Linux My first install of Arch Linux

I have mostly used Fedora and flavors of Debian based Linux distributions. Arch was always a meme which I laughed at but never gave it a shot. So I decided to finally give it a shot in order to finally claim



So off I went to holy grail of arch documentation, the ArchWiki and landed on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide and began my journey.

My bare metal is a Fedora and Windows 11 dual boot installations. I wanted to install Arch in a VM as I am not crazy enough to install it as my main OS. I also feel virtual machine is always the best way to test a new OS.
Plan was to install arch in VM created using Hyper-V as technically its a Type 1 hypervisor.

Time to Install

• Download the arch bootable ISO using torrent (Only way I use torrent for is to download Linux distribution copies /s)
• Verified the downloaded ISO using checksum
• Fire up and new VM and assign 6gb working ram and set boot to the iso for first boot
• 1st error
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• Faced it before and my solution for it was to turn off secure boot in settings and we are in zsh shell. Yay
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• Time to follow the guide.
• Change keyboard layout, time synchronization and connect to internet according to guide. I am connected via lan to my host machine which is connected via external virtual switch to the VM to give internet. DHCP server running on my router. So left everything left on default.
• Next was the important one. After some research I found a way which is bit more easier and user friendly than default guide of using fdisk.
• Verify the drive
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• Going to be using sda.
• No need to clean it as its a brand new virtual hard disk I just created.
• Instead of fdisk I am going to using cgdisk.
• So used cgdisk /dev/sda
• A warning and I am in ready to partition for my Arch
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• Create new partition
• First sector default (So enter)
• Size 1 Gb so set to 1024MiB
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• Asks for type. Boot drive so EF00
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• name it boot. And we created our first partition which is boot.
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• Similarly created swap of 8gb with code of 8200 for swap
• 20GB was assigned to root code 8300 and rest as home 8300
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• Write and you drive was partitioned
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• Formatted the partitions created. Boot as fat32, swap and rest root and home as ext4
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• Time to mount
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• Installation from mirror servers
• Ran
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• Synchronize pacman and install pacman-contrib package
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• Run rankmirrors to organize and rank the mirrors based on your connection speed. Takes a bit of time so no need to worry here. I choose 6 servers as that should be plenty.
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• You view the mirror list to check once its done. Will be different based on connection and location
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• Time to install
• pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware base-devel
• Arch installed technically.

Time to configure.

• Fstab : Ran genfstab -U -r /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
• Verified the fstab file using nano (or any text editor) to open it nano /mnt/etc/fstab
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• Changed root
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• Now we are inside our installation of arch.
• Synchronized pacman and installed nano to edit locale.gen file
• nano /etc/locale.gen
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• For India find en_IN-UTF-8 (Ctrl+W and find). Uncommented the line and saved it.
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• Ran locale-gen. Based on my changes to locale.gen file its generates locales
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• Create the LANG language from this
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• Set time zone and synchronize hw clock
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• Set hostname
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• 32 bit support. Modify the pacman config file
• Uncommented the multilib line and include line. Saved configuration file and ran pacman -Sy
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• Changed root password, added new user with access rights
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• Correct command
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• Changed password of new userid
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• Edit sudo settings
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• Uncomment wheel line and add line in end to use root password
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• Installed bootloader
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• Created bootloader entries file
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• Create entries
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• Added a boot option to that partition which I created before to root.
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• All ok if I can see it here
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• Installed neofetch / screenshot is still archiso. But normal installed arch is still working. Cant seem to change this image sadly
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Officially I can say I use Arch BTW