Install Arch Linux on my daily driver notebook.

Components in this installation

Arch Linux is flexible and there are many guides out there that show you how to install it. During my research I found it unpleasant having to read the entire article before knowing what software the article shows to configure for diferent components. Therefore here’s the list of what Software I use in my Arch Linux Installation:

• System Type: EFI
• Partitioning: LVM (ext4) on LUKS -> all data encrypted (except boot partition)
• Encryption: LUKS2, either using password, keyfile or FIDO2 device
• Bootloader: systemd-boot
• initramfs: systemd-init hooks
• SWAP: swapfile

Disclaimer

I documented in this guide how I installed Arch Linux on my notebook to have a reference I can use if something goes wrong and I need to know how I configured it. It’s also a preparation for the installation as I can test this guide on a virtual machine or another computer and if I know that these commands work, I can configure my system in one run. So don’t expect to have a full guide showing any possibilities and tricks to follow allonw. Note that I’m also just one of many computer scients and not all have the same opinion concering how things are done.

So this guide is mostly for myself, but maybe someone finds it helpful too. Let me know if it was a help for you.

Boot Medium

On a Linux Machine with a usb stick plugged in and internet access these commands will turn your usb stick /dev/sdx into a bootable Arch Linux medium:

wget https://theswissbay.ch/archlinux/iso/2021.02.01/archlinux-2021.05.01-x86_64.iso
cd Download
dd if=archlinux-2021.05.01-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4M

Or if you want to learn something new check out this mutliboot software.

Preparations on live installation

Before installing Arch on the actual disk, there are some checks and configs to do on the live installation.

1. Output of the directory below should not be empty, then we are sure we booted in UEFI mode:

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

2. The default terminal font is quite small and on most laptops it’s hard to read it. We can change it:

ls /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts # list of all available fonts on live system
setfont ter-g20b

3. Plug in a cable and check with ping that you have an internet connection:

ping -c 5 technat.ch

4. If you want to use WiFi you can configure it for this live session. Replace ssid1 with the name of your WiFi and wlan0 with the name of your wifi card (see ip link). You will be asked for the password:

iwctl station wlan0 connect ssid1

5. enable NTP to have an up to date time during installation:

timedatectl set-ntp true

6. generate new pacman mirror list with http mirrors close to you (packages are signed with gpg keys, no needs for slower https):

pacman -Syy
reflector —protocol http -c Switzerland —sort rate —save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Now you should be good to go with the installation. Note that you’ll download quite a lot of packages during the installation, so the faster your internet connection is, the less ☕ you’ll need :)

Partitioning

We are in our live system. But how can we install Arch now? Let’s start by partitioning the disk. For this you need the correct drive. You can find it with lsblk:

NAME                          MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                             8:0    0 476.9G  0 disk
├─sda1                          8:1    0   500M  0 part
└─sda2                          8:2    0 476.5G  0 part

In my case it’s going to be /dev/sda. For the rest of this installation all commands will use /dev/sda. If your drive is another one change that accordingly.

But how does the partitioning layout look like for an Arch installation?

Like that:

As we have a UEFI system we just need one small boot partition for the bootloader. This is the unencrypted part of the installation. The second partition will be encrypted using LUKS before we use LVM to create logical volumes on top of the LUKS device.

Using fdisk, enter the partiton dialog and create a new fresh GPT signature, aka wipe all partitions and data!

fdisk /dev/sda
g

Still in the dialog type those commands to create the first partition:

n
enter
enter
+300M
t
1

And for the second partiton we need those commands:

n
enter
enter
enter
t
enter
43

Now we write the changes to the disk and exit the fdisk dialog:

p
w

Encrypt LVM partition with LUKS

Before we create logical volumes we encrypt the second partition with LUKS:

cryptsetup luksFormat -v /dev/sda2

Type YES to continue and enter a strong password twice.

Now it’s encrypted. But we need to install the system on it so let’s open it again:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 cryptlvm

Note: when opening the device you have to give it a name I called mine cryptlvm but you can name it howevery you want. We will use this name later so remeber it.

This will make the LUKS device available as /dev/mapper/cryptlvm.

