Over the years, I’ve installed Arch Linux on a multitude of different devices. These are some of the notes I’ve taken, with references to the community-based Arch Linux wiki, which will forever be a better detail-oriented reference than I could aspire to creating on my own.

A rough timeline is as follows:

1. Setting up the environment in which you will install Arch
2. Configuring partitioning and the likes of which
3. Bootstrapping the install
4. All those other things you have automated

Notes

• Set the keyboard layout to no-dvorak

  • Without no-dvorak the experience will be sub-par for me.

• Connecting to the internet

  • You could do it later, but I’ve occasionally waited with doing this, only to discover that I didn’t have any internet access nearby. Without a connection you won’t be able to complete it using the default setup, so make sure you’ve got a connection ready before proceeding.
  • Usually a combination of iw, wpa_passphrase and wpa_supplicant

• Setting up two partitions

  • An ESP and a block partition for the encryption setup.

• Creating a dm-crypt/LUKS setup.

  • PARTITION being something like /dev/sda2. Note the number at the end.

  • We deal with the rest of the sysconfig later.

    cryptsetup luksFormat PARTITION
    

  • Open up the encrypted partition.

    cryptsetup open PARTITION MAP-NAME
    

• Make the LVM physical volume, volume group and the logical volumes.

  • I used to always use LVM, but I’ve only benefit from disk expansion once when I added a hard-drive to an older work laptop. Besides that one time, it’s never been worth it for me for anything advanced.
  • In other words, I only use LVM for the abstraction of disks together with encryption.

• Format each of the logical volumes with the file system of your choice.

  • I tend to go for ext4.

• Setup /etc/pacman.d/mirorrlist.

• pacstrap /mnt base base-devel salt that shit.

  • Generally go with base-devel too, in addition to the natural base. I provision with salt, so that goes on too.

• genfstab

Configuring encrypted boot

Something new¹ I discovered is the ability to use a systemd-encrypt hook together with a systemd-vconsole hook for the boot sequence instead of udev and encrypt, with keymap as well.

• Replace udev with systemd.

• Replace keymap with sd-vconsole.

• Replace encrypt with sd-encrypt.

• Replace lvm2 with sd-lvm2.

• Configure loader.conf.

• Copy and configure arch.conf in entries/.

• Interestingly specify rd.luks.name=UUID=NAME rather than the cryptsetup option.

• Setup the systemd-boot-pacman-hook.

Post-installation configuration

I tend to run SaltStack here, but I do it too late. Usually I do the following things manually, and a small part of me dies inside.

• Install various networking software
• Add me as a user
• Add me to the wheel group, always after adding me as a user
• Check that /etc/sudoers cares about the wheel group
• Check out my Salt state roots, and run salt.

Optional: NetworkManager instead of netctl

• Install NetworkManager and ModemManager
• systemctl enable --now NetworkManager.service

User space applications

To my surprise, the following applications were missing from my installation, yet ever so present in my dotfiles requirements.

Alas, this must be remedied.

• compton
• xss-lock
• udiskie
• flashfocus
  • I really like this, but I also really want to replace it with something less resource intensive. It does above and beyond what it needs to for the solution. It goes overboard.
• dunst
• polybar
  • While missing, this was not apparent from my ~/.xsession-errors file.

Interestingly, some other contenders that I didn’t think would be the case also showed up.

• xrdb
  • The /etc/lightdm/Xsession script attempts to use it.
• xrandr –> xorg-xrandr
  • My own scripts use it, and it’s my go-to tool for display configuration. I’m not quite sure how I manage to setup X11, yet fail to install such a useful tool like xrandr.

Furthermore, my cloud-synchronised storage folder was naturally not synchronised. This caused a great loss in terms of wallpapers.²

Later on, I discovered the missing applications by usage.

• rofi
  • How could I?!
• light
  • The most useful backlight application I’ve had on my laptops.
• i3lock-color
  • Without it, my lock script fails. I have become dependant on this fork.

Not to mention packages missing of fonts!

• ttf-material-design-icons-git
  • Unlike the non-git version, this contains a fair few modified icons.

Installing in VMware Workstation³

• Choose UEFI instead of BIOS

• Start fdisk

  # fdisk /dev/sda
  > g					# new gpt table
  > n 1 320M			# new 320M partition
  > t 1				# set to EFI System
  > n 2				# create standard remainder
  > w					# write and exit
  

• Format the disks

• Mount the areas

  mkdir /mnt
  mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
  mkdir /mnt/boot
  mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
  

• Set timezone

• Set locale

• Set vconsole

• Set passwd

VMware specific

• VMware adaptations come later, including system clock

• Add modules to mkinitcpio