Arch linux installation guide

This is a cleaner and a faster guide in installing arch-linux on your system. Note that you should not do everything exactly in this guide, rather just follow the instruction and modify as you wish

Please Read:

If I make any mistake in improving this guide, do send an email to majorgamerjay@protonmail.com issues and help me fix it! Thanks. This guide is divided in three stages/parts:

Stage 1 - Base installation
Stage 2 - Preparing accounts and other things for basic use
Stage 3 - Installing graphical interfaces and X server (WIP)

Note

/dev/sdX | X -> preferred disk. check using lsblk
Examples: /dev/sda1 for root & /dev/sda2 for boot partitions respectively.

Stage 1:

Do the proper partitioning in cfdisk

1 partition for root of any reasonable size (i.e 20GB) [/dev/sdX1]
1 partition for boot of any reasonable size (i.e 200MB) [/dev/sdX2]

cfdisk /dev/sdX

Format The partitions

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1
mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdX2

Change mirrorlist on pacman (optional)

This makes your downloading speed from package manager super fast!

nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Put your favorite mirror on top of all the mirrors or delete all other mirrors than your favorite!

Mount Root and boot drives

mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt/boot

Install arch-base packages, linux-kernel & linux-firmware driver and other necessary things

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware base-devel netctl dialog grub efibootmgr dhcpcd

Generate FSTAB

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

Chroot into Arch (/)

arch-chroot /mnt

Update Hostname

echo HOSTNAME >> /etc/hostname

replace HOSTNAME with your preferred Hostname

Update Hosts File

Install nano (or your favorite text editor): pacman -Syy nano –noconfirm
Edit /etc/hosts by executing nano /etc/hosts and add the following:-

127.0.0.1    localhost    HOSTNAME
            ::1          localhost    HOSTNAME

Replace HOSTNAME with your hostname

Update resolv.conf

nano /etc/resolv.conf

Add nameserver 1.1.1.1

You could change 1.1.1.1 with your favorite DNS resolver

Update locale

nano /etc/locale.gen and uncomment (remove # before) your locale, must uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 locale-gen

Setup Bootloader (GRUB)

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

If there are no errors and the kernels are detected, then you are ready to reboot!

Set root password

passwd

You are now ready to reboot but it is recommended to do it up to stage 2.

Stage 2:

If you haven’t rebooted, then reboot now and then enter root account. We will now make a new user account and add it to the wheel group.

Make user account:

Make user account with home directory

useradd -m <username>

Change user password

passwd <username>

Add users to the wheel group

The wheel group is the sudo group, it is the group of users that can perform root/sudo operations using sudo or doas or su or whatever else.

To ensure that sudo is installed,

pacman -S sudo

Then edit the sudoers file: visudo

If it shows an error about some editors not found, just do EDITOR=<your favorite editor> visudo

Then, move to the line where it says

## Uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Uncomment it, remove the # before %wheel Now, users in wheel group can execute any commands in sudo but will be asked an password to do that.

usermod -a -G wheel <username>

Now the given user will be in the wheel group and now can execute any commands.

This is the end of stage 2, you can now just exit and then log in to your non-root user and can have fun doing anything! :D