FIDO2 Key unlocking

I’m using Yubikeys, so for me a password is not what I want to use for unlocking the device. So I close/lock the device again and run the following commands to configure my Yubikey as another valid auth mechanism:

systemd-cryptenroll --fido2-device=list
systemd-cryptenroll --fido2-device=auto /dev/sda2

Note: Only do this if you really know what you are doing. You need to enter your FIDO2 pin which you should have setup already. If not, read some articles about that before you do that and for now continue using a password.

It’s a good idea to leave the password in place as the first LUKS slot. Just because encryption settings can’t be changed without the password. See the yubikey as sort of a conveniance feature.

LVM

On our encryped partition we can now setup LVM. I’m going to create multiple logical volumes like that:

So I start by creating a physical volume (note the cryptlvm name specified earlier):

pvcreate /dev/mapper/crpytlvm

On top of this PV we create a volume group:

vgcreate vgcrypt /dev/mapper/cryptlvm

And then we need to define our logical volumes:

lvcreate -L 40GB vgcrypt -n root
lvcreate -L 20GB vgcrypt -n var
lvcreate -L 5GB  vgcrypt -n tmp
lvcreate -L 300GB vgcrypt -n vm
lvcreate -L 100GB vgcrypt -n home
modprobe dm_mod
vgscan
vgchange -ay

Note: It’s not necessary to create so many logical volumes. You could also just do the root volume. But for better separation and overview about where the space is used I created multiple ones. Also I didn’t fill up the entire space of my volume group. This is usefull if I have to extend a logical volume in the future as extending is easier than shrinking. But if you want you can also let one volume use the reminder of the space:

lvcreate -l 100%FREE vgcrypt -n home

If you ever have to shrink an LV and extend another one, see this guide in my Wiki for some tipps how to do this with the Arch ISO.

Formatting

Now that partitioning is done we need to format our volumes. The boot partition should be FAT32, for the others you have multiple options, I use ext4.

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vgcrypt/root
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vgcrypt/var
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vgcrypt/tmp
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vgcrypt/home
mkfs.ext4 /dev/vgcrypt/vm

Mount partitions

We’re coming close to the inital bootstrap of Arch. For this we now need to mount our volumes in the live system. I’m doing this below /mnt, so that from the perspective of the installed system /mnt is /:

mount /dev/vgcrypt/root /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/{home,boot,vm,tmp,var,etc}
mount /dev/vgcrypt/home /mnt/home
mount /dev/vgcrypt/vm /mnt/vm
mount /dev/vgcrypt/tmp /mnt/tmp
mount /dev/vgcrypt/var /mnt/var
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

Generate fstab file

Before bootstraping let’s create a fstab file for our new system. The Arch ISO has a tool called genfstab that generates the fstab file for you:

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

My /mnt/etc/fstab file then looks like this:

# /dev/mapper/vgcrypt-root
UUID=083b5377-f768-445b-81eb-0154ee77bb75       /               ext4            rw,relatime     0 1

# /dev/mapper/vgcrypt-home
UUID=21c4372a-88d5-406d-b7e2-a88aea95dedd       /home           ext4            rw,relatime     0 2

# /dev/mapper/vgcrypt-vm
UUID=39635044-d2b3-42fa-b24c-ebf1602d558d       /vm             ext4            rw,relatime     0 2

# /dev/mapper/vgcrypt-tmp
UUID=91858b84-ef95-45cc-bc83-eb60b22a8646       /tmp            ext4            rw,relatime     0 2

# /dev/mapper/vgcrypt-var
UUID=de61f80f-529b-4884-99e1-f034a2542f8f       /var            ext4            rw,relatime     0 2

# /dev/sda1
UUID=73FB-6274          /boot           vfat            rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro   0 2

Note: UUIDs will be different on every system.

Bootstrap system

Now we are ready to get a system on our disk. In Arch there is a tool called pacstrap that does the heavy lifting for us.

To start we install the base package alongside the linux package (which is the actual kernel). Then we also install lvm2 because the system needs lvm support. The linux-firmware package contains drivers for many hardware and is in my case used to get the correct WiFi drivers. The last base-devel package contains multiple tools for development and compiling. It’s usually required for packages from the AUR (they are compiled locally) alongside the linux-headers which is also required for compiling some tools.

