An Arch Linux installation guide and walkthrough, specifically for new Linux users who would like to learn more about their system. I'll be installing vanilla Arch on a Thinkpad, and explaining exactly what each step does along the way.
Follow-up vid - configuring your new Arch installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-puvglgx6Qs
This video covers:
0:00 What are we doing today?
1:23 Why Arch?
5:37 Flashing the Arch ISO
9:40 Booting the live environment, checking system type, basic configuration
22:23 Partitioning your disks
33:48 Installing essential packages and chrooting into the system
37:50 Final configuration and bootloader installation
47:25 Arch is installed!
As well as:
- Basic/new-user friendly command line and vim usage
- Basic explanation of partitions and the root filesytem
- Explanation along the way to make sure you understand what is happening at each step.
If anything is unclear or wrong, let me know in a comment, and I will make note of that in the description. I highly recommend following along on the Arch Linux official installation guide.
I will create a follow-up video about how to configure your system following a basic Arch install.
I am performing a BIOS install with an unmounted bios-boot partition, so if you are on a UEFI system, the following changes are necessary:
1. Instead of creating a BIOS boot partition, create an EFI system partition. Make this a 2GB partition, with type EF00.
2. When formatting the partition, use command mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda1
3. When mounting other partitions, also mount your EFI partition, after making a directory /mnt/boot for it.
4. When generating an fstab file, ensure that your EFI partition is included in the output file.
5. Before installing GRUB, install efibootmgr with pacman (pacman -S efibootmgr).
6. When installing the GRUB bootloader, use the command grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB
Lastly, if you are installing Arch alongside another OS:
Create the new Linux partitions in free space without removing the old, however if you are on UEFI and already have an EFI partition, do not make a new one, instead just mount that one. Before rebooting, while chrooted in, install the package os-prober, and run the command os-prober as root to detect and generate a boot entry. If you have a Windows installation alongside Linux, make sure you have fast-boot disabled.