[ Arch4noobs ]

Why not just use the arch installation wiki?

Well, to put it simply, THE OFFICIAL ARCH WIKI INSTALLATION GUIDE SUCKS! wait, let me rephrase that, THE OFFICIAL ARCH WIKI INSTALLATION GUIDE SUCKS! for beginners. If you're a complete noob to Linux or even if you're a intermediate, you'd probably find the Arch wiki a bit too daunting to comprehend. No worries though! The actual installation is fairly easy and if you follow all the steps that I mention, you'd probably have a working machine in about 30 minutes or so.

Downloading the ISO

You can acquire the Arch linux ISO file from the Arch Download Page . I would recommend torrenting the file by the means of a torrent client, I personally use qBittorent. Alternatively, you can get a direct download link as well. If you're going to do the latter, I'd suggest you'd verify the PGP signature before you follow through the next step.

Flashing the ISO onto a USB drive

The easiest way to flash any ISO onto a USB drive is by using the program Balena Etcher. The flashing instructions are very straightforwad and I dont think it's worth a mention in this guide. Check out their website for more information.

Booting into the live environment

• Accessing the system BIOS

Make sure you've plugged in the USB drive after you have finished flashing it. To access the system BIOS, you must first restart and when you get your device manufacturers splash screen, you must enter a specific keyboard combination. This combination varies across manufacturers. For example, in Dell computers, the combition is to press the F2 key repeatedly until you're prompted with the BIOS screen.



It may look something like this:



• Configuring the system BIOS to be able to boot into Arch

After you have access to the system BIOS, you have to change some settings first to be able to boot into the live environment.



1. Disable Secure Boot:

The Arch installation image does not support Secure Boot, if needed you can enable secure boot after the installation though it may lead to some unexpected errors.

2. Change your UEFI settings

   Navigate around your BIOS and find an option called "Allow other OS's" or something similar to that. Make sure it's enabled

3. Change your Boot Sequence

   Change your boot sequence such that the USB drive which contains the flashed ISO boots first instead of the Hard Drive.

4. Save all your changes and Reboot!

   You will now be prompted into the Arch linux splashscreen. To access the live environment simply press enter on Boot Arch Linux (x86_64)

The Live Environement

Great! you're finnaly booted in the live environement and are now prompted with this screen:



OooOo. .... spooky, But don't be intimidated! Ok, you get the spooky screen and now what?
well first, you have to verify the boot mode.

• Verifying Boot Mode

  Before you go any further, you have to verify if you have entered into your desired boot mode, since the steps of intallation are a little different for each mode. To check what boot mode you are in, run the command:
  
  

  ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

  
  if the command return with no errors, you're in the UEFI boot mode. If no such directory exists, then you have booted into Legacy

• Connect to the Internet

  1. Ethernet: Just plug it in ez

  2. WiFi: For WiFi it's a bit more complicated, but easy nevertheless. In this guide, we're gonna connect to the wireless network using the iwctl utility.
     To start, type in: iwctl in the terminal. You have now entered the iwctl command prompt. To identify your device, type in:

     device list

     your device is probably listed as wlan0.
     
     Next, Scan for your available networks in your area:

     station yourdevicename scan

     
     Next you can list the name of all available networks using the command:

     station yourdevicename get-networks

     After you find your desired network, you can connect to it by issuing the command:

     station yourdevicename connect yournetworkname

     if it's being protected by a passphrase, enter the required password. And you're done! you've successfully connected to the internet, and once you have the internet, you can do anything! To check your connection just ping some random server or website

     ping -c 2 google.com

     if the process doesnt output an error, then you're golden!

• Update your System Clock

To update the system clock, run this command:

timedatectl set-ntp true

To the check the service status, use timedatectl status

• Partion the Disk

Though the official Arch wiki reccomends to use fdisk to partition the hard drives, for the purposes of this guide we will be using cfdisk since it's much more beginner friendly and easier to use. To start cfdisk just type in cfdisk into the terminal.


