[SOLVED] Arch installation for an end user

[rich shore]

So recently I've been thinking of installing Arch Linux on my machine and I find that its philosophy matches mine a lot. However, I'm not too experienced with Linux in general. Doing an install using the ArchWiki would be very very barebones and I really don't know what packages I would need for a good experience.

I am not afraid to use the terminal and I am willing to learn, I am finding Linux super interesting and day by day I want to install it and today I take the shot.

IMPORTANT: Dualbooting with Windows

[heavy steeple]

@rich shore what de/wm do you want to install

[rich shore]

Also; by end user I do not mean racecar Johnny but I mean a general end user and how would a typical user in here do an installation and know what packages to install, it's a bit hard for me if it's very barebones like arch

[rich shore]

I was thinking of hyprland

hold up a sec ill find what i want to copy

wait sorry

https://github.com/DeLuks2006/Linux_Configs/tree/main/Hyprland here

this is what i want to replicate

[rich shore]

https://github.com/DeLuks2006/dot-files try this @heavy steeple

[heavy steeple]

I wouldn't recommend using a wm, ie hyprland for my first use of a wm in arch, I would recommended using a de to get to know arch a little bit better, then use a wm

[rich shore]

i have used linux mint for a few weeks and occasionally arch and debian on vms with kde

[heavy steeple]

then proceed

[rich shore]

arch not that much though

i want to dualboot with windows as well

[heavy steeple]

10 or 11?

[rich shore]

10

[heavy steeple]

10 is eol

[rich shore]

i know

but this machine probably isnt gonna last till then lol

ill buy another one probs but we can proceed

[heavy steeple]

first, make the arch partition

give it a name

[rich shore]

this is what it looks like

currently

im not going to be installing much so i think that something like 120gb should be fine

[rich shore]

is it safe to shrink the C: partition?

[heavy steeple]

yes, just read the warning

[rich shore]

@heavy steeple alright done

[heavy steeple]

reboot into the iso

[rich shore]

alright

It's taking a while

I'll just wait

@heavy steeple done

I'm in the iso

Internet is working

[heavy steeple]

@rich shore no need for the ping

manual install or aerchinstall?

[rich shore]

Yeah sorry, I tend to do that sometimes

[rich shore]

I'm fine with either

I'd prefer manual though

[heavy steeple]

cat /sys/firmware/efi/fw_platform_size

[rich shore]

Crap, I forgot to save the changes in disk management 😬

Is it fine if I do it in cfdisk later?

[heavy steeple]

yes

[rich shore]

It returns no such file or directory

Assuming it's bios

[heavy steeple]

ping -c3 archlinux.org

[rich shore]

Wirks

Works*

Returns 64 bytes

[heavy steeple]

did the system not boot in the mode you desired?

[rich shore]

What do you mean

[heavy steeple]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide#Verify_the_boot_mode

[rich shore]

My machine is 14 years old so theres no way for uefi in this machine

It's BIOS

[heavy steeple]

grep -o -w 'lm' /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u

[rich shore]

Returns lm

[heavy steeple]

timedatectl

is that accurate?

[rich shore]

Nope, 1 hour behind

[heavy steeple]

we can fix that later

now make the partition for arch

[rich shore]

Alright

Cfdisk right

[heavy steeple]

or your favorite partition manager

with ext4?

[rich shore]

There's 117.2G free space which is the thing that I did earlier in disk management

[rich shore]

Not sure, I've heard about btrfs too

But you're the more experienced one so you know what's probably best for me

[heavy steeple]

ext4 is simpler

[rich shore]

Alright I'll do ext4 then

(don't mind the other stuff below) so I wrote the changes in cfdisk

[heavy steeple]

looks ok

with or without swap?

[rich shore]

With

My system only had 4gb ram and I doubt that it's gonna be enough

[heavy steeple]

Mount the root volume to /mnt

[rich shore]

Wait I haven't formatted the partition yet

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4 right

[heavy steeple]

mkfs.ext4 /dev/root_partition

[rich shore]

Done

[heavy steeple]

mkswap /dev/swap_partition

[torpid birch]

Which partition is meant to be your swap partition?

[rich shore]

Wait

Swap isn't possible as bios only supports up to 4 partitions

And I can't really delete any

Let's continue

[torpid birch]

You could set up a logical partition

But it's possible to set up a swap file or zram later

[rich shore]

Alrighty

What's next

[torpid birch]

Mount your root partition to /mnt

[heavy steeple]

@rich shore

[rich shore]

Done already

[torpid birch]

If you want, you can use reflector to get a mirrorlist that works better for your location, but you could also just do this later

[rich shore]

Alright I'll do it later

But what now

Also I know I sound like a total noob

[torpid birch]

Then you can get to running pacstrap

[rich shore]

I know that there is pacstrap but just wanting to make sure

[torpid birch]

Which installs the first packages to your system

There's a few packages you'll want, just give me a second to list some

[rich shore]

Yup but here I run into a problem: I really don't know what to install

I know there is linux linux-firmware base base-devel etc but point is that I see people with a big list of packages and it's very different for everyone and meanwhile I typically don't know what I want to install and then it's a mess of sorts

[heavy steeple]

first install those packages, then a de, just to get a wm installed

[rich shore]

Yeah it's doing that

[torpid birch]

base - basic packages for the system
base-devel - packages needed for using the AUR and compiling stuff
linux - the kernel
linux-firmware - collection of drivers
text editor like nano or vim
network software like networkmanager or iwd
bootloader like systemd-boot (included in base) or grub

here's a few

[rich shore]

Done

Pacstrap is done now

[rich shore]

Didn't do vim or networkmanager

[heavy steeple]

xfce4, just to get a de up and running to make installing a wm easier

[rich shore]

But I need those

[rich shore]

So now I do pacman -S xfce4

[torpid birch]

It's not that bad to install a WM from the terminal

[torpid birch]

But if you want to, no, not like that

You can wait until you get into chroot before you install it

[rich shore]

Alright but what come next

Genfstab

I'll do that

Do I just follow the installation article for now?

@heavy steeple

Sorry, just a bump

I got till the root password part

[rich shore]

I installed grub

[torpid birch]

Do you still need help with the installation?

[rich shore]

No, I figured it out on my own :)

I installed hyprland and it's going pretty well, going to configure it tomorrow be ause I still haven't done much but I love it so far :)

[torpid birch]

That's good to hear 👍

[real sentinel]

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