while configuring the
system, and a wifi daemon so that, post-reboot, I can connect and continue the
setup.
$ sudo pacman -Sy
$ sudo pacman -S vim iwd
What next?
Set the timezone and locale
$ ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime
$ hwclock --systohc
$ vim /etc/locale.gen # uncomment the en_US.UTF-8 line
$ locale-gen
$ echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
Set the hostname
$ echo midnight > /etc/hostname
$ vim /etc/localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.0.1 midnight.localdomain midnight
$ pacman -S base-devel man-db man-pages
Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, add sd-encrypt to the HOOKS section, and swap
udev with systemd. More information on hooks is on the
mkinitcpio
ArchWiki page
HOOKS=(base systemd autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard sd-encrypt fsck)
Regenerate it with mkinitcpio -p linux
Configure the bootloader to
- turn on microcode updates
- mount our encrypted root directory on boot
$ sudo pacman -S intel-ucode
$ bootctl install
$ vim /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf
title Archlinux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options rw rd.luks.name=fdd06c74-7d25-4542-841f-7ca3ec8b4f50=cryptroot root=/dev/mapper/cryptroot
Where UUID is the UUID of the encrypted linux filesystem (/dev/nvme0n1p2),
found with blkid or lsblk -f.
$ bootctl update
$ bootctl list # verify archlinux entry is there
Post-installation setup
At this point, reboot the system and log in as root with the password you
set before.
Wireless
Like before, we can use iwctl (provided by the iwd package) to connect to
wifi. Unlike before, however, we do not automatically get an ip address, so we
must dhcp. iwd has its own functionality for this, so we must simply edit the
configuration file and enable it. In the past I've used dhcpcd, but the
program requires root to start, whereas the iwd daemon can be enabled to
automatically start on boot.
$ vim /etc/iwd/main.conf
[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true
$ systemctl enable iwd
Create your user
The goal is to create your own user account and prevent root from logging in
via password.
$ pacman -S sudo
$ useradd --create-home brooks
$ passwd brooks
$ usermod -a -G wheel brooks
$ vim /etc/sudoers # and uncomment the wheel line
$ su -l brooks
$$ sudo su # Ensure sudo works
$ passwd --lock root # Once sudo is verified, prevent root from logging in
On the next reboot, you can sign in as your user instead of root
zsh + development environment
For general development environment setup, these are the programs I use often.
$ sudo pacman -S zsh zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting
$ chsh -s /bin/zsh brooks
$ sudo pacman -Sy
$ sudo pacman -S git tmux stow
$ sudo pacman -S neovim the_silver_searcher fd bat fzf \
acpi neofetch nodejs python npm openssh
$ mkdir ~/build && cd ~/build
$ git clone https:/aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
$ cd yay
$ makepkg -si
$ yay -S xcwd-git
I have an Apple magic keyboard and want to swap the fn and ctrl key.
$ yay -S hid-apple-patched-git-dkms
$ sudo mkinitcpio -P all
Graphical server
So far, we've been configuring our system without the use of a graphical server. I prefer the i3 tiling window manager, and this time around I'm using it without a display manager.
$ sudo pacman -S i3-gaps i3blocks \
xorg-xinit xorg-xmodmap xorg-server \
arandr termite rofi chromium
A graphical environment can be started at any time using startx.
Audio
$ sudo pacman -S pulseaudio pavucontrol pulseaudio-alsa
In my i3config, I use pactl to map volume control to a few keys. Can be
started with start-pulseaudio-x11.
Some applications will only work directly with alsa, so install
pulseaudio-alsa for compatibility (and to allow multiple applications to play
audio at the same time).
Video
Luckily I didn't have to set anything up in order to support video streaming from my webcam
Backlight
$ sudo pacman -S xbacklight xf86-video-intel
$ reboot
Backlight controls from xbacklight doesn't work unless video drivers are
installed. I have an Intel-based machine, hence xf86-video-intel.
Screensaver
$ sudo pacman -S xautolock i3lock-color
Font installation
$ sudo pacman -S ttf-hack ttf-font-awesome noto-fonts-emoji
Hack as my general font, and Font Awesome for icon support on my status bar. The Noto Emoji Fonts is a font designed by Google. Once installed, all our applications (Chromium, Termite, i3blocks, rofi, etc...) can support emoji rendering.
For example, This is the fox face emoji: 🦊, but without an emoji font installed, my terminal and browser would render it as a white box.
Another interesting thing that I learned about emojis while configuring support for it is that a lot of the more complex emojis are actually multiple code points. For example, 👍🏻 is simply the combination of two emojis right next to each other: 👍 and 🏻.
Gtk / Theming
The default gtk theme, Raleigh, isn't the best in my opinion, and the Arc
theme is a good default dark theme.
$ sudo pacman -S lxappearance arc-gtk-theme
$ yay -S xcursor-breeze
Use lxappearance to change the theme and mouse pointer
File manager
On the command line
$ sudo pacman -S ranger w3m
w3m can be used to preview images from the command line
And that's it for now. My dotfiles are on Github, if you want to take a look at the configuration yourself.