So we call pacstrap to install those tools on our mounted disk:

pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware lvm2 linux-headers

Alternatively you could install the LTS-kernel. The LTS or Long-Time-Support kernel is known for it’s focus on stability and it’s security updates over many years. It can be a good idea to actually install both so you always have a fallback if your main kernel breaks something on an upgrade. However if something is wrong with your installation (if you mixed up your initramfs or you forgot to remove a mount from fstab for example) the LTS kernel won’t help you as the root disk is still the same.

Anyway the new pacstrap command would be:

pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel linux-lts linux-firmware lvm2 linux-lts-headers

arch-chroot

After we’ve installed the base system we can change our root to /mnt so that we can do further configurations to the os-disk:

arch-chroot /mnt

Install system packages

On top of the base system we are going to install several system packages:

• vim: To edit system files and because it’s my favourite editor
• intel-ucode or amd-ucode Microcode update files for Intel | AMD CPUs
• terminus-font the font we are currently using is part of this package
• networkmanager as networking solution of choice (alternatives here)
• dnsutils for DNS debugging capability
• openssh for the SSH client
• iptables-nft replaces iptables, for details see here and here
• bluez and bluez-utilsfor bluetooth functionality
• xdg-utils and xdg-user-dirs for some default folders and utilities to work with desktops
• ntfs-3g for NTFS support
• mtools and dosfstools for support of FAT file systems
• nfs-utils for NFS support
• cups for the printing system
• sudo to run commands with super-user privileges
• hplip for HP printing support
• gvfs and gvfs-smb for an API to virtual file systems
• pipewire as linux sound server
• pipewire-alsa, pipewire-pulseaudio and pipewire-jack to route apps to pipewire

pacman -Syy
pacman -S vim intel-ucode terminus-font networkmanager dnsutils openssh iptables-nft bluez bluez-tuils xdg-utils xdg-user-dirs ntfs-3g mtools dosfstools nfs-utils cups sudo hplip gvfs gvfs-smb pipewire pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack

Choose wireplumber when asked what to use as dependency fir pipewire and confirm that we replace iptables with iptables-nft.

After the tools are installed, we enable some of the important services:

sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager
sudo systemctl enable bluetooth
sudo systemctl enable cups
sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer

Regional Settings

Once the packages are there we go on and configure our regional stuff. We start by generating our locales in /etc/locale.gen. Uncomment your appropriate language and then generate the language pack:

locale-gen

The configured language needs to be set in the /etc/locale.conf file as follows:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

We installed the terminus-font package so let’s make use of it by setting our font in the /etc/vconsole.conf file. If you want to try a font use setfont to change the font, this will not persist over reboots. A list of all available fonts in the system can be seen in /usr/share/kdb/consolefonts/

FONT=ter-g20b

To set the timezone we just use a hardlink to /etc/localetime like so:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich /etc/localtime
timedatectl set-ntp true
hwclock --systohc

I’m using the english (US) Layout, so theroretically I don’t need to change anything on the keyboard layout. However because I’m from Switzerland and you sometimes need to write something in swiss german I need to type öüä quite a lot. So I switched from standard english (US) to english (Intl., with AltGr dead keys). Anyway here’s how you could change the default keyboard layout:

localectl list-keymaps # list all available keymaps

and then add the keymap to /etc/vconsole.conf as follows:

KEYMAP=us-acentos

Sudo

Uncomment one of the following linens in /etc/sudoers using EDITOR=vim visudo to allow the wheel group to run sudo commands:

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL #--> will prompt for password when using sudo
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL #--> won't prompt for password when using sudo

initramfs

As the documentation for Arch Linux says the initramfs should automatically be generated when installing the base system with pacstrap. But the default HOOKS in the initramfs don’t contain support for LVM and LUKS, so we add them.

I edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and change the HOOKS line to match that:

HOOKS=(base systemd keyboard sd-vconsole autodetect modconf block sd-encrypt lvm2 fsck filesystems)

If you want to know more about the order and the hooks for the initramfs I highly recommend reading this page.

