Arch Linux Install

These are DT’s personal notes for installing Arch Linux inside a virtual machine on video. Obviously, it does not cover every possible scenario for installing Arch Linux. For a more in-depth guide, it is strongly recommended that you follow the official Arch Wiki Installation Guide.

• The Installation Guide recommends using ’fdisk’ to partition your drives.
• fdisk -l : lists out the partitions (/dev/sda and a loopback disk associated with live environment)
• fdisk /dev/sda : enters into fdisk
• “m” for help
• “o” for DOS partition or “g” for GPT

NOTE: MBR only works on =>2TB disks and up to four primary partitions. GPT can be used on much larger disks, the size limit depends on the OS and filesystem. GPT can have up to 128 partitions (you’d have to be a complete nutter to do 128 partitions on a disk)

• “n” for add new partition
• “p” for primary partition
• Partition number: “1” to create sda1
• First sector defaults to 2048, hit ENTER.
• Last sector defaults to entire disk, change it to: +550M
• Last sector defaults to entire disk, change it to: +2G
• Last sector defaults to entire disk, change it to: +14G (or hit ENTER for all remaining space)
• “n” -> “p” -> partition 2 defaults, hit ENTER
• “m” for help to change partition type, “t”
• “1” -> “L” -> “?” (EFI System)
• “2” -> “L” -> “82”
• “3” -> “L” -> “?” (may already default to Linux filesystem)
• “m” -> “a” -> “1” -> “w” (write table to disk)

• mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
• mkswap /dev/sda2
• swapon /dev/sda2
• mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3

• mount /dev/sda3 /mnt (mounts it to mnt on live image)
• pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware
• genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

• arch-chroot /mnt (change into root directory of our new installation)

NOTE: Chroot is used for installation or system rescue. Prompt will change, letting us know we are logged in as root on new system.

• ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime
• hwclock –systohc (sets the hardware clock)
• nano /etc/locale.gen

• nano /etc/locale.conf

    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
  

• locale-gen
• sudo pacman -S nano (still chrooted so nano will be installed on new system)
• nano /etc/hostname (archvbox)

• nano /etc/hosts

    127.0.0.1	localhost
    ::1		localhost
    127.0.1.1	archvbox.localdomain	archvbox
  

• passwd (set root pass)
• make normal user: useradd -m dt
• passwd dt
• usermod -aG wheel,audio,video,optical,storage dt
• pacman -S sudo
• EDITOR=nano visudo

• pacman -S grub
• grub-install /dev/sda
• grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

• networkmanager (sudo systemctl enable –now NetworkManager)
• xorg xorg-init
• lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter
• A lightweight window manager for a GUI (awesome, fluxbox, etc.)
• A terminal emulator (such as alacritty)
• A text editor (such as vim/neovim)
• A web browser (such as firefox)
• A few other things I may want: git, nitrogen, picom
• xf86-video-fbdev (graphics driver for the VM)

• Edit the lightdm config file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf [Seat:*]

    ...
    greeter-session=lightdm-yourgreeter-greeter
    ...
  

• systemctl enable lightdm
• systemctl enable NetworkManager

• exit the chroot
• Unmount: umount /mnt
• reboot (shutdown now to detach the ISO in VBOX)

  git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-git.git
  ls -la
  cd yay-git
  makepkg -si
  yay -S name-of-package (for installing a package)

• cp etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc /home/dt.xinitrc
• sudo chown dt:dt .xinitrc
• vim .xinitrc

• In .bash_profile:

    [[ [[ $(fgconsole 2>/dev/null) == 1 ]] ]] && exec startx -- vt1