Jan 26, 2018

ARCH LINUX EFI BTRFS INSTALL NOTES

Keyboard-layout

If you would like a non us qwerty lqyout:

# loadkeys be-latin1

Connect to the internet

# wifi-menu

Partition the disks

Cfdisk

# cfdisk /dev/sdx

First partiton efi) size: 1GiB, hexcode: EF00, name: boot
Second partition swap) size: <>GiB, hexcode: 8200, name: swap
Third partition root) size: <>GiB, hexcode: 8300, name: root

Write to disk

NOTE: replace sdx with the name of the partition you want to use.

NOTE: swap size depends on ram size, 1.5 times ram, fe. if you have 16G of ram, commonly you would use a swap size of 24GiB.

NOTE: having an all-in-one partition is used for personal use only, for server use it is recommended to have a seperate home and root partition.

Format the partitions

# mkfs.vfat /dev/sdx1
# mkswap /dev/sdx2
# swapon /dev/sdx2
# mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdx3

Mount the file systems

# mount /dev/sdx3 /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/sdx1 /mnt/boot

NOTE: if you have made a home partition you will need to create a home directory in /mnt and mount the partition to /mnt/home.

Setting up mirrorlist

# cp /etc/pacman.d.mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup
# sed -i 's/^#Server/Server/' /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup
# rankmirrors -n 6 /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup > /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

NOTE: this can take a while 10-15mins.

Pacstrap

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

Genfstab

# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Change the fsck order of your btrfs partition in etc/fstab from 1 to 0.

NOTE: check if the UUID's are the right ones and that every entry in etc/fstab has a UUID instead of the logical path (fe. /boot)! check with 'blkid'.

Arch-chroot

# arch-chroot /mnt

Time,locale and language

Set the time zone.

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Brussels /etc/localtime
# hwclock --systohc

Edit /etc/locale.gen and search for the lines 'be_BY.UTF-8 UTF-8' and 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8' . Uncomment these.

# locale-gen

# echo 'LANG=en_US.UTF-8' > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

If you still want a non US qwerty layout

# echo 'KEYMAP=be-latin1' > /etc/vconsole.conf

Hostname

# echo 'myhostname' > /etc/hostname

Add an entry to hosts.

# vi /etc/hosts

127.0.1.1 myhostname.localdomain  myhostname

Arch user repos

Edit /etc/pacman.conf and add.

[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

Now you can (you will need to be non root):

$ pacan -S yaourt
$ yaourt -S packer

Root password and adding a user

# passwd

Install sudo package (you will need the vim package first).

# useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power -s /bin/bash <user>
# passwd <user>

# visudo

Uncomment:

'%wheel ALL=(ALL)' ALL

Add this line under it:

Defaults rootpw

Install initial packages

# pacman -Syyu
# pacman -S intel-ucode btrfs-progs wireless_tools wpa_supplicant networkmanager network-manager-applet 
# pacman -S mesa 
# pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-xinit xorg-twm xorg-xclock xterm

NOTE: use networkmanager for auto internet access.

Bootloader

Check if efivarfs is set up correctly.

# mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /sys/firmware/efi/efivarfs

Use efibootmgr to configure the bootloader:

# efibootmgr -d /dev/<sda> -p 1 -c -L 'Arch Linux EFISTUB' -l /vmlinuz-linux -u 'root=/dev/<sda3> rw initrd=/intel-ucode.img initrd=/initramfs-linux.img'

Reboot (possible errors)

Reboot the system, if you notice a freeze the problem lies with nvidia-drivers.

Install the following packages.

# pacman -S nvidia nvidia-libgl lib32-nvidia-libgl lib32-nvidia-utils nvidia-utils

NOTE: you will need to boot to the original arch installer iso, remount your partition and arch-chroot into your environment.