You should be prompted into a GUI interface similar to this


Note: Select the DOS option if you're on Legacy and GPT if you're running UEFI.

if you didn't get the menu screen, it's ok. That means cfdisk has automatically scanned and discovered your BIOS type.

1. Deleting existing partitions

Delete an already existing partion by navigation through the GUI and pressing Enter on Delete for the already existing partitions

2. Making a partion

For low end devices it's generaly advised to make 2 different partions, one is the linux file system and the other is linux swap file. The swap file exists so that when the RAM is overused, it offloads some of the work to the hard drive instead. Please refer to this image if you want to find out how much swap space you need to allocate to your system

Making a EFI partition: To make a EFI partition, press Enter on New and create a partition with 300M in size. After that, from the bottom menu, select Type and choose EFI system.

Making a Swap partiton: To make a swap partion, refer to the table below and choose the size of your swap file accordingly. The more ram you have, the less reason you'd have to make a swap file





To change the file system, go to Type and press Enter on 82 Linux swap / Solaris


Making a Root partition: To make a root partition, create a new file, give it the rest of the disk space and confirm. You don't have to change the file type since linux filesystem is the default. All you have to do after this is to press Enter on Write and you're all done!
Note: The EFI partition is sda1, the swap partition is sda2 and the root partition is sda3

• Format the Disk

After you've partionioned your drive, you have to format all three of them with the appropriate file system. To format the root partition, run:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3

To format the EFI partition, type in:

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1

To initialize the swap partition you have just created, run:

mkswap /dev/sda2

• Mount the file systems

Mount sda3 to /mnt directory, run:

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

Enable the swap partition you created with:

swapon /dev/sda2

Installing the System

• Installing the Linux, and base packages

To install the base package, linux, and the firmware, run the pacstrap command:

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware

Configure the System

• Fstab

Generate an fstab file by running:

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

• Chroot

Change the root into the new system:

arch-chroot /mnt

• Installing other required software

Other software you'll need is nano and NetworkManager To install both, run:

pacman -S nano networkmanager

To be able to connect to the internet using NetworkManager and use the GUI at next reboot, run:

systemctl enable NetworkManager

• Time Zone

To set the time zone of your country, run:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime

Example:


Run hwclock:

hwclock --systohc

• Localization

1. Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other needed locales. To do that, run:

nano etc/locale.gen

and remove the "#" form en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other locales.


Example


After that, generate the locales by runnng:

locale-gen

2. Create a locale.conf file and set the LANG variable accordingly:

nano /etc/locale.conf

And type the following arguements:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
                    


• Network Configuring

Create a hostname file and add your host name (it could be anything you want):

nano /etc/hostname

Write your preffered hostname. For example, here I will use the hostname null


Then, you must edit the /etc/hosts file and add matching entries to it. run:

nano /etc/hosts

Add this line to the file with proper indentations:

    127.0.0.1	localhost
    ::1		localhost
    127.0.1.1	yourhostname.localdomain  yourhostname
                   

Here is an example with the above entry null


• Root password

You can change the root password of the system using the passwd command. In the next reboot, you can enter that to login as the root account. To set the root password, run:

passwd

And follow through the prompts.
• Installing a Bootloader

The bootloader we are going to be installing is grub. To install grub, runt the command:

pacman -S grub efibootmgr dosfstools os-prober mtools

Now that we have downloaded grub, we and its utilities, we must make a EFI directory manually for grub to recognise, run:

mkdir /boot/EFI

to mount the directory, type:

mount /dev/sda1 /boot/EFI

After that, install grub by using the command:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --bootloader-id=grub_uefi --recheck
                

Finally, creat a grub configuration file by issuing the command:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
                

Reboot into Arch

• Exit out of chroot

To exit out of chroot type exit on the terminal or press Ctrl+d

• Unmount all partitions

To unmount all partitions, type in:

umount -R /mnt

• Reboot

Finnaly, reboot into your new arch system by typing in reboot, unpluging your USB device and changing your boot order to hard disk first.