Step2. prepare environment and install

This series posts are intend to collect the knowledge which I gathered while trying Arch Linux. And the planned posts would be

• step3. customize archlinux

Outline of this post

• create bootable media
• partitioning (in UEFI BIOS case)
• install
  • Question: how to install without internet?

create bootable media

• download iso
• dd to usb disk: dd bs=4M if=/path/to/archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdx status=progress && sync
• TODO: multi-bootable usb disk.

partitioning

• Testing for a UEFI Boot:
  • ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
• cfdisk /dev/sdX
  • create GPT (partition table)
  • set tye of boot partition to “EFI partition” aka ESP (EFI System Partition) or EFISYS, type 0xEF00
  • format EFI partition as Fat32
    • mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
  • format data(filesystem partition) partition to ext4
    • mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
  • format swap partition, and enable it btw.
    • mkswap /dev/sda3
    • swapon /dev/sda3

Installation

• just follow this post to install every thing.
  • for bootstrap
    • you need dhcp be enabled first
      • #systemctl enable dhcpcd.service
    • choose a closer sit for downloading. Select_the_mirrors
  • for bootloader:
    • for configuration file, arch.conf, it could copy from /usr/share/systemd/bootctl/
    • for install systemd-boot, you can also specify the target folder to install bootctl --path=esp install
  • for desktop you can pick one from this post, for example:
    • lxde + lxdm failed …

[Install xfce4 Desktop Environment]
$ sudo pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies

[Install, Start & Enable lightdm Display Manager]
$ sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
greeter-session=lightdm-deepin-greeter

$ sudo systemctl start lightdm.service
$ sudo systemctl enable lightdm.service

something special for VMware case

• refer to this post
  • create a guest machine which have UEFI BIOS
    • By adding firmware = "efi" in configuration file *.efi
• Also this comment in thread could be a reference

When needing to quickly install in a VM, I usually don't bother about stuff such as partitioning, swap, timezone, locale, users, etc. Minimum needed -

mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda
mount /dev/sda /mnt
pacstrap /mnt base grub btrfs-progs
genfstab /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
arch-chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

exit
reboot

[TODO] install with wifi enabled