Scott Murphy scott.murphy@arrow-eye.com
First, the Arch documentation is very good. You can get all of this directly from it, however it makes a few assumptions that might trip you up if you are new to arch, UEFI and running under VMWare.
I'm using VMWare for my Arch install, so this is specific to installing under VMWare Fusion 8 on macOS. This probably translates pretty much directly to other installs if you leave out the VMWare items. The other thing is that my install is the 64-bit install. I don't have a 32-bit system and was not interested in trying it out in VMWare at this time. Maybe in a update.
You can find the Arch distro links on the [https://www.archlinux.org|Arch Linux website], in the https://www.archlinux.org/download/[Download] section. Select a mirror or bittorrent link and get started. I selected the https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/archlinux/iso/2017.03.01/[CS Club mirror] at the university of Waterloo. I picked the https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/archlinux/iso/2017.03.01/archlinux-2017.03.01-dual.iso[2017-03-01] image. Once it is downloaded, You can use the iso in whatever way you want. I'm using it as is, in a virtual DVD drive.
You can burn it to a DVD if you have something sufficiently old, however if your device supports booting for USB, I'd go that route.
NOTE: Add a link to the create a USB version instructions
Create a new VMWare machine by selecting `New → Create a custom virtual machine` in the VMWare Library. Go through the full creation up to the point where you start the VM to get the install going. My VM has
In order to use UEFI, you need to edit the VMX file. Assuming you called the machine `New Arch VM`, you would find the vmx file in the `~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/New Arch WM.vmwarevm` directory. In this case, the file will be called `New Arch VM.vmx`. If there is an additional file with the same name and a .lck extansion, the library has the file open. Make sure you have the startup window closed. If there is no `.lck` file, then all you need to do is edit the file and add the following line to it.
firmware = "efi"
That was pretty straightforward. This will tell VMWare to use UEFI as the boot method instead of legacy BIOS.
This will go more like a series of steps. There will only be extra info where it gets somewhat odd.
Now that you have the blank VM created and the VMX file modified, it is time to get started.
ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
ping archlinux.org
timedatectl set-ntp true timedatectl status
sgdisk -p /dev/sda sgdisk --new=0:0:+512M /dev/sda sgdisk --new=0:0:+256M /dev/sda sgdisk --new=0:0:0 /dev/sda sgdisk --typecode=1:EF00 /dev/sda sgdisk --typecode=2:8200 /dev/sda sgdisk --change-name=1:"EFI System" /dev/sda sgdisk --change-name=2:"Linux swap" /dev/sda sgdisk --change-name=3:"Linux filesystem" /dev/sda sgdisk -p /dev/sda
That should first show you a disk with no partition table, and then the disk with all three partitions, something like this:
Disk /dev/sda: 41943040 sectors, 20.0 GiB Logical sector size: 512 bytes Disk identifier (GUID): 9E17A0DA-9DED-4E62-BAE7-076E1522C21B Partition table holds up to 128 entries First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 41943006 Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries Total free space is 4061 sectors (2.0 MiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 1048576 511.0 MiB EF00 EFI System
2 1050624 1574911 256.0 MiB 8200 Linux swap
3 1574912 41943006 19.2 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
Now that the disk is properly partitioned, you will format the partitions:
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1 mkswap -L swap /dev/sda2 mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
NOTE: UEFI partitions are FAT32 formatted and the UEFI BIOS can read FAT32 partitions to locate the correct `.efi` file to boot. This also makes it easy to mount that partition to make fixes.
What are we going todo?
. Mount the root partition on /mnt . Create a new directory to mount the boot partition on and mount it there . Use the pacstrap program to install the base operating system . Create a new fstab that reflects the mounted disks . Chroot to the newly installed OS so initial changes could be made . Set the timezone . Set the hardware clock to the running OS . Enable the en_US locakle and set the system language to en_US UTF8 . Give the system a hostname . Let the system refer to itself in a zeroconf (bonjour) way
In order to acomplish this, enter the following commands:
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt mkdir /mnt/boot mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot pacstrap /mnt/base genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab arch-chroot /mnt ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto /etc/localtime hwclock --systohc sed -i 's/#en_US/en_US/' /etc/locale.gen locale-gen echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf echo "myhostname" > /etc/hostname echo "127.0.0.1 myhostname.localdomain myhostname" >> /etc/hosts
If this is an Intel based system, you will need to add the ability to perform cpu microcode updates. I don't know if this even works under VMWare, but if I have to install on a physical system, then I want to remember this part.
You enable the updates that by adding the intel microcode package:
pacman -S intel-ucode
NOTE: Need to check this out on a test system. I'm not sure you need to perform this step if you are not using grub. I'm not, so this might be useless. I happen to like having grub in place, so this is not wasted documentation, just potentially unused.
In order to fix the bootloader to use the intel microcode upadtes, we need to install the grub utilities and update the configuration:
pacman -S grub grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
or you might need to do it inside the EFI setup. That will ne noted in the /boot secting below.
Now you should set the root password:
passwd
Congratulations, the system has been installed. Unfortunately, it will not boot just yet.
This is where it tends to get a little harder to follow. At this point, you can unmount the disks and reboot - you will not have a bootable system, but you will have a fully functional system if it could only boot. If you mess around enough, it will boot, but you may not know what you did or why it works. I like to compare this to the first time you use grub or PXE boot a system. You are not sure what is happening under the hood, even though you edited those files.
If you rebooted, you will need to boot from your install media again. Don't bother with the selection 'Boot from Installed System' or whatever version it offers, it will not boot.
If you reboot, you need to mount the disks again and chroot again. Once that has happened, you can continue on and make a bootable system.
You are going to need some more tools installed, so fire up `pacman`
pacman -S efibootmgr efitools
You can check to see if the system is effectively ready for this by running the `efivar` command and seeing the output
efivar -l
This should give you a list of “things” that look like a bunch of GUIDs followed by a readable word. If so, everything you need is in place.
This is the secret sauce for making the system bootable:
efibootmgr -d /dev/sda -p 1 -c -L "Arch Linux" -l '\vmlinuz-linux' -u "root=/dev/sda3 rw initrd=/initramfs-linux.img"
NOTE: Intel microcode updates may require the previous line to include two `initrd=` sections, so the previous line would have `-u “root=/dev/sda3 rw initrd=/intel-ucode.img initrd=/initramfs-linux.img”`
This is for a wired connection, however the procedure is similar for wireless. Look at this first and then check out the wireless section of the networking reference below.
The legacy `net-utils` have been fully deprecated in the current version of Arch, so you will be using the `ip` command
Get the name of the wired interface. It will not be eth0.
ip link
The output will be like:
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 2: ens33: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000 link/ether 00:0c:29:dc:56:64 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
The wired interface is ens33.
Assuming you will be using dhcp for your networking, this is how you get it working. Enter the following commands:
cd /etc/systemd/network echo > local.network<<EOF [Match] Name=ens33 [Network] DHCP=ipv4 EOF systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service ip a
If this is a system you rebooted before you configured the network, you can enable the networking using the command:
systemctl start systemd-networkd.service
The final command, `ip a`, should show that you now have an address on your local network. This should come up after a reboot.
At this point, you should be golden. exit from the chrooted system by typing `exit` and then unmount the disk partitions using the command `umount -R /mnt` and then enter `reboot`
The following pages (mostly from the Arch Wiki) were used to make these notes.
Also looked at:
For creating that USB stick, you can use the traditional `dd` method or try out Etcher if you are command line weary.
Of course if you would prefer to do the install, including the GUI desktop and software selection the easy way, there are two projects of note that can help you out.
They are: