So You Want to Install Arch? Let's Do It!

hello and welcome to the OTB channel so have you thought about installing of an inner arch system but you're just a little bit unsure or a little bit nervous about the exact procedure well worry not this video is for you I'll see you after the intro okay welcome back so an arch install I did one months and months ago on a t-thought 430 ThinkPad but the procedure has changed a little bit since then so I thought it was time to refresh that video but this time I've gone a step further I'm going to back up my method of installing arch with documentation from my git lab page so essentially all you have to do is copy and paste for most of the procedures so if you're a little bit nervous or you're not feeling that confident about installing arch but you'd really like to give it a go this could be for you and the reason I'm doing this apart from refreshing the arch install video is personally I've installed arch on a number of occasions and the arch wiki is great to follow but it sort of breaks off at points and it doesn't for instance allow you to continue about how to install grub on the site on the first installation page you have to go on to another section and after a while we sort of customize the way that we do things and do a few extra steps to speed the process up so what many of us do is we write our own text file or script if you've got that that sort of skill and we follow that every time we do the installation now are no easy Nick's or as Nick's has one and he's in the process of turning his into a script at the moment as well and his installation instructions are great they include lots of the packages that he would normally install what I'm going to do I had my own texture file with the stages of installing a desktop of my choice already written out but I've just modified it slightly so it's more generic so it applies to everyone and I'm putting it on my get lab so you should all be able to print it out if you wish to or more likely I'm gonna recommend that if you do this you install over SSH that means you can have a terminal open on your workstation and the text file and you can just copy and paste a lot of the commands in so why would you want to install a vanilla ranch system because you can there are some great pre-configured arch systems out there Manjaro arco linux except endeavour the brilliance I tend to stick to a vanilla ranch system for one reason and one reason alone I tend not to like the customizations and the tweaks that other people do so I would rather start from scratch and build up the system myself that's what I'm gonna go through now so all you have to do is download the ISO from the Arch Linux page and follow along I'd recommend by the way try this a few times in VirtualBox until you get the procedure off paths and then do it on real hardware but anyway enough talk for now let's get into the installation so you should see in front of you now the arch is Oh booted in VirtualBox I've booted it in EFI mode and you'll just get straight to this root prompt don't worry too much about this because I'm going to recommend you do this over SSH so really we're going into this interface now just to check that we are connected and to start up the SSH service I would recommend before we go any further that try to do this over an Ethernet connection even if you have to sit your laptop or something right next to your router it's gonna be easier you may well have the option of connecting by Wi-Fi you could run this command Wi-Fi - menu but that would very much depend on the drivers being available so if you can do it over a wired connection so much the better and if you're on a wired connection the chances are you will find that you are already connected so I'm just gonna do ping google.com here and yes I can see I'm connected so I'm going to ctrl C to stop that okay let's find my IP address I do this through the command IP a and I can see here that my IP and it's the second interface the EMP 0 s3 where it says in it I'm one 92168 dot one dot two two three so that's the IP address that I'm going to SSH into so how do we set up SSH well the first thing that you're gonna need is to set up a password for root there isn't a password on on the root ISO so let's set one up and we do this simply by typing PA SS WD and it prompts me for a password and it asks again so root on the arch I so now has a password the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start SSH now the way this arch ISO is set up it will permit root logins to SSH so we don't have to mess about with any files we simply do system CTL start sshd dot service and that's as done so you can leave your machine alone wherever it is now and you can move on to your main desktop and you can SSH into this and you can largely copy and paste from there on in so let's move to my main workstation so you can now see in front of you I've just got a terminal open on my main workstation one of the advantages is that I can make the text larger so you can see it more clearly but on my other screen I've also got a text file with the instructions for installing arch that I can copy and paste across if necessary you could also have the arch wiki open should you wish to it's the same thing essentially so let's SSH into that and into that box so we go ssh route at and it was 192.168.1.2 to 3 okay it's checking the authenticity of the host what we have to type here is yes and we have to issue that password that we've just set for route and we'll logged in and you can see the prompts change now it's route at arch ISO so we're all set so first things first we need to set our key map by default the arch ISO is set on us so if you have a u.s. key map you have nothing to do here you set up by default but if you haven't got a u.s. keyboard you'll