Talk:Installation guide

Suggest a repo sync before pacstrap?

Recently I've seen several people have pacstrap fail during installation due to a failure to retrieve files. I have also ran into this issue myself several times in the past. Running pacman -Syy to sync the repos usually fixes this. Should we include an optional step to sync the repos before running pacstrap? Or at least mention that if you get the error failed to retrieve some files to try syncing the repos first? Caviarcbr (talk) 11:04, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

pacstrap already does this: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-install-scripts/-/blob/v31/pacstrap.in?ref_type=tags#L19

Your mirror was probably out of sync.

— andreymal (talk) 11:47, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Chapter "2.1 Select the mirrors" - because: "On the live system, all HTTPS mirrors are enabled" Ua4000 (talk) 11:53, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Maybe it's worth mentioning in this chapter that not updating the mirrorlist can cause errors when running pacstrap. As it's worded now, it makes it seem like it's only to increase download speed. I know it's not listed as an optional step, so people should be doing it anyway, but it seems the importance of this step isn't properly conveyed, and it's causing issues for people. Caviarcbr (talk) 12:00, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Not updating the mirrorlist will land people on the fastly mirror, I don't see how people would encounter the same error you had in that case. A search on our forums or the web gave no relevant results for Failed retrieving file associated with "fastly.mirror.pkgbuild.com": do you have examples of people having issues during installation?

Edit: Nothing on my IRC logs either.

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 07:06, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Missing mention of the kernel packages

In Installation guide#Install essential packages, the checklist does not mention the installation of a kernel. The user could miss this package, or assume the base package have a kernel as (required) dependency and is installed already, which is not. This would make the installation missing kernel, and the user would only notice when they run mkinitcpio later, or worse, if they skip the step if their use case don't need to re-run it. This actually happened with me on my install. Huupoke12 (talk) 09:37, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

The checklist is for things to install in addition to base, linux and linux-firmware. The example command, below it, includes a kernel package. -- nl6720 (talk) 10:34, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Both sentenses,

• You can substitute linux with a kernel package of your choice, or you could omit it entirely when installing in a container.
• You could omit the installation of the firmware package when installing in a virtual machine or container.

could be moved from "Tip" to the normal listing above, including a little rewording and moving to the top of the list:

• a kernel package of your choice, could be omitted entirely when installing in a container.
• firmware package, can be omitted when installing in a virtual machine or container

Ua4000 (talk) 17:11, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

The firmware is already listed in the list though: "specific firmware for other devices not included in linux-firmware (e.g. sof-firmware for onboard audio, linux-firmware-marvell for Marvell wireless and any of the multiple firmware packages for Broadcom wireless)," is item number four in the list.

It's probably not bad to have all packages in the list instead of in a tip, as we state "The only mandatory package to install is base".

Drafted: I tried to keep everything logically ordered with kernel, microcode and firmware are moved up top as they can all be omitted in containers and virtual machines, the tip about it is moved just under the list instead of at the very end.

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 09:06, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

Draft

No configuration (except for /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist) gets carried over from the live environment to the installed system. The only mandatory package to install is base, which does not include all tools from the live installation, so installing more packages is frequently necessary.

In particular, review the following software and install everything that you need:

• a kernel package of your choice−to manage hardware, schedule processes and enforce security,
• CPU microcode updates—amd-ucode or intel-ucode—for hardware bug and security fixes,
• specific firmware for other devices not included in linux-firmware (e.g. sof-firmware for onboard audio, linux-firmware-marvell for Marvell wireless and any of the multiple firmware packages for Broadcom wireless),
• userspace utilities for file systems that will be used on the system—for the purposes of e.g. file system creation and fsck,
• utilities for accessing and managing RAID or LVM if they will be used on the system,
• software necessary for networking (e.g. a network manager or a standalone DHCP client, authentication software for Wi-Fi, ModemManager for mobile broadband connections),
• a console text editor (e.g nano) to allow editing configuration files from the console,
• packages for accessing documentation in man and info pages: man-db, man-pages and texinfo.

Tip The kernel, microcode and firmware can be omitted entirely when installing in a container or a virtual machine.

For comparison, packages available in the live system can be found in pkglist.x86_64.txt.

To install more packages or package groups, append the names to the pacstrap(8) command below (space separated) or use pacman to install them while chrooted into the new system.

For example, a basic installation with the Linux kernel and firmware for common hardware:

# pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware

Tip This initial package selection in pacstrap only needs to include what is required for the system to boot; all other software can be installed or replaced post-installation.