Arch Linux Installation Guide 2020

have you ever wanted to install arch linux but maybe you were a little afraid because you've heard these horror stories you know a lot of people like to over blow arch linux as far as the difficulty of the installation process it's really quite easy to install some people i think mistakenly think it takes a long time to install arch linux it's actually very quick to install arch linux so today i'm going to run through an arch installation i'm going to do this inside a virtual machine i'm going to install arch linux inside virtualbox and if you're new to installing arch linux or new to installing any linux using a command line installer i would suggest you also do it in a virtual machine before trying it on physical hardware what i want you to do is install virtualbox and follow along with me and i promise you at the end of this video both you and i will have working arch installations inside virtualbox so the first thing we need to do of course is create a virtual machine inside virtualbox i'm going to go to the menu here that says machine i'm going to click on new and i'm going to title this virtual machine arch linux and by the title it's already figured out that the os type is linux and the version is arch linux 64 bit if i needed to i could go through the drop down menu and select something else but this is correct in my case so i'm going to click next now let's give it some ram i'm going to give my vm four gigs of ram the amount of ram you give your vm well of course depend on how much ram your host machine has how much ram you can spare i've got 64 gigs of ram on my host machine so i can give this vm as much ram as i want but four gigs is more than enough for what we're doing then create a virtual hard disk now just leave it on default vdi as the disk image is fine just click next dynamically allocated for the hard disk that is fine click next and then let's choose a virtual hard disk size i'm going to give this virtual machine a 20 gigabyte disk and i'm going to create and create one more time all right and we have created that vm now click on the new vm that we just created go to settings and in settings what i want to do is i want to go to system i want to give the processor more than one cpu i'm going to give it two cpus you see i have up to 24 available on my machine your machine may have a different number of cpus available but i want to beef it up just a little bit so i'm going to give it a little more power i'm also going to enable efi because the last time i did an arch installation video i did bios and a lot of people wanted a efi installation so today let's run through an efi installation of arch and i'm going to go to display video memory the max you can give virtualbox at least in the gui is 128 megs give it 128 megs max it out and then i'm going to enable 3d acceleration even though i don't think we're ever going to boot into a graphical environment for this video then i'm going to go to storage and i'm going to click on the little optical disk here and we are going to add our arch linux iso so i downloaded the latest iso and it appears there i'm not going to change anything with audio or network uh matter of fact the only other thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go down to user interface and this is just for me not for you guys i'm going to click off the menus and the bottom systray that the windows have just because i'm recording these windows and i want them to be as clutter free as possible and i'll click ok i'm going to go ahead and launch my new vm all right and we get to a command prompt and we need to read the installation guide especially if you've never done this what you need to do is go to the archwiki and on the main page of the archwiki there will be a link to the installation guide this installation guide is not very long you could page down two or three times and be at the end of the installation guide it's not a very lengthy process matter of fact more than half the guide is probably stuff that won't even apply to us so really it's a very short and quick installation so the very first thing we need to do is set our key map now by default the key map is set for us but if you were unsure about the key map what you would do is you would go in here and you would run this command ls meaning list all the contents of this directory and what do we want to run ls on we want to run it on this directory slash user slash share slash kbd slash key maps and then slash two asterix slash one more asterisks dot map dot gz and if you run that it will list out all the available key maps that are possible for you to choose matter of fact what i would do is i would actually pipe that through list so i would run that same command and then at the end add a pipe symbol and then the less command so that you can just hit enter and scroll the entire list makes it a lot easier to to find what you need for me though like i said the us key map is the default so i actually don't need to set anything but those of you that do you would then run this command load keys space and then the key map that you found so if you were german for example you would load d e latin one for the german key map let me clear the screen the next thing we need to do is make sure we have working internet because we don't have internet then nothing's going to work so let's go ahead and do a ping google.com and let's see if we actually have a ping it doesn't look like we do oh there it goes it's just really really slow really really slow there it goes all right it took a second but