need to set it up so that things like the pipe symbol and the absent will work correctly to see a list of the different keyboard mappings in fact let me just copy and paste this command across there we go you'd simply do an LS on us our share KBD key maps i three eight six star star forward slash star map cheese ed and then we pipe it through less so that we don't have suddenly have the output going off the screen so we can we can move up and down essentially and what I actually want is the UK map not the Dvorak map so let's go all the way down here until I found find the one I wants because I obviously want it to be set up to UK and it's their UK dot map geez ed so press the Q to come out of there what are them want to do is I want to set the keys to that UK dot map dot G Zed and to do that I use a command called load keys clearly depending upon what your keyboard map is the UK dot map top cheezaid is going to change as I say if you've got us keyboard you don't need to do any of this so I've done that what I also like to do load keys is just a temporary setting so it's not persistent across rebooting the machine I like to make sure that it is persistent so I also save the key map in fact I'm going to create that that's a file by echoing keymap all caps equals UK across the e TC v console Kampf okay all done now you may be installing in standard bias mode or you might be installing in efi mode to be honest the procedure doesn't really change that much if you're using an EFI system there are some things that you've got to consider when you do in the partitioning and the installation of grub is slightly different but for the most part it's exactly the same process but if you've got an EFI system it is always worth checking that you have booted in the correct mode and to do this you issue the command LS forward slash sis forward slash firmware forward slash efi /ef aivars and as long as you've got something in that directory and you can see I have here you're all good you're in EFI mode so let me just clear that output so all good so what else do we need to do right the first thing that I always do is I like to check that the clock is set correctly so we issue this command time date CTL set NTP true doesn't matter if you're on a bias or an EFI system always use this and it'll go off to an NTP server and just check we're at the right time now we get to the next stage partitioning there are a number of different programs that you can use for this many people like to use fdisk some you like to use parted personally I like to use CF disk it's completely up to you I always start though I can just get this to work by issuing the command S this fdisk - owl and having a look to see what the disc on my system is called you can ignore the loop entry there what I'm interested in is this entry here dev SDA so that's the name of the disc that I want to install arch on right so in order to open up that disc in CF disc I simply have to type CF disc followed by the device name because this is a new disc I'm immediately going to get asked to select a label type what this actually means is your disc hasn't even got a partition table yet what sort of partition table do you want to set up now you can get quite complex in terms of different variations here but let's keep things simple if you're using an EFI system go for GPT if you're using a bias system go for dos so you simply choose which one you want I want GPT in this situation so I'll select GPT and hit enter now depending how you proceed from here depends on whether you do have an EFI system or not for an EFI system you're going to have to create a minimum of two partitions you're going to need an efi partition itself where your bootloader is going to be stored and you're going to need a root partition if you're just booting up in standard bias or legacy mode you only need a root partition as a minimum if you want to create separate home partitions as well feel free but as a minimum you would just need a root partition you also have the possibility of creating swap partitions here and swap partitions or the whole issue of do you need or do you not reader swap has become a little bit of a mute points you certainly need a swap partition if you are going to hibernate your system most of the time if you have an SSD you would tend to try and avoid that to cut down on the number of writes and so you could get away without a swap partition as long as you have enough RAM if you have a spinny disk though and you intend to hibernate it's always a good idea to create a swap partition equal to the amount of RAM you have up to say a maximum of around eight gigs I'll do a video on this at some point because it's never straightforward but on this system here what I'm gonna do I'm gonna create an efi partition i am going to create a little swap partition a four gig and i'm also going to create my root partition if this was a legacy installation a bias installation in other words i would just create the swap partition and the root partition i tend to create everything from the top down and leave the root partition to last that's personal preference so you can see down here it's asking me or it's highlighted the word new so i'm going to create my efi or as we call it an EFP partition first so partition size for an efi partition I always go for five hundred and fifty Meg's right so that's created I'll then want to go across to the type and I'm just using my arrow keys here I'm hitting Enter again and you'll see at the top there is a an option there for efi system all good and then with my arrow keys going to move down to the free space i'm going to hit enter again for new and I'm gonna create a four gig partition and I'm gonna move to type and I'm gonna set that as my Linux swap I'm then gonna move down to the free space