Arch installation manual

Installing Arch🔗

The basis for this tutorial is this one

Always keep tabs on this extended official tutorial.

Preparing🔗

For Linux users:🔗

First of all, install arch ISO on your USB stick. Here you can find an official image.
Check your USB name using fdisk program fdisk -l. Ypu are interested in /dev/sdX kind of disk.
Use dd tool to make bootable drive

$ sudo dd if=path_to_arch_image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

skip windows manual

For Windows users:🔗

First of all, install arch ISO on your USB stick. Here you can find an official image.

I recomend using RUFUS for proper image installation. Choose everything as you see on this photo:

Important! all files from USB-stick will be deleted

Now go to the BIOS (press F2 or F8 or smth else on you laptop during booting), and choose UEFI mode and change boot order (make your USB first prior). result should be something like that:

Save changes and exit

Main part of installation🔗

Firstly check if you're loaded in EFI mode: efivar -l. The output should be like this:

On some computers Wifi won't work without turning the module on with this command: rfkill unblock all

Now let's turn on Wifi. Firstly get name of your interface: ip link (it usually starts with 'w', i.e: 'wlan0') Then activate the interface: ip link set interface_name up.

First method: iwctl

iwctl
station interface_name scan
station interface_name get-networks
station interface_name connect network_name

Example of turning on wifi:

Check if internet works with ping google.com (should appear messages with '64 bytes' at the beginning, press CTRL+C to finish check)

Time synchronization: timedatectl set-ntp true

Now let's look at your previous boot records: efibootmgr and delete previous linux or some other stuff: efibootmgr -b X -B, where 'X' is number of stuff's boot

Here is how it should look like

Now disk management: cfdisk. Here I delete everything from previous system and

choose root directory (about 60GB, linux filesystem)
boot partition (1GB, EFI filesystem) (Actually it's better to install bootloader on the Windows EFI partition, if you want to see choise of system during loading).
Create (or do nothing if you already have) home directory (40+GB, linux filesystem).
Create swap partition (Your RAM size * 2, Linux swap) Don't forget to "write" after making new partition. And don't delete Windows partitions if you want dual boot.

Here, how it looks on my laptop: As you can see I have 64GB root (/dev/sda11), 33GB home (/dev/sda10) 20GB swap (/dev/sda5), and my boot is /dev/sda3. Remeber, that on your laptop/PC, there will be other partition numbers.

Now format partition and mount them. Root:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda{root number} -L "arch"
mount /dev/sda{root number} /mnt

Boot:

mkdir -p /mnt/boot
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda{boot number}
mount /dev/sda{boot number} /mnt/boot

Or just mount Windows EFI partition, if you didn't create new one

mount /dev/sda{windows boot number} /mnt/boot

Swap:

mkswap /dev/sda{swap num}
swapon /dev/sda{swap num}

Home:

mkdir -p /mnt/home
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda{home number} -L "home"
mount /dev/sda{home number} /mnt/home

Now let's update pacman: pacman -Syy

Install base system and packet for future AUR using: pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware base-devel linux-headers

Generate fstab: genfstab -L /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab Check if it is generated: nano /mnt/etc/fstab

Example fstab(don't forget to change filesystem UUIDs (you can find them in 'cfdisk')):

UUID=8d3f44f4-a017-4c76-9e66-dd5068dc5397	/         	ext4      	rw,relatime,discard	0 1

UUID=2f671175-0fe6-472a-a4b0-1da5345f03e1	/home     	ext4      	rw,relatime,discard	0 2

UUID=1892-CB1C      	/boot     	vfat      	rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro	0 2

!!IMPORTANT!! If you have SSD, than this is extremely important to automatically activate TRIM each time it's needed. This will save lifetime of your SSD. So please, add 'discard' option to mount points in fstab (as you can see in the example)

Now let's go in arch: arch-chroot /mnt

It is good idea to download an adequate text editor at the beggining: pacman -S vim

super short guide for vim:

i - go to 'insert' mode (you can type in this mode!)
Esc - back to 'normal' mode
:w - write to file (in normal mode)
:q - quit from file (again, in normal mode) (you can combine: ':wq')

Adjust locals: vim /etc/locale.gen and uncomment

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
ru_RU.UTF-8 UTF-8
uk_UA.UTF-8 UTF-8

