Arch Linux Installation

2017-08-02

Hi, folks. In this video I talk through the process of installing Arch Linux on a newly built desktop computer. The entire process was recorded with ttyrec, and played back during the stream (as may you) from the following four files:

Although I tried to explain the process during the playback (and even a little bit during the installation process itself!), there were some potentially useful things left uncovered – e.g. wired networking – due to the fact that it was only my specific process that I was explaining. These things are addressed below the video.

If you're in a hurry and would like to follow the installation process quickly, feel free to use the filter (press F or hover over the colourful annulus in the bar above the annotations) to toggle off every media except for "In-Game" and switch the mode from inclusive to exclusive.

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Partitioning: 1 vs Multiple

The simplest possible partitioning schemes will involve one drive containing a single partition formatted:

with any file system for BIOS; or
with a FAT32 file system for UEFI

If you are on a UEFI system and would rather use a more current file system than FAT32, the simplest scheme would require one small FAT32 partition to contain the EFI stub – 512MB is recommended, but frankly not really necessary (my own /boot only uses 87.1MiB) – and a second partition formatted with your preferred file system for the rest of your stuff.

For all (two) of my builds I've preferred to keep my personal data and the operating system on separate drives. The reasons for this being to streamline upgrades by keeping, say, the operating system in place while swapping in a bigger drive for my files; or wholesale moving my personal files to a new system (as I did for this new build) without needing to buy, or copy the existing files to, a new drive. A historical reason for keeping them separate was to allow me to put the operating system on a small, fast SSD, while my less time-critical files could reside on a bigger, slower HDD. Nowadays I'm all SSD anyway.

Either way, whether you want a scheme like mine or a single partition scheme, just remember to use lsblk -fs to make damn sure you pass the correct device(s) to gdisk.

Formatting: F2FS vs Btrfs

Information pending

Init system: systemd vs OpenRC

In my experience the default and officially-supported systemd works for my needs: it boots quicker than Arch's previous default init system (SysVinit) and has provision for running daemons as our regular user rather than root, e.g. in my case, mpd. systemd also straight up inherited my preferred bootloader for UEFI systems, gummiboot, making my original transition fully painless. It has, however, been a while since I've even thought about init systems so there are probably many more differences that I just take for granted. Those mentioned are the ones that spring to mind.

If you know you don't want to use systemd, I must defer to systemd-free.

Network: Wired vs Wireless

The video shows wireless setup. Honestly, network configuration has been a bit of a dark art to me, especially with wired connections, but, if you're happy for your router to issue you an IP address via DHCP, the following should work:

ip link – to determine your interface's name, e.g. enp0s31f6
sed 's/eth0/${YOUR_INTERFACE}/' /etc/netctl/examples/ethernet-dhcp > /etc/netctl/ethernet-dhcp – where ${YOUR_INTERFACE} is the name reported by ip link, to replace the example "eth0" with that name and output this configuration to netctl's profiles directory
netctl start ethernet-dhcp && netctl enable ethernet-dhcp – to start the network connection and, if successful, enable it to start on boot

Bootloader: systemd-boot vs Syslinux vs GRUB

From most streamlined to most well-known:

systemd-boot for UEFI systems (as shown in the video)
Syslinux for BIOS systems
GRUB for either

In my experience, GRUB has more, and longer configuration files to deal with than the other two, and requires an additional grub-mkconfig "regenerate" invocation after any config changes. Another consideration is dual-booting. I've never tried this so don't know how the bootloaders compare in this regard, but would welcome any recommendations here.

useradd

For this installation I used an existing /home/ directory from a previous system which contained my user's $HOME. If you have no such directory, use useradd -m to create one.

Starting your Window Manager

Also unmentioned in the video is that my existing $HOME contained an ~/.xinitrc file. This contains the vital line:

exec startfluxbox

Upon running startx, this file will be sourced and the exec line invoked. Each window manager has its own exec line, which pacman may emit when installing the window manager's package, or which may certainly be found in the Wiki. Another option would be to use a display manager, for information about which I must defer to the Wiki.

Arch Linux Installation

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