there's 27 and a half gigs left I'm gonna use all of this I'm gonna go to type again and it's already set to Linux file system so all good I'm now gonna write that partition table am I sure you need to write the whole word here yes not just why and it's been written if you were installing a legacy system so you wouldn't have the first partition there the EFI basically my SD a1 would be my swap partition and my SD a two would be my file system it might of course be that you're also installing on a dual boot system so you might have some partitions in place already which is great if there's already an efi partition there leave it there don't touch it don't format it don't do anything with it but you will obviously need a separate partition to install a system onto if you are installing a legacy system it's also important that on your root filesystem the one I've got highlighted as well that you set a boot flag you'll have another option down here in CF disc which allows you to set a particular partition as bootable we haven't got it on ESP because he doesn't matter so let me just quick that quit that and clear again and let me type F disc al just to check those partitions are being created and I can now see we have SDA one is an efi partition SDA two is a swap partition and my root partition or what will be my root partition is SDA three now I said before that if there's already an EFI system partition on your system because you're gonna multi boot or dual boot you don't need to format Matt this is a brand new system for me it's a raw system so I'm gonna format everything and I'm gonna start with my root partition which in my case is SD a three and I'm going to format that to ext4 so I issue the command make FS ext4 and I pointed to dev sta 3 which is my root partition that's done next I'm going to format my efi system partition SDA one as a fat32 file system so the format for that is make FS dot fat - capital F 32 and that's dev SDA one dumb last but not least I'm going to deal with a swap partition and that's simply a case of make swap dev SDA - so it's set that up and I'm now going to turn on that swap partition so swap on dev SDA - right so that's our partitioning done the next thing we want to do is we want to mount those partitions on our system so that we can install to them I always start with my root partition which in my case is dev SDA 3 so I'm going to simply issue mount dev s a three and I'm going to mount that on /bounds so that's all you need to actually type for that mount dev SD a three unmount and that's mounted fine if you on a legacy system that's all you need to do for efi systems you really need to mount this efi system as well this efi system partition there are various ways that you can do this the way that I do it is I mount it on boot /ef I now there isn't a boot /ef I directory at the moment so what I'm gonna do is create that so make directory and remember were mounted currently on mount so mounts /boot /e fi right make directory - P I'm going to use the - P option here for one very important reason although it's one I'm asking it to create this efi directory if any of the preceding directories such as boot don't actually exist on the system at the moments the - p option will make sure that they are created along the way so that's done I'm then gonna mounts dev SDA one which going up here is my efi system on mounts boot efi right so everything's mounted the partitions have been created we are now ready to start the installation right so let me clear this screen so we can start we're gonna use a command now called pack strap and using the pack strap command and pointing it to MNT where the root partition is mounted I'm going to install base base - de Val I'm going to install the Linux kernel so Linux and Linux - firmware and I know you guys like to use Nano rather than vim you could use them if you wanted but I'm gonna install Nano less dialog etc etc and a couple of other utilities that gonna help us out this thing called dialog I've included it here because if you're gonna connect via Wi-Fi that will need to be installed on the system so that you can still connect when you reboot it's only necessary if you're not doing the installation over an Ethernet so let me just issue that command and it's synchronizing the directories and this will take awhile we'll come back once it's done right so we're done that took about three or four minutes that's all and let me clear this screen so we've now got the kernel and the base system installed the next thing we need to do is we need to generate an S fstab file and arch contains a utility where we can actually do that gen fstab if you follow along with my text file that's on my git lab page you will see the command is this and that's done and you can check it by doing a cat MNT mounts et Cie oops et Cie fstab and you can see fstab has now been created so all good it's picked up the partitions that are already mounted right now we have to chroot into the main system arch makes this very easy rather than having to issue a load of different commands where your mounting proc and sis and everything else we just have to issue the command arch - chroot space forward slash mounts and you will see my prompt change I have now CH routed into the installed system or the system that's being installed and it's essentially like I'm working in the new system that has been booted right the first thing we want to do is we need to set our time zone now this will obviously depend where you are in the world so I know that for me Europe forward slash London is the key and I need to link that to et Cie local time if you want to have a look at timezone data to see what's available and again I'm going across to my text file and I'm just going to copy and paste this command in it you would list us our