It was a long time dream to set up Arch Linux. After 5 years of using Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian Servers that I managed to learn enough to be able to try Arch Linux. As the rumours say, the latter is not for the faint heart. Just copy pasting Arch Linux beginner’s installation guide won’t make it happen.
The beginner’s installation guide
Arch has a beginner’s guide which I tried to follow. It all seemed to work perfectly until I rebooted the laptop. The UEFI bootloader was loaded but Arch was not starting.
I retried but this time following a YouTube tutorial. And it worked with some minor modifications. As I said, you need to understand what you’re doing. Following any guide blindly will not guarantee success.
WiFi
I was very much surprised at how easy it was to connect the Live Distro from USB to WiFi.
# wifi-menu
And just followed the dialogue box. Entered the WiFi password and there you go! But once you installed the OS on your drive, you gotta install
“dialog” and “wpa_supplicant” package. To do so, I live booted with the Arch USB. Once the command prompt opened
# wifi-menu // Connect to wifi
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
# arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
# pacman -S dialog wpa_supplicant
# exit
# reboot
When you reboot, you’ll be able to run wifi-menu locally. What I did above was use the Live USB as OS, connect to WiFi then make it believe that the filesystem it is currently working on has changed to /mnt which is pointing to /dev/sda2. Might seem confusing at first but with experience, it’ll become natural 😉
Pacman
pacman is the package manager. On Ubuntu and Debian, we know the famous apt-get and openSUSE’s zypper.
# apt-get install package
# pacman -S package# apt-get remove package
# pacman -R package# apt-get autoremove package
# pacman -Rs package# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
# pacman -Syu
apt-get is much easier and verbose for the newcomers.
GUI
By default, you get only a command prompt when installed. I forgot which commands I ran to get KDE up and running.
# pacman -S xorg sddm plasma
That’s it for this blog post. Do try Arch in a VM or a test laptop ONLY if you’re beginner like me. Partitioning is done in CLI and can result is screwing your whole Hard Drive.
Happy learning 😀