This effectively a direct copy of my last Arch Install post, but with modifications for my new laptop. It’s a System76 Darter Pro, and so it a has a few differences from the Lenovo Yoga 13 I had before.
The following are the steps I took in order to get Arch installed and running with what you would reasonably expect to have from an operating system. This is as much notes for my benefit as a guide for anyone else.
BIG NOTE: I performed nearly all these steps to install onto a thumb drive and booted into that to be certain that it would work out before I wiped my internal hard drive.
ALSO NOTE: Arch is a very much do it yourself kind of distribution. Do not expect everything to work right out of the box, and your hardware may require configurations different from mine.
Firstly, find a thumb drive, download the Arch installation iso from here, and make a bootable thumb drive with the following command.
dd bs=4M if=/path/to/archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdx status=progress oflag=sync
Note that sdx should be your thumb drive, and it should not be mounted. This will erase everything else from that drive, so be sure you got the right one (additional details can be found here).
Now restart your machine and get it to boot from the thumb drive. You may need to hold or press some button as your machine boots to get to a menu that allows you to select which device it boots from.
Once it’s booted, you’ll be dropped to a command prompt. The following is the list of commands and files I edited to get to a usable system. I’ll try and comment and explain everything as best I can, but the best source of information is the Arch Wiki starting with the installation guide.
First, make sure you are connected to the internet. If you have an ethernet jack plugged in, chances are pretty good you’ll be connected automatically. You can check with a simple ping command like ping archlinux.org. I didn’t actually have to do this with my new laptop, but I’m leaving it here anyway.
systemctl stop dhcpcd # stop the dhcp service ip link # outputs the networking interfaces and their status ip link set wlp0 up # where wlp0 is the name of your network interface iw dev wlp0 scan | less # to find the name of a wifi network to connect to
The edit the file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf (I use vim, but nano is available too) and add the following lines:
ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant update_config=1
Then keep going with the following commands:
wpa_suplicant -B -i wlp0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf wpa_cli > scan > add_network > set_network 0 ssid "NetworkName" > set_network 0 psk "thepassword" > enable_network 0 > save_config > exit # or Ctrl-d to exit wpa_cli systemctl start dhcpcd # restart the dhcp service timedatectl set-ntp true # sync time with remote server timedatectl status
Once you restart the dhcp service it may take a few seconds for you to be connected to the internet, but you can again check with a ping command. Also, if your wireless network isn’t using WPA2 you may need to do something different. There’s also a chance that your wireless connection may need additional firmware or kernel modules not included in the installation environment. For more information see the this page on the Arch Wiki.
The following commands will get your hard drive set up with full disk encryption. If you don’t want that you can skip the encryption parts here, and when setting up the bootloader. Also, my laptop has UEFI, but if your machine doesn’t you made need to do something other than a GPT partition table. You can find lots more information the Arch Wiki, starting here.
I set up my disk with a GPT partition table, with the 1st partition having 550Mb and type EFI System, and the 2nd partition taking up the remaining space with type Linux System. This partition then gets encrypted. Then, using LVM I set up 8Gb of swap space inside the encrypted partition, with the remainder of the system taking up the rest of the space.
lsblk # list your available hard drives fdisk /dev/sdx # partition the hard drive. make sure you get the right one mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdxX # put FAT32 filesystem on the boot partition likely /dev/sda1 modprobe dm_crypt # make sure the encryption module is loaded cryptsetup benchmark # reports speeds of different ciphers and key sizes # Your best cipher and key size are potentially different cryptsetup -v --cipher aes-cbc-plain64 --key-size 256 luksFormat /dev/sdxX # /dev/sda2 for me cryptsetup open /dev/sdxX cryptlvm # mount the encrypted drive with name cryptlvm pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptlvm # create a physical volume for LVM vgcreate VolumeGroup /dev/mapper/cryptlvm # Create logical volume group named VolumeGroup lvcreate -L 8G VolumeGroup -n swap # create 8Gb of swap space lvcreate -l 100%FREE VolumeGroup -n root # Use remaining space for system mkfs.ext4 /dev/VolumeGroup/root # format drive with EXT4 file system mkswap /dev/VolumeGroup/swap # make swap mount /dev/VolumeGroup/root /mnt # Mount our filesystem on /mnt swapon /dev/VolumeGroup/swap # Turn on swap space mkdir /mnt/boot # make a place to mount our boot partition mount /dev/sdxX /mnt/boot # mount the boot partition vim /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist # move closer/faster mirrors to the top
Now we’re finally ready to install the operating system on the hard drive. It’s done with the following command, listing all of the packages you want installed to start with. I’ve annotated it with why we want each package, but you need to omit the comments and put it all on one line. You can also install any you missed later using pacman.
pacstrap /mnt \ # Install system in /mnt base \ # A bare bones operating system base-devel \ # some compilers and tools grub \ # a bootloader efibootmgr \ # for uefi systems intel-ucode \ # microcode for intel chips networkmanager \ # for network configuration with a GUI network-manager-applet \ # applet in task bar for network manager wireless_tools \ # additional wireless tools cups \ # for using printers system-config-printer \ # GUI for configuring printers cups-pk-helper \ # for allowing users to configure printers hplip \ # HP printer drivers nftables \ # firewall nss-mdns \ # needed for avahi stuff? avahi \ # for detecting network services like printers bluez \ # bluetooth support for network manager bluez-utils \ # additional bluetooth support xorg \ # X11 display server i3-wm \ # a lightweight tiling window manager i3status \ # an i3 status bar dmenu \ # a good app launcher for i3 lightdm \ # graphical login manager lightdm-gtk-greeter \ # the login screen terminator \ # my favorite terminal emulator sudo \ # allow users to run administrative commands zsh \ # I like zsh instead of bash for my shell vim \ # My favorite command line text editor git \ # version control elinks \ # a terminal web browser wget \ # for downloading files via command line volumeicon \ # for volume control atom \ # my favorite text/code editor nautilus \ # file browser ttf-hack \ # good monospaced font openssh \ # for connecting to other machines
I probably missed one or two that I ended up with in the end, but this should get you most of the way there. Then generate an fstab with genfstab -U /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab and chroot into the system for some final setup with arch-chroot /mnt.
Set up time-zone, language and computer name settings as follows.
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime # replacing Region and City hwclock --systohc vim /etc/locale.gen # uncomment the line en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 locale-gen echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf echo "yourcomputername" > /etc/hostname
Add the following to /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 localhost 127.0.1.1 yourcomputername.localdomain yourcomputername
Now configure the bootloader. If you don’t do this you won’t be able to boot the system.
Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf to have the following lines match. The modules part I figured out from here.
MODULES=(i915 loop) HOOKS=(base udev autodetect keyboard keymap consolefont modconf block encrypt lvm2 resume filesystems fsck)
Then run mkinitcpio -p linux to create the initial boot kernel.
Now edit /etc/default/grub to have the following lines match, where device-uuid is the uuid of the disk partition you encrypted, which you can find with the command blkid.
GRUB_CMD_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet nowatchdog ec_sys.write_support=1" GRUB_CMD_LINUX="cryptdevice=UUID=device-uuid:cryptlvm root=/dev/VolumeGroup/root resume=/dev/VolumeGroup/swap" GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="part_gpt part_msdos lvm"
Now run the following to generate the bootloader.
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
You should now have a working bootable system, but there is still some more setup to be done.
You should run passwd to give the root user a password. Later you should run sudo passwd -l root to remove the root password so that nobody can log in as root, but ONLY AFTER you are CERTAIN that at least one user has sudo access or you’ll have a real hard time.
So, setup a user account with sudo access.
visudo -f /etc/sudoers # and uncomment the sudo group groupadd sudo # create the sudo group useradd -m -G sudo,wheel -s /usr/bin/zsh username # create your user passwd username # give your user a password
You should also set up the firewall now. I created the file /etc/nftables.conf with the following contents.
flush ruleset
table inet filter {
chain input {
type filter hook input priority 0;
# accept any localhost traffic
iif lo accept
# accept traffic originated from us
ct state established,related accept
# accept ICMP & IGMP
ip6 nexthdr icmpv6 icmpv6 type { destination-unreachable, packet-too-big, time-exceeded, parameter-problem, mld-listener-query, mld-listener-report, mld-listener-reduction, nd-router-solicit, nd-router-advert, nd-neighbor-solicit, nd-neighbor-advert, ind-neighbor-solicit, ind-neighbor-advert, mld2-listener-report } accept
ip protocol icmp icmp type { destination-unreachable, router-solicitation, router-advertisement, time-exceeded, parameter-problem } accept
ip protocol igmp accept
# activate the following line to accept common local services
#tcp dport { 22, 80, 443 } ct state new accept
udp dport { 5353 } ct state new accept
# count and drop any other traffic
counter drop
}
}
Also edit the line in /etc/nsswitch.conf to match the following so that avahi works properly.
hosts: files mymachines myhostname mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns
And create the file /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/49-allow-passwordless-printer-admin.rules with the following contents so regular users can configure printers.
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
if (action.id == "org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.all-edit" &&
subject.isInGroup("wheel")){
return polkit.Result.YES;
}
});
Now you can enable all the services you want to be running when you reboot.
systemctl enable NetworkManager systemctl enable lightdm systemctl enable nftables systemctl enable org.cups.cupsd systemctl enable avahi-daemon
I also created the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30_touchpad.conf with the following contents so that my touchpad would work the way I like.
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "libinput"
Option "Tapping" "on"
Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr"
EndSection
Now is a good time to logout of the chroot environment, unmount the drives and reboot the machine.
exit umount -R /mnt reboot
You’ll be asked for the password you used to encrypt the hard drive, then you’ll get to the login screen and you can log in as your user. i3 will generate a basic configuration for you. You can see mine here. Also, when you open a terminal zsh will run you through an initial setup to generate an initial .zshrc file. Again, you can see mine here.
Finally, I download and install cower to be able to more easily install packages from the AUR. I find cower strikes a nice balance between manually installing and maintaining packages from the AUR is a pain in the ass, and OMG I’m automatically installing untrusted software on my machine. Anyway, download and install as follows.
wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/cower.tar.gz tar -xf cower.tar.gz cd cower makepkg -s sudo pacman -U cower-18-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz cd ../ rm -rf cower rm cower.tar.gz
Then I use cower to install the Brave web browser, and some System76 specific packages to help with drivers and power management, which I found out about from here.
cower -d brave-bin cd brave-bin makepkg -s sudo pacman -U brave-*.pkg.tar.xz cd ../ rm -rf brave-bin cower -d system76-dkms system76-io-dkms system76-firmware-daemon system76-driver system76-power # build and install them similar to above sudo modprobe system76 sudo systemctl enable system76 system76-firmware-daemon system76-power <code class=" language-bash"><span class="token function">sudo</span> system76-firmware <span class="token comment"># So you can tell if you have new firmware </span></code>
Things seem to be doing pretty well, but your mileage may vary, and you may want to adjust some settings. Just go find the documentation on the Arch Wiki.
I still have plenty of other software to install and tweaks to make, but things seem to be working well so far.