now it's working as expected all right control c kills the ping so we do have network next we need to make sure our system clock is accurate so we need to run the following command time date ctl all one word time date ctl space set dash ntp space true run that command and if everything worked right you can verify it with time date ctl space status and yeah it's active everything worked just fine with that the next thing we need to do is we need to partition our disk now this is probably the most critical part of the installation so this is the part where you can mess some stuff up but the archwiki suggests that we use fdisk to partition our drives i'm not very familiar with fdisk i've used it a little bit in the past typically i do cf disk when i do my partitioning but for purposes of this video i'll actually do the f disk so i'm going to run f disk space dash l and this will list all of our drives that are available for us to use here now there are two drives here instead of just one even though i created one drive for the vm the second drive here is just the loopback device it's really just associated for the live environment that we booted into but really our device is that top one the 20 gig hard disk that i created at slash dev sda so now let's run fdisk slash dev slash sda and now it's asking for more commands we have a prompt i don't know a lot of the commands but you can type m for help so i'm going to type m for help and the first thing we need to do is create a new label and we need to either do o on the keyboard for a dos partition table or g or a gpt partition table so since i'm doing efi we should do gpt so i'm going to type g to create a gpt partition table all right now that we've done that again i'm not sure what command i want to type next i'm going to do m for the help again and i think what we need to do at this point is we need to add a partition to that disk and to add a new partition we need to do in so type in hit enter it's going to ask us partition number one through 128 because using efi you can have up to 128 partitions on a disk that's insane you have to be a complete nutter to have 128 partitions on a disk but all right what's the partition we're doing here and we'll do partition one then it's asking what is the first sector by default it's at 2048 i would just go with the default and then the last sector what you need to do here is give it a byte size for the last sector or just give it the plus symbol plus a size and i'm going to do plus 550 m 550 megabytes because that is going to be our efi partition and it needs to be 550 megabytes all right created new partition one and it created it as a type linux file system that's not the correct type for that partition but we will change it later for now let's keep going because we need three partitions we just created the efi partition i'm also going to create a swap so in on the keyboard for add new partition partition number this will be partition 2 first sector just leave it as default it's going to be the end of the last sector and then the last sector for this partition again we'll give it a size i'm going to do plus and since a swap that i'm creating here i'm going to do two gigs in this vm so plus 2g all right and it created new partition 2 and it also created it as type linux file system that's not correct we'll change it in a minute but let's add that third partition so n for add another partition partition three first sector just hit enter and then the last sector i'm just gonna hit enter and it's gonna by default give it the remaining space and it created partition 3 of linux file system that's will be the correct type for this one size 17.5 gigabytes because that was all the remaining space after the 550 megabyte efi partition and the two gigabyte swap partition so i'm going to hit m on the keyboard again and to change a partition type you need to hit t on the keyboard so t which partition do we need to change the type of well let's start with partition one and partition type or alias i'm not sure what we want to choose out of the list it says type capital l to list everything so let's do l and it looks like the very first one you see number one is efi system that's what we want so q to quit out of that and then i'm gonna type one for efi system and it changed that partition to from linux file system over to efi system perfect now i'm gonna type t on the keyboard again for change partition type and now we need to do partition 2 and partition 2 let me do l to get the list partition 2 needs to be linux swap which linux swap is number 19 in the list q to get out of that and then type 19 and it changed partition 2 from linux file system to linux swap and then partition 3 is also set to linux file system i don't need to change that because that's going to be our system file system right that's going to be the big partition and it needs to be linux file system so i think we're done here i think what we need to do now is write the table to the disk so let me hit m here and it looks like we need to type w to actually write the table and then it automatically exits out of f disk for us now we need to go ahead and make our file system so we need to make three different file systems on those three different partitions that we did now we did the efi partition it needs to be fat32 so we need to do mkfs dot fat space dash f 32 capital f 32 actually space slash dev slash sda1 alright so we made the fat32 file system on sda1 now sda2 is the swap so let's do mk swap all one word make swap space slash dev slash sda2 we just made the swap we need to turn the swap on so do swap on all one word space slash dev sda2 all right and finally we need to make the file system on the big partition on sda3 so let's do a make file system mkfs dot extend 4 ext4 space slash dev sda3 and we have made our file systems now we need to mount the big partition sda3 so let's do a mount space slash dev sd sda3 space mnt and now that that is mounted over onto the live image what we need to do is run the pack strap command this actually installs the base system for arch so run pack strap all one word space slash m t because that's where we're mounted to space and then what we are installing we're going to install base which is the base arch system we also are going to install linux which is the kernel and also install linux dash firmware hit enter and this is installing the base package this usually takes just a couple of minutes i'll pause the recording and then according to the wiki we need to go ahead and generate our file system table our fs tab or our f-stab and however you want to pronounce it so let me clear the screen here and then i'm going to run this command gen f stab space dash capital u space slash m t space and then two greater than signs so two of the right pointing chevrons space and then slash m t slash etsy slash fstab and hit enter and that should have generated our file system table then the next thing we need to do is go ahead and run arch dash charu so a charute is changing into the root directory of our new installation is basically what that is and of course i messed that up because i didn't tell it where we were rooting to i want to do arch dash to root space m t because that's the mount point all right you see the prompt changed we are now logged in as root you know over at slash mnt on sda3 because that's where we're going to be installing everything on the sda3 partition now we need to go ahead and set our time zone and how you do that is you run this command ln for link dash sf space and then this path slash user slash share slash zone info slash region and this is not actually region but it is the name of your region slash city again that's the name of your city and then space and then slash etsy slash local time now i actually know my region and city because i've done these installs so many times my region is america slash and then the city is chicago i don't actually live in chicago i'm nowhere near chicago but we're in the same time zone so that's what i would need to run i'm going to go ahead and run that now you may not know exactly what your region or city is so what i would do is i would run this command here ls for listing the contents of our directory slash user slash share slash zone info and what you see in this directory those are the regions and once you find your region for example europe what i would do is then ls user slash slash zone info slash europe and those are the cities and then hopefully you you know your region and city so you just go back and you know plug in what you needed to do for that ln command the link command and a control c to cancel that clear the screen the next thing we want to do is set our hardware clock you run this command hw clock space dash dash c s-y-s-t-o-h-c that command that sets our system clock and then the next thing we need to do is set the locale now this is a little tricky uh is you you can mess this up and the archwiki and on this if you guys are following along in the archwiki it is a little confusing here what you need to do it says you need to edit the locale.gen and uncomment your particular locale so what they're saying is whatever editor you use for example nano space slash etsy slash locale dot gen let's hit enter nano is not found because it's not part of the base packages that were installed earlier so let's do a pac-man space dash s space nano let's go ahead and install that neither nano or vim were going to be installed by default you have to install those the only thing i think that's here by default is vi nobody really cares to use vi most of you guys probably are not film users either i think nano is be a little easier so i'm going to use that throughout this tutorial so now let me run the nano space slash etsy slash locale dot gen all right and you see this file it has a whole bunch of lines and every line is commented go find your locale and uncomment that line for me i need to find the line en underscore us english us so i'm going to go through the list and i want this line right here en underscore us.utf-8 space utf-8 okay now i'm going to do control x in nano to exit y for yes to write it hit enter and then the next thing you need to do after editing that file is run this command locale dash gen it's generating locales generation complete now you can uncomment more than one locale if needed for me english us is all i need the next thing we need to do is set the host name so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna do nano again space slash etsy slash host name we need to create this config file and then we just need to type the hostname the hostname is the hostname of the computer and in this case i'm going to call this vm arch vbox makes sense to me so control x to exit y to save that set the host name and then we need to create a host file so i need to once again nano space slash etsy space slash hosts and this file is not empty there are two lines but they're commented out but we need to add some lines ourselves the archwiki actually tells you exactly which lines to add these three lines here that i've highlighted and just copy it exactly the way it you read it from the