Arch ~ A VirtualBox Installation
Arch Linux is one of those things that I’ve known about for a long time but have never really gotten around to exploring. I have used manjaro before, which was introduced to me by my friend Sam, but have never used/installed vanilla Arch. This blog is going to cover the steps to setup vanilla Arch using this installation guide which was suggested to me by zer0the0ry.
Before starting I should note that the guide suggests to be in UEFI BIOS mode, but I am going to be using legacy for the first installation.
Since this is my first time installing vanilla Arch, I am going to be using virtualbox, which can be installed via
sudo apt install virtualbox
Next to download the vanilla Arch ISO which is available on the archlinux downloads page. As rwxrob suggests, you should verify the SHA1/MD5 checksums and the PGP signature of the ISO before continuing.
The MD5 checksum can be verified via the md5sum command and likewise the SHA1 checksum can be verified via the sha1sum command.
To verify the PGP signature we need to download the archlinux-2020.04.01-x86_64.iso.sig file which can be found in the same place as the ISO. Run the following command.
gpg --verify archlinux-2020.04.01-x86_64.iso.sig
Because we don’t have the public key we have to run
gpg --recv-key 4AA4767BBC9C4B1D18AE28B77F2D434B9741E8AC, then run the above command again.
The output should be
gpg: Signature made Wed 01 Apr 2020 16:38:31 NZDT
gpg: using RSA key 4AA4767BBC9C4B1D18AE28B77F2D434B9741E8AC
gpg: Good signature from "Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 4AA4 767B BC9C 4B1D 18AE 28B7 7F2D 434B 9741 E8AC
Once archiso has booted, the first thing to do is an update && upgrade via pacman -Sy.
Next to change the root password via passwd.
I am on my desktop, which is connected via ethernet so I will be skipping the step to connect to WiFi via wifi-menu.
The next command the guide suggests is timedatectl set-ntp true to make sure the systems clock is correct.
To check the BIOS mode, enter the command ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars. If the directory does not exist it means the legacy BIOS mode is active. As I stated at the start the guide suggests UEFI, but I am using legacy.
Now to partition.
To find the drive to be paritioned run the fdisk -l command. In my case the drive is called /dev/sda, so I ran the command fdisk /dev/sda.
The guide states that if you are using BIOS, the partition table type used should be DOS. To create a new partition table enter o. Then to create a new partition enter n, choose a partition number, the first sector, and finally the last sector. I left mine all default as I am not going to bother with a swap file for my first installation. One last thing is to set the bootable flag via a. Finally enter w to write and exit.
Once the partitioning is done its time to format the partition via the following commands.
mkfs.ext4 -L ROOT /dev/sda1
Remember to change the /dev/sda1 value to whatever drive and partition number you are using.
I’ve come across the mkfs command before when using dd to create a live USB, but haven’t really explored what the command actually does. man mkfs shows that the mkfs command is used for building a Linux filesystem. It should also be noted that it states in the man page “this mkfs frontend is deprecated in favour of filesystem specific mkfs.type utils.”, which would explain why the command ismkfs.ext4. Looking up man mkfs.ext4 confused me a bit at first as it comes up with mke2fs which is a command to create an ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem. It made more sense when I read the part in the description stating “If mke2fs is run as mkfs.XXX (i.e., mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, or mkfs.ext4) the option -t XXX is implied…” The -t flag is to specify the filesystem type. -L sets the label of the volume, in this case ROOT.
Very interesting and always fun to learn something new!
After the formatting is done, it’s time to mount the filesystem via the following.
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
Time for the base installation.
The first thing the guide suggests is to “rank the mirrors before for faster downloads”. I didn’t quite understand what this meant, but after a quick Lynx search for archlinux-keyring reflector I came across the Reflector Arch-Wiki page. It states “Reflector is a script which can retrieve the latest mirror list from the MirrorStatus page, filter the most up-to-date mirrors, sort them by speed and overwrite the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.”
Since I live in New Zealand this is actually pretty handy.
To rank the mirrorlist I ran the following commands.
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring reflector
reflector --country 'New Zealand' --age 15 --protocol https --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Next to start the installation via the following.
pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware linux-lts sysfsutils usbutils e2fsprogs inetutils netctl vi less which man-db man-pages intel-ucode
Can you spot the difference to the guide in the above command (other than intel-ucode since im using an Intel CPU)?
