Difference between revisions of "Installation guide"

Revision as of 13:07, 20 August 2012

In Install media 2012.07.15, AIF (the Arch Installation Framework) is no longer included but instead Arch Install Scripts are provided to aid in the installation process. This article summarizes the install process using these scripts. See the Beginners' Guide instead for a walkthrough aimed at new users.

Download

Download the new Arch Linux ISO from the Arch Linux download page.

• Instead of six different images we only provide a single one which can be booted into an i686 and x86_64 live system to install Arch Linux over the network. Media containing the [core] repository are no longer provided.
• Install images are signed and it is highly recommend to verify their signature before use. On Arch Linux, this can be done by using

  pacman-key -v <iso-file>.sig

• The image can be burned to a CD, mounted as an ISO file, or directly written to a USB stick using a utility like dd. It is intended for new installations only; an existing Arch Linux system can always be updated with pacman -Syu.

Keyboard layout

For many countries and keyboard types appropriate keymaps are available already, and a command like loadkeys uk might do what you want. More available keymap files can be found in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/ (you can omit the keymap path and file extension when using loadkeys).

Partition disks

See partitioning for details.

Remember to create any stacked block devices like LVM, LUKS, or RAID.

Format partitions

See here for details.

If you are using (U)EFI you will most probably need another partition to host the UEFI System partition. Read this article.

Mount the partitions

We now must mount the root partition on /mnt. You should also create directories for and mount any other partitions (/mnt/boot, /mnt/home, ...) if you want them to be detected by genfstab.

Connect to the internet

Assuming a wired connection, running dhclient or dhcpcd is sufficient to get a lease. For more info visit configuring network.

Wireless

If on a wireless connection, see Wireless Setup and Netcfg for details on establishing a connection to your access point.

Install the base system

Before installing, you may want to edit /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist such that your preferred mirror is first. This copy of the mirrorlist will be installed on your new system by pacstrap as well, so it's worth getting it right.

Using the pacstrap script we install the base system. The base-devel package group should also be installed if you plan on compiling software from the AUR or using ABS.

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

Other packages can be installed by appending their names to the above command (space seperated), including the bootloader if you want.

Install a bootloader

GRUB

• For BIOS:

# pacstrap /mnt grub-bios

• For EFI (in rare cases you will need grub-efi-i386 instead):

# pacstrap /mnt grub-efi-x86_64

• Install GRUB after chrooting (refer to Configure system section).

Syslinux

# pacstrap /mnt syslinux

Configure system

Generate an fstab with the following command (if you prefer to use UUIDs or labels, add the -U or -L option, respectively):

# genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Next we chroot into our newly installed system:

# arch-chroot /mnt

• Write your hostname to /etc/hostname.
• Symlink /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Zone/SubZone. Replace Zone and Subzone to your liking. For example:

# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Athens /etc/localtime

• Set locale preferences in /etc/locale.conf.
• Uncomment the selected locale in /etc/locale.gen and generate it with locale-gen.
• Configure /etc/mkinitcpio.conf as needed (see mkinitcpio) and create an initial RAM disk with:

# mkinitcpio -p linux

• Configure the bootloader: refer back to the appropriate article from the bootloader installation section.

• Set a root password with passwd.

Unmount leftovers

If you are still in the chroot environment type exit or press Template:Keypress in order to exit. Earlier we mounted the partitions under /mnt. In this step we will unmount them:

# umount /mnt/{boot,home,}

Finally reboot and configure your system as explained in Beginners' Guide/Post-Installation.