wiki so it says to do 127.0.0.1 and then tab over or space over a few times and then do local host and then the second line needs to be colon colon1 and then the same thing tab over space over and then once again localhost and then on the third and final line 127.0.1.1 tab over space over and then do my hostname and this needs to be your actual host name that you just created in the host name file so in my case arch v box dot local domain and then tab over space over and then do your host name again which is arch v box for me and of course it'll be different for you control x y to save and clear the screen the next thing we need to do is create some users and some passwords because by default there's only going to be one user on the system the root user unless you create other users also you need to set a password for your root user if you forget that then at the end of the installation you're gonna have to just root back into this thing and do this later you might as well do it now so run the command as root pass wd that's going to ask for your new root password create it confirm it all right now let's add a normal user a non-root user so i'm going to run the command user add it's all one word and then dash m and then space and then the name of that user i'm adding i'm going to call this new user dt then we need to create a password for the dt user pass wd space dt then create that password then confirm that password all right and then the last thing we need to do here really is to make sure that dt is a member of some groups especially the wheel group which would give him pseudo privileges that way you don't have to log in as root to do things as root you know you can do sudo you know as the dt user in my case or whatever username you created so i'm going to do this command user mod space dash lowercase a capital g space and then i'm going to list out some groups i'm going to do the wheel group comma audio comma video comma those are the most important but you can keep adding groups some of the other groups that are available would be optical storage as a virtual box user i'll eventually add dt to the vbox users group if i use vert manager i'm going to need to add dt to the lib group you know but for now i'm just going to stick with these so i'm going to hit enter and complain because i wasn't through with that command you need to do user mod dash lowercase a capital g all those groups with no spaces between the commas and then space and then the user you're adding to all these groups in my case dt now hit enter again okay no errors now we wanted to add dt to the wheel group so he had sudo privileges but sudo is not installed unless we install it let's go ahead and do a pacman dash capital s sudo and install sudo and now that we've installed sudo we can run the command vi sudo to edit the sudoers file and make sure dt has those privileges now vi sudo is going to edit that file as vi if you don't want to edit nvi and i don't want to edit nvi do this editor all caps equals nano or whatever editor you want to use here in the command line but editor equals nano space vi sudo and now we can edit this sudoers fall we need to find one line in here we need to find a line about the wheel group and it's right there uncomment that you see that it says will all equals all equals all means the wheel group has all privileges they can do anything and by my dt user being a member of the wheel group he has super user privileges so he can do anything so control x to exit y to save next let's go ahead and install grub so let's do a pacman dash capital s grub and y for yes now that we have grub installed um since we're doing efi other than grub there's some things we need alongside grub we also should do a pacman dash capital s efi boot manager mgr so efi boot mgr all one word we also need dos fs tools we also need os dash prober and then we need m tools hit enter install all of those packages and then we need to make a efi directory in our boot directory so we need to run this command mkdir make directory space slash boot slash and this is the directory we're creating efi all caps hit enter then we need to mount our efi partition so mount space slash dev slash sda1 remember was the efi partition space and then where are we mounting it to we're going to mount it to of course boot slash efi all right that is mounted now let's run the grub install command because just sudo pacman s grub it installs grub but it doesn't really install grub to a proper partition because it doesn't know where to put it you actually have to then run this command grub dash install and since we did efi we're going to have to add some flags here so do grub dash install space dash dash target equals x86 underscore 64 dash efi space and then dash dash boot loader dash id equals grub underscore uefi space dash dash recheck hit enter it says installing installation finish no error reported okay so it installed grub we still need to make a grub configuration file now this is easy we don't have to edit anything by hand just run this command here grub dash mk config space dash o space slash boot slash grub slash grub dot cfg it generates the grub configuration file and that is it at this point we've really installed arch linux the base system we could actually reboot the system right now but before you do you may want to install some other stuff while you're already here and mounted onto sda3 what i would do is for networking usually people install network manager before you reboot because chances are you'll most likely have internet if you install network manager now