Install Arch Linux

the process of installing arch linux is quite hard, and overwhelming sometimes, if you are not familiar with the terminal and linux in general, but here we are going to break down the essential step to get going, to make a bare metal, functioning system:

keep in mind that this a generic guide, but you can make your changes, to suit your needs.

1. Prepare a USB Stick

download archlinux image from the here then, copy the image to usb device assuming it is sdb:

dd if=archlinux-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

to get usb device path you need to run lsblk and find your device finally reboot your system

2. Prepare Disk

after you booted into the arch installation media, you can move to the next step partitioning the disk, note that you should have internet connection in your machine, in order to fetch packages online. you need to know which device to install arch on, I will assume it is sda.

fdisk /dev/sda

create new dos label on the disk. if you are using uefi system you should create efi partition, to verify you have uefi system, you should get output from the following command:

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

500Mib would be enough, for efi partition and you should use fat32 on it.

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1

then create the root partition. and format it, you can use whatever filesystem you like, I chose btrfs.

mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda2

mount the partition

mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

install base system

pacstrap /mnt linux linux-firmware base grub

chroot to the root fs:

arch-chroot /mnt

make the disk bootable on legacy bios system:

grub-install --targe=x86_64-pc /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

on uefi system: mount efi partition

mkdir -p /boot/efi
mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

install grub

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

3. Configuration

setup root account

passwd root

network config

echo "archlinux" > /etc/hostname
cat <EOF >>/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1     localhost
127.0.0.1     archlinux
EOF

install network manager

pacman -S networkmanager
systemctl enable NetworkManager

exit chroot environment

exit

generate fstab

genfstab -U >>/mnt/etc/fstab

reboot

umount -R /mnt
reboot

4. Create Unpriveleged Account

create user named stallman, and add it to wheel group (doasers :) )

useradd -m -s /bin/bash stallman
grpadd wheel
usermod -aG wheel stallman

install doas, and allow wheel group members to run as root

pacman -S opendoas
cat <EOF >/etc/doas.config
permit persist :wheel
EOF

switch to the user account

su - stallman

5. Prepare The Graphical Environment

install xorg

doas pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit 

install a compositor

doas pacman -S picom

install wallpaper manager

doas pacman -S nitrogen

install suckless utils

git clone https://git.suckless.org/dwm
git clone https://git.suckless.org/st
git clone https://git.suckless.org/dmenu
git clone https://git.suckless.org/slstatus

make -C dwm && doas make -C dwm install
make -C st && doas make -C st install
make -C dmenu && doas make -C dmenu install
make -C slstatus && doas make -C slstatus install

create xinitrc file

cat <EOF >.xinitrc
#!/bin/bash
nitrogen --restore &
picom -f &
slstatus &
exec dwm
EOF

finally get into the graphical environment

startx

Resources:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide