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Simple Arch Linux Installation or “I (now) use Arch btw”

Motivation

I’ve wanted to use Linux as my daily driver ever since I got my current job. All dev machines at work run on linux (Ubuntu or Arch,whatever you want. We get full reign!) and it’s been such a pleasant experience that I’ve decided to run linux on my personal machine. There was some apprehension at first, with how familiar I’d become with MacOS, but let’s be honest, Mac is just linux with extra ricing.

After little deliberation I decided to bite the bullet, and psycopath that I am, chose to use Arch as my daily driver. Now you might think I’m crazy (and you’re not wrong to do so) but I had other motives when making this decision. You see, the more i used linux the more fascinated I became with the idea of being in total control of my system. Having complete mastery of your tools is probably one of the most satisfying feelings any practitioner can have and nothing helps you master your tools as a software engineer like linux! You get an insight into how your computer works and the effects that has on your work cannot be overstated!

Why Arch?

So enter Arch. Why Arch? I don’t think any other distro gives you the level of control Arch gives you over your system. No desktop environment, no preinstalled packages, no bloatware. Just you and your terminal. You get to choose what you want to install and how you want to configure it. It’s like building a house from scratch, brick by brick, nail by nail. It can certainly be intimidating at first, but it’s actually a liberating and empowering experience, to know that you built your system from the ground up, and that you can change it however you want. However, Arch’s greatest strength is also it’s greatest weakness. Most of us just cannot afford to spend hours ricing up our system and would rather have a pre-baked machine up and running. I guess that’s why every year is the year of the Linux Desktop. That being said, there’s a solution to that problem as there are a lot of people on the internet who give you their setup for free. I personally used Omarchy which gives you a decent but minimal Arch setup. You get the best of both worlds because you still have to install Arch and setup encryption, networking, partitioning and all that jazz, but don’t have to worry about numerous config files and packages. Thank God for the internet!

The Process

I decided to write this guide as a simple bullet point list of the steps you need to take. I personally like this approach since you don’t have the extra cognitive load of reading a paragraph to get the information you need. Just follow the steps!

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of how to use the terminal and some familiarity with Linux. You will see a lot of foreign terms being used so I highly recommend you read the Arch Wiki as you follow along. It’s a great resource and has a lot of information on how to use Arch.

Now that’s enough yapping. Let’s get into it!

  • create the bootable and boot sytem into arch
  • connect to wifi. first run iplink to check network connection
  • then iwctl to enter wifi connection mode
  • choose network by running station wlan0 connect <network name>
  • check system is available for remote access through ssh. systemctl status sshd.service. this checks sshdaemon is running
  • check .ssh is empty. do this because we want to setup authentication
  • to setup auth run passwd in .ssh directory
  • should be able to ssh in through the password

setting up the system

  • check keyboard is correct using localetcl list-keymaps and choose your desired keyboard map.
  • update system clock by running timedatectl

partioning disks

  • use lsblk to get a look into the currently attached disks and their partitions
  • will be using lvm for partitioning. lvm basically creates a /boot partition and then uses the rest as one big partition. it is in this big partition it creates “logical volumes” of storage which can then be freely resized. it also lets logical volumes span multiple storage devices.
  • start partitioing using fdisk /dev/nvmen01
  • we’re going to be using lvm so i’ve cleared the disk. it should be fresh and have no partitions.
  • create a new partition table with g command and follow that with n to create new partition.
  • creating boot partiton with +1G to have one GB for /boot. accept the defaults except size default.
  • use t to change partition type though since we want it to be boot partition. look for EFI partition type and use that
  • create the linux lvm partition.
  • accept default first section and last section since its the rest of the disk
  • change type to use Linux LVM

encrypt disk

  • will be using ‘LVM on LUKS’ format so we can encrypt the entire disk. [link to arch wiki]
  • run cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/<name of large partition>. save passphrase soemwhere safe
  • run cryptsetup open /dev/<name> cryptlvm to open the encrypted partition
  • create a physical volume on the parittion using pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptlvm
  • create volume group using vgcreate <name> /dev/mapper/cryptlvm
  • create logical volumes which will be the actual volumes.
  • create swap logical volume lvcreate <volume group name> -L <swap_size> -n swap
  • create root and home and data partitions
  • create filesystem for each partition you made using mkfs .ext4 /dev/<volume group name>/<partition name>
  • call mkswap /dev/<volume group name>/swap
  • make fat32 filesystem for boot partition:
    • mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/<boot partition>
  • make sure to mount root before boot!
  • mount boot using mount --mkdir /dev/<boot partition> /mnt/boot
  • use lvremove /dev/<volume group>/<partition> if you want to remove logical volume
  • use lvresize /dev/<group>/<partition> -L <size> to resize after remvoing a block
  • run resize2fs <partition> to resize after messing with any of the volumes
  • specify swap partition by running swapon <partition>

installing the OS

  • at this point we need to download the linux kernel and any other packages that would be needed. to do this run pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware intel-ucode now if you cd into /mnt you’ll see a regular linux filesystem.
  • Now run genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab to genrate an fstab file
  • next chroot into the system. arch-chroot /mnt. You are now in a linux OS.

Basic Setup

  • change the timezone by running ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime you can substitute the regions here are required.

  • run hwclock --systohcto generate /etc/adjtime

  • now if you run date you will see you date and timezone info.

  • Next install some essential packages using pacman -Syu man which sudo grep man-pages texinfo man-db

  • open /etc/locale.gen and uncomment your desired locale. i’ll be using LANG=en_US.UTF-8 so i’ll uncomment that line.

  • next generate locales using locale-gen

  • open /etc/locale.conf file and put in your desired locale there. in my case i’ll be using en_us which will mean I have this line in my file LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Networking

We want to enable networking capabilities using ether or wlan. for those we will be using systemd-networkd and iwd for wired and wireless respectively.

  • run systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service systemd-resolved.service
  • resolved is needed for DNS configuration - you want to make sure you have a valid conf for resolved at /etc/resolv.conf so that you don’t have DNS resolution problems. To do this simply run sudo ln -sf /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf to create a symlink from the systemd stub file.
  • create a network configuration file by running vim /etc/systemd/network/25-wireless.network and paste the following inside the file:

[Match]
Name=wlan0

[Network]
DHCP=yes
IgnoreCarrierLoss=3s
  • install iwd by running pacman -Syu iwd
  • enable systemd service: systemctl enable iwd.service
  • setup hostname by putting desired hostname in /etc/hostname

Customise initramfs

initramfs is a scheme that loads a temporary root file system into RAM that aids in the linux startup process.

  • Open /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. There should be a default HOOKS array that we want to edit. Since we’re using a systemd based initramfs we want to replace udev with systemd and also add lvm2 since we’re using LVM partitions. We also want to replace encrypt with sd-encrypt
  • open /etc/vconsole.conf and add a font from /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts:
FONT=latarcyrheb-sun32
we do this because we specified `vconsole` in hooks.

  • edit root kernel parameter in bootloader to point to root logical volume.

  • run mkinitcpio -P to regenerate initramfs. Make sure lvm2 package is installed to avoid errors.

  • you’ll see a few warnings after running this. don’t worry about these for now.

Configure boot loader

when you startup a computer the follwoing process happens:

POST (POWER ON SELF TEST) ---> LOAD BIOS --> SCAN DISK FOR BOOT PARTITION --> LOOK FOR BOOTLOADER in /boot -->
  • will be using systemd-boot as boot loader that comes preinstalled .
  • run bootctl install.
  • you might get some warnings about /boot being world accessible. This is because of insufficient permissions on the filesystem. when we run genfstab it automatically generated some permissions regarding files and directories in the fmask and dmask options. These look different because FAT filesystems don’t recognise UNIX permissions.
    • to fix our problem we simply want to change the values for fmask and dmask to 0137 and 0027 respectively.
    • then unmount and remount our bootloader using umount /boot and mount /boot
    • now rerun bootctl install
    • run bootctl update to verify bootloader is installed.
  • update boot loader entry for arch OS by adding this snippet:
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img

options rd.luks.name=<device_UUID>=cryptlvm root = <rootpartition> rw

# where <device_UUID> is the UUID of the entire encrypted LVM partition (get this by running blkid. basically the second partition apart from /boot)
# <rootpartition> is the mounted root partition logical volume, e.g: /dev/voluemgroup/mount

to /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf 1

Setup User and authentication

  • run useradd -m <name>
  • give them root permission by running usermod -aG wheel <name>
  • run visudo and uncomment this line in there: %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
    • if visudo doesn’t work you might need to install sudo with pacman.
  • setup root password by running passwd as root and setup password for chubi by running passwd chubi

Bonus: Configuring SSH

Now that you have a barebones Arch install up and running you might want to be able to make changes to your system from another machine. In my case I had Arch running on my desktop and wanted to lie down on my bed and configure things with my laptop :)

setup
  • Install openssh with sudo pacman -Syu openssh
  • Start the ssh daemon: sudo systemctl start sshd
    • You can enable it if you want it running on boot: sudo systemctl enable sshd
  • get the system’s ip address with ip a
  • Now on the client machine simply ssh <user>@<ip address>

Footnotes

  1. when in vim normal mode you can type !! to insert linux commands into the current buffer. ↩

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