share zone info and you'll see all the different areas there and their folders which again you can CD into so all good right I know want to generate my hardware clock setting this assumes that your hardware clock is set to UTC there we go next I need to set up my localization now there are a couple of ways you can do this you can simply use Nano that we've already done and you could hit nano etc' locale doc gen you'll notice I'm not having to put mounts in front anymore because I'm CH rooted into the system and you can have a look at all the different locales that are listed there and what you need to do is to uncomment the one that relates to your area I I'm not gonna do that because I already know what I'm gonna do so I'm just echoing en-gb dot UT f dash 8 UT f dash 8 across to e TC locale Jen okay good we then need to run the command locale Jen and it's gonna generate that locale as you can see generation complete brilliance I'm now going to export that or save it to locale Kampf by using this command whatever locale and underscore GB dot UT f dash a that you identified in the previous step you can echo that direct into e TC locale Kampf you don't need the second UT f dash eight for this so that's all done and finally I'm just going to export my language again en-gb UTF - eight I'm essentially following the arch wiki now to set up my local and language okay next decide on your hostname what you want to call the system I'm gonna call this OTB arch and I'm gonna send that across to the e TC hostname file that's that done then I'm going to edit so I'm using Nano which I installed on the previous situation I'm going to edit et Cie hosts the file is currently empty but I am going to put this into it let me just clean up that spacing I hate bad spacing there we go this is on the arch wiki the details of this it is also in the text file that's on my gitlab it's the same from for everybody except for the hostname that you've set up and you include that on that last line so let me just save that right so that's the host setup a step that I always take at this point I remake the init the unit Ram FS now you don't technically need to do that anymore I like to do it just to make sure that the kernel and everything has been installed properly so I'm just gonna let it run through the process because I have occasionally got a few errors at this stage so I find it useful to run this brilliance so let's clear that and we're now at the stage of adding our normal user you will have noticed already there is only a root user currently on the system so I want to create a user called OTB yep so user ad - M - capital G and I'm adding that user to a couple of groups the most important here is the wheel group because I'm going to use that to set up sudo shortly but the other groups can help you out when you have your system installed if you remember the sis group for instance you can manage your printers so all good I'm now going to create a password for that user and I simply issue password PA SS WD so not the forward and it's for a user OTB and again great so my user is set up and I've created a password what I'm now going to do and I might as well do this here and now is set up sudo and I'm going to use nano as the editor for that so editor equals nano vie sudo and I'm gonna go all the way down here until I found find the entry that references the wheel group and it says uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command so I'm just gonna delete the comments save that and come out that's why I added ot be the user to the wheel group because setting up sudo that's all you need to do ok so we now get to the point where I want to sync my repos I want to optimize my mirror list and I want to enable multi Lib I always do this at this stage and to do this I would go into etc' pacman.com f-- and i'm gonna go all the way down in this file and you can see at the moment we've got core extra and community repos uncommented i also want to uncomment multi lib be careful here because there's a multi Lib testing as well and that's not the one I want so I'm going to remove the hash sign from that multi Lib entry you will need to move it remove it from both portions I'm going to save that and I'm going to issue pac-man s why why to update those repos and you can see multi Lib has now been added now one more thing and this isn't absolutely essential at this stage but I want to optimize my mirrors to make sure that I am getting the fastest mirror as possible and I'm going to use a little package that we installed err earlier called reflector and you can see this command that I've just pasted in what you will need to do is to change the name of your country this is setup for United Kingdom and I just run it and that actually makes sure that my mirrors are the fastest in the United Kingdom let me resync the repositories all good we're nearly there guys what we're now going to be doing is installing grub now this varies slightly depending on whether you've setup an EFI system or a legacy system for an EFI system this would that be the command that you enter pac-man - s grub EFI boot manager OS prober if you were setting up this system on a legacy system you wouldn't need to install EFI boot manager okay so you would just have pac-man - ass grub OS prober so let's install those proceed with installation yes please and we now need to install grub to wherever we want it to live on a legacy system it's really simple you would just do a grub - install dev whatever your root partition is or sorry whatever your disk is so it would be grub - install would slash dev /st eh that's all you need to type for an EFI system you need a few more details and I'm just copying what you would put here so grub install the target I want the EFI group exam table executive all installed I'm