Installing Arch with the Nov 2012 - iso

[viking60]

Well Arch has a reputation of being hard to install - and it is not if you know how to do it. In any other case - it is hard So to take the mystery out of it and to give you the opportunity to ask questions without being confronted with statements about you being to lazy to do your own research (or other very cool statements from people mastering the install to perfection) - I thought I should share my humble experience.

So I tried to ruin my existing Arch install to test the new install iso and that did not go so well because Arch complained about existing files and sysvinit having to be replaced etc.
That is a well known thing for those who have manually transformed Arch to 100 % systemd (as it all is now).

Deep down I think that is a good thing though - we do not want to destroy existing Arch installs. So I tooke the blodaxe Live CD and installed it just to get the partitioning going from another system because the Arch recommended cfdisk is supposed to do stuff in a way that Grub2 could find hard to digest (different start sector that should be 2048 etc etc..)

Then I booted the Arch iso that automatically logs into root, and changed to viking keyboard with the command

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loadkeys no-latin1

After that I had a look at my partitioning with

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lsblk /dev/sda

And thought I was good to go so I tried to mount one partition (normally I have two; with /home separated but not in this example);

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mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

And got some complaints about the partition type .. or something.
So the mount did not go through. But that is easy to fix so I did a:

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mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

That went through and after that I could mount it as described above.
Finally I put the viking mirrors on top in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist as I was told by the Arch beginners guide.

So finally by now we are actually able to install Arch with a script called pacstrap so here we go:

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pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

According to the beginners guide you could use an -i switch here to pick and chose packages from base and base-devel but I would not bother - it did not work here anyway
(It gave an error message so the command would not run at all).

Then I "chrooted" into the environment

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arch-chroot /mnt

and fixed the terminal language to Valhalian by uncomenting the correct language

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nano /etc/locale.gen

After that it was time to generate the effects of the change with:

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locale-gen

An after that I created and populated the locale.conf

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# echo LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8

Then I wanted to make the stick after a reboot so I had to edit one more file

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nano /etc/vconsole.conf

And in this empty file I entered

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KEYMAP=no-latin1
FONT_MAP=

Then I was a good boy and did what the guide told me to do regarding Timezones - namely creating a symlink like this

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ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Oslo /etc/localtime

(same time as Valhalla).
To find it I did a ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe. If you are a Genius (they all use Apple - I am told) you might get the idea to change Europe to something else if you live - say - in America

I set the HW clock to UTC

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hwclock --systohc --utc

You could replace --utc with --localtime because that is what Windows likes if you are dualbooting - but there is a registry-fix to be had for Windows so you can use UTC there too.

Time to give the child a name now:

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echo archbox > /etc/hostname

Then I need to configure my network that is working perfectly fine in the install iso environment but won't in the installed environment if you forget it.

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 systemctl enable [email protected]

So now you need to set a root password:

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passwd

takes care of that.
To make a normal user just do an:

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adduser

and answer the prompts - there are a lot of them and you can simply press ENTER on the ones you do not understand.
You do not have to worry about setting repos at this point - the most important ones are already set.

Since we need something to boot this stuff I decided to go for grub this time so I installed it like this:

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pacman -S grub-bios

Then I had to run:

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grub-install /dev/sda

no numbers after sda
Them we generate the cfg file:

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grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

And that was it! See how easy it is?

Now we still have to exit and unmount

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exit

Then

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umount /mnt

And reboot....

Now you can log in with your created user and start installing a DE if you need it.

Imagine that some people think this is hard.. A walk in the park - that is what it is Just get a and and you will manage just fine.

[rolf]

I did install Arch, once, back in the day, when you had to type in the proper commands while schussing five miles in the snow, uphill, both ways! wait a minute..

So, basically, this looks like a method that automates some of the process so it is not quite so complicated to get an Arch system up and running?

Lots on my plate, still, but good job keeping us up-to-date on new developments.

p.s.

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mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

Have you heard about some recent kernel bug(s) with ext4 kernel corruption? ALERT : Ext4 data corruption trouble on the latest kernels

I first heard of it there and links or google can show more information. Apparently, there are patches but it looks to me this issue might not be completely put to bed, as yet.

[viking60]

This iso has kernel 3.6.6-1 so it should be fixed. An Vikings always walk Five miles uphill in snow - bare footed - because they like it
There are still a lot of commands to remember and no GUI install. But the documentation is good - and it works.
And once you have done it you will find the best KDE or Gnome or Openbox that you have ever seen. You will never lack anything.
But I will maintain that this is not a distro for the greenhorns - You have to have some hair on your chest.
To get easy access to AUR just add this to your /etc/pacman.conf file:

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[archlinuxfr]
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch


And install yaourt. (All archers will hate me for this tip because it is supposed to be done in a much harder way )

PS:
If you get cryptiv messages right after boot - like me - you can install the amd-ucode package.