If we change something in this file, we need to regenerate the initramfs:

mkinitcpio -p linux
mkinitcpio -p linux-lts # if you have an LTS kernel

FIDO2 key

If you have added your yubikey to the luks partition, you need to install libfido2 before generating the initramfs to make sure the luks partition can be unlocked.

root password

To login after the reboot we need to a root password:

passwd

hostname

Set the hostname of the machine like so:

echo WALL-E > /etc/hostname

And adjust the /etc/hosts file accordingly:

cat <<EOF >/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1   localhost
127.0.1.1 WALL-E.localdomain WALL-E
EOF

bootloader

At the beginning of the tutorial I said that this installation is a UEFI installation and that I’m going to use systemd-boot as my bootloader. There are mutliple options depending on your preference and your setup. See here for more information on other options.

With systemd-boot we initialize the bootloader first:

systemd-machine-id-setup
bootctl --path=/boot install

Now we need to create a bootloader entry for Arch. For this we need to know the UUID of the root device (the partition mounted on /). We get it with the following command:

uuid=$(blkid --match-tag UUID -o value /dev/sda2)

Note that we don’t get the UUID of the actual root logical volume but instead of the second parttion. This is fine as we specify the LV to be used in the bootloader entry afterwards. If you don´t use LVM, you would get the UUID of the root partition.

So let’s add an entry to our bootloader:

cat <<EOF >/boot/loader/entries/arch.conf
title   Arch Linux
linux   /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd  /initramfs-linux.img
# initrd /initramfs-linux-lts.img
options rd.luks.name=${uuid}=cryptlvm root=/dev/vgcrypt/root
EOF

And we also change the bootloader config to use the above entry as default:

cat <<EOF >/boot/loader/loader.conf
default arch.conf
#default arch-lts.conf
timeout 0
editor no
EOF

The editor 0 directive disables the option to add kernel parameters during boot. The timeout 0 waits 0 seconds before continuing to boot. So you won’t see the bootloader with the different options at all, if you don’t press space during boot.

FIDO2 key

If you have added a FIDO2 key for your LUKS partition, you have to configure the following in the options field of your bootloader entry to make sure your root partition is unlocked using the fido2 key during boot:

options rd.luks.name=UUID=cryptlvm rd.luks.options=fido2-device=auto,fido2-with-client-pin=false root=/dev/system/root

keyfile

On my machine I had a problem which causes the keyboard to not work during the early boot process (BIOS problem) even with the keyboard hook in initramfs. So I used a workaround which uses a keyfile stored in the initramfs to unlock the LUKS partition. This is not very secure as the initramfs is stored on the /dev/sda1 partition which is not encrypted and anyone with access to the disk could extract the keyfile and then decrypt your data. A better option would be to store the keyfile on a thumb drive and insert this everytime you boot. But I’m not at a point where I think this is necessary for me. If you want to do it you can read everything about it here.

So that’s what I did to fix my problem:

dd bs=512 count=4 if=/dev/random of=/keyfile iflag=fullblock
chmod 400 /etc/mykeyfile
cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sda2 /keyfile

then in the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file I added the following to the FILES and MODULES array:

FILES=(/keyfile)
MODULES=(ext4)

Regenerated the initramfs:

mkinitcpio -p linux

and then modified the options line in the boot entry by adding the keyfile:

options rd.luks.key=${uuid}=/keyfile

Success?

So this is it for the installation. Now you can exit the arch-chroot environment and reboot the system to proofe that you successfully installed a working Arch Linux!

If the installation fails to boot, I recommend you boot back into the live system, decrypt the LUKS partition, mount the volumes again and take another look at your boot entry.

From my experience typos in the bootloader config are the most common cause of problems :=)

Recommended first steps

Before using your system I recommend you do some basic steps, some of them are optional, some of them are quite important.

Enable firewall

No mather what you are doing with this computer it’s always recommended to enable a firewall on your host to make sure you don’t accidentially expose some ports externally. Since you already installed iptables-nft we can start it’s integrated firewall deamon:

sudo systemctl enable nftables.service

The configuration for it is in /etc/nftables.conf if you need to add rules. Of course all incoming is blocked by default, but outgoing one too, so you need to add a rule for that. My current file looks like that:

table inet filter
delete table inet filter
table inet filter {
  chain input {
    type filter hook input priority filter
    policy drop

    ct state invalid drop comment "early drop of invalid connections"
    ct state {established, related} accept comment "allow tracked connections"
    iifname lo accept comment "allow from loopback"
    tcp dport 80 accept comment "allow 80"
    tcp dport 443 accept comment "allow 443"
    ip protocol icmp accept comment "allow icmp"
    meta l4proto ipv6-icmp accept comment "allow icmp v6"
    pkttype host limit rate 5/second counter reject with icmpx type admin-prohibited
    counter
  }
  chain forward {
    type filter hook forward priority filter
    policy drop
  }
  ### Important to add this, otherwise outgoing traffic is blocked ###
  chain output {
    type filter hook output priority 0; policy accept
  }
}

Note: to take affect it’s recommended to reboot your computer now, since some programms write rules into it at start.