than waiting till later so we could do a pacman dash capital s network manager space and then is there anything else i want to install for me i use vim as my editor i could go ahead and install that that way i don't have to keep using nano you could go ahead and install you know window manager and all that stuff xor and all that stuff will take some time you're going to have to configure some stuff too i'm not going to take the trouble of getting into the graphical environment stuff let's just stick with this for now so i'm going to just install network manager and install vm i don't think git is installed by default i would like to have git too so i'm going to go ahead and pac man dash capital s get just to make sure i have get installed on the system really i think that's enough for a base install since we installed network manager we probably should enable it with a system d so let's go ahead and run a system ctl space enable space network with a capital n network with a capital n manager with a capital m and created that sim link and really let's go ahead and exit out of the your root and reboot so let's exit type exit all right and then we're still mounted here so run u-mount for unmount u-mount space slash mnt says target is busy do an up arrow to get that command to come back up and add a dash f flag so u mount space dash f slash mount we're going to force it done mount target is busy maybe f wasn't the right flag i think there is a l flag for a lazy flag let's see okay the l flag u mount space dash l space slash mnt will force the unmount all right now that we have got out of the true and we've unmounted now we could type reboot and reboot into our freshly installed arch since i'm in a vm don't reboot i actually am going to do shutdown run shutdown now sudo shutdown now or halt now or whatever command you want to run to shut down the system the reason we need to shut down instead of reboot is because i need to go back into the settings of the vm because remember the iso is still attached so just rebooting won't work it's just going to reboot us back into the live environment so go to storage click on the iso and then go down to this disk with the red x on it click on it and it's going to say remove selected storage yeah click ok now that we've detached that iso now restart all right we've gotten to a command prompt you see it says arch vbox login so that's the hostname of the computer and we created the dt user of course we could log in as root as well but i'm going to login as dt let's see if we have networking so if i do a ping google.com we have network and we have internet we can do anything so that's really it i mean we just did a base arch install i don't know how long that took i rushed through a lot of that from here you just pac-man dash capital s all of your stuff xor your login manager your desktop environment your window managers and your various applications your graphical applications and some of that stuff can take a while especially if you're not exactly sure what you want to install what most people do that run things like arch linux or gen 2 and things like that they keep an install script they just keep a list of programs they always need that way when they reinstall they can just plug that script in and it just installs all that stuff for you so that is it for this arch linux installation guide again you know practice in a vm just follow along with me in a vm maybe install it in a vm half a dozen times to really get comfortable using the command line and editing things using things like nano and reading the wiki and if you run into some errors reading the wiki figuring out the solutions once you've done it half a dozen times you know install it on physical hardware if you have a spare machine that would be best but if you don't have a spare machine after you've played around with it a little bit in a vm and then maybe go ahead and roll the dice and install it on your main production machine arch linux is not that advanced right if you know a little bit about linux if you've used linux a few months then i think you can get through an arch linux installation and i think you can maintain the system now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show michael gabe corbinian mitchell devin fran chuck claudio donnie dylan george kell of devils louis paul scott and willie they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this 2020 version of the arch linux installation guide wouldn't be possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen these are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community there are no corporate sponsors here at distrotube it's just me and you you want to support my work look for distrotube over on patreon peace

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Keywords: arch linux, install, guide, tutorial, terminal, shell, arch install, arch linux installation, arch linux install guide, arch linux install virtualbox, arch linux installation tutorial, how to install arch linux, arch linux 2020, arch wiki, linux, gnu linux, linux distro, btw i run arch, rtfm, arch linux uefi, fdisk, linux partitions, grub, bootloader, gpt, distrotube

Id: PQgyW10xD8s

Length: 31min 25sec (1885 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/the_guy1]

I know that these guides are a dime a dozen however I am long term Arch user and wish there was a good efi guide other than the wiki when I got my new laptop because it took a couple of tries to get everything to work because of the the wiki explains both at the same time and grub is easy to mess up