After the packages have finished installing the next thing to do is to create the filesystem table via
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Finally to change to the installed system via arch-chroot /mnt.
Onto installing the bootloader
Run the following commands.
pacman -S grub os-prober
grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Configuring the system.
If you guessed the above question correctly you will have noticed I use vi and not nano.
First thing to do is to setup the hostname via the following.
echo oglinuk > /etc/hostname (replace oglinuk with your desired name)
then add the following lines to /etc/hosts.
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 oglinuk.localdomain oglinuk
Now that the hostname is setup its time to setup the locale. First to uncomment any language relevant in /etc/locale.gen. In my case I am going to uncomment en_NZ.UTF-8 UTF-8 and en_NZ ISO-8859-1. After the changes have been made run the command locale-gen.
Once the locales have been generated, the next thing to do is to set the locale via the following.
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
and set the keymap via
echo KEYMAP=us > /etc/vconsole.conf
After the locale has been setup, the next thing to do is to setup the time && date via the following.
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/NZ /etc/localtime (ensure you replace NZ with your country)
hwclock --systohc --utc
With time && date setup, on to setting up multilib, which is needed for gaming. Uncomment the following lines in /etc/pacman.conf.
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
then run pacman -Syu
Setting up a User
We setup the root password at the start, so I skipping that step. To create a new user execute the following.
useradd -m -g users -G wheel,audio,video,storage,power,input,optical,sys,log,network,floppy,scanner,rfkill,lp,adm -s /bin/bash oglinuk
Replace oglinuk with your desired username.
Then run passwd oglinuk.
Next enable sudo via EDITOR=vi visudo, then uncommenting the following line.
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
Installing a Desktop
First to install a display server via the following.
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-xrandr xorg-xfontsel xorg-xkill
Next for the desktop environment. I am going to be using Xfce.
pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies
For the display manager I am going to use SDDM.
pacman -S ssdm
systemctl enable sddm
Installing Useful Packages
General packages
pacman -S linux-headers linux-lts-headers dkms jshon expac git curl wget acpid avahi net-tools xdg-user-dirs alarcitty lynx tmux go docker
I am not using an SSD so I am skipping the step for running systemctl enable --now fstrim.timer.
Media packages
pacman -S gst-libav gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly gstreamer-vaapi gst-transcoder x264 x265 lame
I am not going to bother with printer support as I have no use for it.
Graphics drivers
pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa
pacman -S vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
I have a NVIDIA 1050 ti so I am going to install the NVIDIA drivers.
pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils
Gaming packages
pacman -S vkd3d lib32-vkd3d faudio lib32-faudio
Networking packages
pacman -S networkmanager networkmanager-openvpn networkmanager-pptp networkmanager-vpnc
systemctl enable NetworkManager
Archive and filesystem util packages
pacman -S p7zip unrar unarchiver unzip unace xz rsync nfs-utils cifs-utils ntfs-3g exfat-utils
Sound packages
pacman -S alsa-utils pulseaudio-alsa pulseaudio-equalizer
Since I am using the Xfce desktop environment, I am going to install the control app for the GTK desktop.
pacman -S pavucontrol
The guide suggests to comment out the load-module module-role-cork line in /etc/pulse/default.pa file.
Reboot
exit
umount -R /mnt
telinit 6
telinit is a command I’ve never seen before. man telinit shows that the command telinit is used to change the SysV system runlevel. The 6 option is to reboot the machine. The man page does state that “since the concept of SysV runlevels is obsolete the runlevel requests will be transparently translated into systemd unit activation requests.” Cool stuff!
Post Installation
The guide suggest to set the X11 keymap via localectl set-x11-keyman us. Make sure you replace us with your desired keymap.
Now to setup the AUR helper, which we will be using yay, an AUR helper written entirely in Golang.
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay && makepkg -rsi
cd .. && rm -rf yay
That’s all I am going to cover as I am not interested in themes or any GUI stuff. Feel free to continue following the guide if you are wanting to customize the themeing. Hope you enjoyed and now to play around with the fresh Arch install! Shout out to D3S0X for the awesome guide and to zer0the0ry for the suggestion!