Don't forget to save and actually generate the locales:

locale-gen

Adjust time zone and time:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Kiev /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc

Adjust the name of the computer: vim /etc/hostname and write there "YOUR_HOSTNAME"

Adjust hosts: vim /etc/hosts and write there -"127.0.0.1 pavlik_giley.localdomain YOUR_USERNAME"- DONT FORGET TO SAVE EVERYTHING

Password for root: passwd

Add new user: useradd -G wheel -s /bin/bash -m YOUR_USERNAME, and give him sudo permissions: vim /etc/sudoers and uncomment %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

user's password: passwd YOUR_USERNAME

Download some potentially useful stuff: pacman -S efibootmgr iw wpa_supplicant dialog netctl dhcpcd iwd. And more: pacman -S ntfs-3g mtools fuse2

Install bootloader: bootctl install

Loader config: vim /boot/loader/loader.conf

Example loader:

default arch
timeout 2
editor 0

(It will wait 2 seconds before running into default choice - arch, editor 0 means you can't change loader parameters during boot(this is for security))

Now it is vital to adjust kernel settings:

pacman -S intel-ucode
vim /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf

Write here something like this (maybe you will need to change them in the future):

title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root="LABEL=arch" rw

Now exit and umount all partition:

exit
umount -R /mnt
reboot

GNOME installation🔗

Install X: sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-apps mesa-libgl xterm

Install graphic drivers:

sudo pacman -S xf86-video-intel
sudo pacman -S nvidia #if you have nvidia GPU

Now install GNOME itself:

sudo pacman -Syu
sudo pacman -S gnome
systemctl enable NetworkManager
systemctl enable gdm

Lenovo y530 (my laptop) can't render HDMI output with intel GPU, so if you want to use second monitor, read here Also download prime-run (for running application with nvidia GPU(if you have nvidia): sudo pacman -S prime-run

You should be all set! Proceed to programs list, resources and useful links docs.

System customization and apps installation🔗

First of all set normal wallpalers, change touchpad sensitivity and other settings in GNOME

Python:

sudo pacman -S python-pip
sudo pacman -S ipython

Battery optimization:

sudo pacman -S tlp
sudo tlp start
sudo systemctl enable tlp.service

It's a good idea to create new mirrorlist file for Pacman, if you from Ukraine, you can use this: (replace it in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist)

## Ukraine
Server = http://archlinux.ip-connect.vn.ua/$repo/os/$arch
Server = https://archlinux.ip-connect.vn.ua/$repo/os/$arch
Server = http://mirror.mirohost.net/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
Server = https://mirror.mirohost.net/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
Server = http://mirrors.nix.org.ua/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
Server = https://mirrors.nix.org.ua/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

Or use automated tool rankmirrors for ranking mirrors:

rankmirrors -n 0 /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Terminal: sudo pacman -S terminology

git: sudo pacman -S git

yay: git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git; cd yay; makepkg -si

zsh installation and customization with oh my zsh:

cd ~
sudo pacman -S zsh
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git
echo "source ${(q-)PWD}/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh" >> ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zshrc

Browser + telegram:

yay telegram-desktop
yay firefox

Don't forget to sign in gmail, youtube, CMS, etc.

CUSTOMIZATION

sps gnome-tweaks

Download all extension and setup tweask as you like

Install VScode: yay visual-studio-code-insiders

Cion yay clion #chose just clion. Don't forget to activate licension and type path to compilers and debugger

Pycharm yay pycharm #choose community version Don't forget to install material theme and set 18's font

STM32. Install eveything except eclipse from this tutorial After this download STM32CubeMX itself from official site Then unzip script, give permissions to run it (chmod +x scriptname.sh) and run it with sudo

Then if you will have problems with debuggger run those commands:

cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libncursesw.so.6.1 libncurses.so.5
sudo ln -s libncursesw.so.6.1 libtinfo.so.5

Follow this tutorial to work with STM32 through CLion:

List of other apps I use:

Slack
IntellijIDEA (don't forget to get jdk)
AndroidStudio (+sdk +ndk)
zoom
Microsoft Teams ('teams' package in local repository)
clion-gui
LibreOffice

Also it's quite useful to configurate your touchpad gestures with this application, if you're using xorg on gnome

Looks like that's it. Happy archlinux experience!

LinuxClub@UCU