Installing Arch Linux - Minimalist Version

This is a step by step version to install ArchLinux.

First, What is ArchLinux?

The concept of  "The Arch Way" . . Simplicity, Code-Correctness over Convenience, User Centric, Openess and Freedom.

Quote - 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'  

ArchLinux gives you the freedom to do anything, whatever you want, supported by a huge Wiki.

But the distro is for the intermediate linux users who have some experience in using a linux distro and know how to operate on a non-GUI operating system and build a file from source.

Now, without any time wastage, the process of installing a minimalist version of ArchLinux

1. Get the latest image of ArchLinux from its page ArchLinux Download.
2. Boot it into the system or the virtual machine, whichever you like.
3. Select 'Boot Arch Linux (x86_x64)'
4. Its is recommended to have an internet connection and to test the connection use 'ping command'.
5. Using fdisk -l command, prepare the hard drives for the installation.
6. Using cfdisk command, enter the preparation menu and make a root partition (/dev/sda1) as primary, swap partition (/dev/sda2) as primary, and home partition (/dev/sda5) as logical.
7. Save the configuration and exit it. You can use fdisk -l command to get the view of the hard drives now.
8. Use mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 and mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda5 to create the disk file system.
9. To initialise SWAP use  mkswap /dev/sda2 and the swapon /dev/sda2 commands.
10. Run lsblk command to check evrything is right or not.
11. Then comes, installing the Arch Base system. Use the following commands:
    mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
    mkdir /mnt/home
    mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/home
12. Initialise the package manager list by nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist command. And press Enter(default)
13. To boot from partitions we use genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab command.
14. Now comes the system configuration, Configure the chroot by arch-chroot /mnt and set language by editing locale.gen file by nano /etc/locale.gen
15. Exit it and type
    locale-gen
    echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
    export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
16. Enter the location as ln-s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Kolkata /etc/locatime (List can be seen on ls /usr/share/zoneinfo)
17. Configure hardware clock by hwclock --systohc -utc
18. Uncomment [multilib] from pacman.conf file by nano /etc/pacman.conf
19. Synchronise and update database using pacman -Syu
20. Change the password using passwd command.
21. Add new user in the system using useradd -mg users -G wheel,storage,power -s /bin/bash your_new_user
22. Change its password using passwd command.
23. Install sudo package bu pacman -S sudo
24. Edit /etc/sudoers file using nano and uncomment “%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
25. Last step is to install the bootloader:
    pacman -S grub
    grub-install /dev/sda
    pacman -S os-prober
    grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
26. Congratulations, ArchLinux is installed with minimalist base.
    Now exit the chroot environment by
    exit
    exit
    umount /mnt/home
    umount /mnt
    reboot
    
    
    
    You can also add a desktop environment to ArchLinux to make it a GUI based OS, which will be covered in later tutorials.

This post was written by: Naqushab Neyazee

CSE Undergraduate, AMU, Aligarh.

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Filed Under: Arch, Archlinux, how to, installation, linux, Minimalist, virtual, vmware on Thursday 21 August 2014