Arch linux custom installation

Introduction

Disclaimer: This does not pretend to be by any means the perfect arch installation guide, but what it has worked for me after trying hard and failing even harder.

We will be installing the Arch Linux OS, GRUB, and KDE.

This guide is heavily inspired by Henri's arch installation.

Guide

1. Internet configuration

As obvious as it may sound, first we need to check that we have a working internet connection. Hence, we'll do:

# To enable the network interface
dhcpcd
# Ping our friend google
ping -c 4 8.8.8.8

If we need to stop the dhcpcd service, we will do:

systemctl stop dhcpcd@<TAB>

The ArchLinux docs for reference are here.

2. Partitioning Disk

Now we should start partitioning the disk. To check out partitions we do it with:

lsblk

To start partitioning we will do:

cfdisk /dev/sda

Before jumping here, we should know how big each partition should be.

What has worked for me is, 1 GB for the boot partition -should be more than enough. As for RAM, follow this rules (not mine)...

Now, the schema should end up something like this

We will start facing the Partition Dragon with the cfdisk /dev/sda command utility, if you haven't done it already.

Now, let's see our options:

We will choose dos in the prompt, or gpt if our disk has more than 2T.

• First we will manage /dev/sda1/: In the utility, we will go to FREE SPACE >NEW and make it 1 GB big, primary , and bootable. We will also make sure the type says Linux on the screen.
• Now we will go for our SWAP partition /dev/sda2/: We will create this partition going to NEW again, giving it 2 GB , primary, and in Type we will select Linux swap / Solaris.
• Lastly, for the /dev/sda2: We will select the remaining size, PRIMARY, WRITE and yes.

Now we can quit the cfdisk utility.

3. Doing the homework | Formatting the partitions

We have faced our first big challenge. Go grab a beer, you deserve it. I used to be scared of partitioning my disk... well I still am. So, yes, be proud of yourself.

As it follows:

# Format partitions
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3

# Create and mount SWAP
mkswap /dev/sda2
swapon /dev/sda2
# If we needed it: swapoff /dev/sda2

We should create the main folders, that we are going to mount in the main partitions:

# We don't need to create /mnt/var and /mnt/home anymore explicitly
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

4. Updating packages for us

Method A

We are going to sync our packages through Reflector with the following commands:

# Sync and refresh the master package database from the server defined in pacman.conf
pacman -Sy
# Install latest version of reflector which basically will sort our mirror list for us
pacman -S reflector
reflector --verbose -l 5 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Method B

Another alternative, following the ArchLinux wiki, says:

The Packages to be installed must be downloaded from mirror servers, which are defined in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. On the live system, all mirrors are enabled, and sorted by their synchronization status and speed at the time the installation image was created.

The higher a mirror is placed in the list, the more priority it is given when downloading a package. You may want to edit the file accordingly, and move the geographically closest mirrors to the top of the list, although other criteria should be taken into account.

This file will later be copied to the new system by pacstrap, so it is worth getting right.

5. Installing Arch linux packages

This is the heart of the installation. Here we will choose which packages are we going to install.

# My recommendation
# In order:
# 1. base system (base and base-devel),
# 2. grub-bios (boot helper GRUB), 
# 3. And well, a network manager

pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel grub-bios networkmanager

Now we are going to configure the boot partition through the genfstab command:

# Config fstab
genfstab -U -p  /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
# Config chroot
arch-chroot /mnt

6. Language, location, timezone and other stuff

Depending on our language, we will have to go to the file /etc/locale.gen and uncomment the desires languages. In my case, I'm modifying: en_GB.UTF-8 and es_ES.UTF-8.

vi /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
echo LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

Let's do the timezone now:

# Canary Islands option
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Atlantic/Canary > /etc/localtime
# Or mainland Spain
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Madrid > /etc/localtime
# The UK
ls -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London > /etc/localtime

The time itself:

hwclock --systohc --utc

Now we will go to /etc/pacman.conf and uncomment the lines [multilib] and include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.

vi /etc/pacman.conf
pacman -Sy

Now the keyboard, in case you got it in Spanish:

loadkeys es
# and making it persistent in vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=es

Now we will set the hostname and the network.

echo name-of-your-machine > /etc/hostname
ystemctl enable dhcpcd@enp0s3.service
systemctl enable dhcpcd.service

Set root password and create a user:

passwrd
pacman -S sudo bash-completion
useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power -s /bin/bash osedg
passwd osedg

Allow the users in wheel group to be able to perform administrative tasks with sudo:

# Uncomment the line: %wheel ALL=(ALL)
EDITOR=nano visudo

Install and configure bootloader:

# Let's create a config image of Linux
mkinitcpio -p linux
pacman -S grub os-prober
# Install GRUB
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now we will finish it off

exit
umount -R /mnt
reboot

Post-installation

After installing the OS, we are going to proceed to install KDE Plasma plus other few extra bits that we may need.

Make sure to reboot the system if you haven't done it already, and check that all packages are updated.

pacman -Syyuu

Now we will install all things we need.

pacman -Sy xorg plasma kde -applications ttf-freefont firefox vlc gimp libreoffice htop flashplugin git wget