giving it an ID you do you don't necessarily need to put this but I tend to do it but most importantly I'm pointing it to the efi directory that i have already mounted that boot forward slash efi directory so installation finished no errors reported so all good last but not least i need to generate a boot configuration it doesn't matter if your legacy or efi you would issue this command all done right now at this stage and if you look at the wiki the arch wiki it tells you you can now reboot and continue to configure your system once you've rebooted that's probably advisable just to check that grub is working properly don't forget that if it's not and you need to go back into your system to reconfigure it it's easy enough you use your arch ISO go back in remount the partitions and do an arch - - chroot and you continue working on your system for simplicity and because everything seems to be working now I'm actually not going to reboot at this stage I am going to install some packages and the packages that I'm going to install I'm going to install xorg I'm also going to install some utilities such as ntfs 3g infuse I'm going to install pulseaudio here DKMS and Anwar unzip our my Firefox web browser so enter selection the default is all I'm just gonna stick with all and the default proceed with the installation yes so let's get those installed and I'll come back in a sec right so we're back that only took three or four minutes again I'm gonna clear the screen I tend to do this in stages I'm now wishing yet another command and here what I actually want to do is I want to install Network manager I want to install the backend for printing cups and I also want to install a display manager I'm going to use light DM and some fonts because if you don't install any fonts at this stage when you get to your desktop environment it's going to look horrible so I'm gonna click yes and we'll come back again once that's done right so that's Network manager and printing display manager and some fonts installed we now finally get to the desktop environments we've got X org already done so I'm just going to install Marte and it's a really short in command pac-man - s Marte Marte extra default all default all proceed with the installation yes and again we'll come back once that's done right so we're done again that didn't take long as you can see it's the partitioning stage that takes longer than anything the last stage before we reboot is we need to enable some services the first one being a light DM so systemctl enable light D MDOT service that's done let's also enable network manager that's done and let's enable cups so the reason we've done this we want our desktop manager to show up when we reboot we want Network manager to be working and to have the network manager applet showing up in our Marte desktop and we want to be able to print okay so we're about to reboot and just finalize the installation type exit at this point and we're out of the Schrute environments I then want to unmount dev SDA one which is my es part ESP partition and also SDA three which is my root partition and now I'm gonna reboot and we'll come back once I've rebooted and I've got up the marte desktop up and running so I've just rebooted and as you can see I'm at the light DM screen there is no guest additions here so I've not got the full resolution so let's just boot in and hopefully we get to a vanilla Mart a desktop and yes we do it's not a full resolution but that's pretty much what I wanted you can see that network manager is there already which is great there's nothing here apart from the standard marte programs and Firefox which I added to make sure that you've got a web browser to start you off with and at this point it's over to you you'll probably want to install the microcode for your intel or AMD cpu you'll want to install various codecs programs and theme it to your liking but this is the fun part now that you've got everything sorted the rest is just about customization you may well want to install yaen aur helper as well that's fairly straightforward to do and I'll leave instructions in my text file about how you do that but for now let's go and have a chat so that was relatively straightforward the most complex part is the partitioning which you probably already know once you've done the partitioning the rest is just a few commands you need to insert there and then install your packages what you'll end up with if you follow this guide is a very basic desktop environment for you to build up as you see fit use it and abuse it by all means let me know what you think I'm sure not everybody will agree with the way that I I particularly do things but it's the way that's worked for me I've been trying to be quite verbose about differences between bias and EFI because I know some of the guys on my Facebook group I've asked me to kind of go into detail on that and so that's what what I've tried to do so I hope you enjoy it give it a go play with it in VirtualBox if nothing else and see what you think that's it for today guys hope you enjoyed this don't forget to join me on library' have a great day [Music] you [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 10,337

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, arch linux, arch linux install, arch linux tutorial, arch linux installation, arch linux (operating system), install arch, arch linux install uefi, how to install arch linux, install arch linux, how to install arch linux 2020, arch linux install virtualbox, arch installation guide, arch install 2020, arch install uefi, arch linux install 2020, arch install bios, arch install legacy, arch install over ssh, vanilla arch install, arch linux installation guide

Id: XmCuFJgxzL8

Length: 45min 46sec (2746 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020