Personal user

There are reasons why we shouldn’t work with root day by day:

sudo pacman -S zsh
useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power -s /usr/bin/zsh technat
passwd technat

Networking

Now that NetworkManager is running, we canu se it to connect to WiFis:

nmcli device wifi list
nmcli device wifi connect SSID password password

More information about nmcli can be found here. Note that there is also a more user-firendly nmtui that can also be used to interact with NetworkManager.

Well not always Networking (and especially WiFi) works as expected. So let’s take a step back and go through all the things that could go wrong.

Check drivers

The most important thing is to see wether the system has detected our network interface and can use it by loading the correct driver for it. Normally the linux kernel does a good job by picking the correct default driver for your network interface (that’s why you have linux-firmware package). Let’s check if he did:

lspci -k | grep -i net -A 3

You should see at least one network interface listed. My output is as follows:

00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I219-LM (rev 21)
        Subsystem: Fujitsu Limited. Device 192c
        Kernel driver in use: e1000e
        Kernel modules: e1000e
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 (rev 3a)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi

If the NIC’s are not listed you need to find the correct drivers manually. See here or here for more information on how to get network drivers and load them.

DNS

NetworkManager has multiple ways to resolve Names. One is to delegate DNS to the systemd-resolved service. For this the following has to be set:

sudo cat <<EOF >/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/dns.conf
[main]
dns=systemd-resolved
EOF
sudo systemctl enable --now systemd-resolved

From now on DNS is completly managed by systemd-resolved. Note: /etc/resolv.conf is now also managed by systemd-resolved. See this page for how NetworkManager uses or doesn’t use the /etc/resolv.conf file.

Captive portals

See NetworkManager for a list of solutions to make networmanager open a browser window when you connect to a network that has a captive portal.

WPA2_Enterprise Networks

Universities and schools often use wpa2-enterprise networks where you have to authenticate yourself with credentials instead of a pre-shared-key. NetworkManager can connect to such WiFi’s but seems like you have to do it via a manual added connection.

So create a file in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/[CONNECTION_NAME].nmconnection and place the following content in it:

[connection]
id=[CONNECTION_NAME]
uuid=[UUID]
type=wifi
interface-name=[WIFI-INTERFACE NAME]
permissions=

[wifi]
mac-address-blacklist=
mode=infrastructure
ssid=[SSID]

[wifi-security]
auth-alg=open
key-mgmt=wpa-eap

[802-1x]
eap=peap;
identity=[USERNAME]
password=[PASSWORD]
phase2-auth=mschapv2

[ipv4]
dns-search=
method=auto

[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto

[proxy]

Replace the [] place holder with the correct values. An UUID can be generated with uuidgen.

Or see the Wiki Page with a similar description.

Bluetooth

The packages are already installed and the service is enabled. Use bluetoothctl to connect your devices.

For automatic power on of the bluetooth adapter at boot, edit the file /etc/bluetooth/main.cf and uncomment the following line:

[Policy]
AutoEnable=true

Troubleshooting

If you have errors with connecting devices or powering on the adapter, you can try the following.

Drivers

To check if btusb is loaded and used run a lsmod | grep btusb

You should see that bluetooth is using it:

bluetooth             720896  43 btrtl,btintel,btbcm,bnep,btusb,rfcomm

Blocks

It’s also possible that rfkill blocks the bluetooth module which can cause special behaviours. Check that with rfkill list:

My output was as following:

0: hci0: Bluetooth
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no

There is a “yes” by soft blocked bluetooth. I fixed this by running rkfill unblock bluetooth.

Bluetooth Headsets

For bluetooth headsets see this wiki page.

Swapfile

My Arch Installation has no SWAP partition. That’s because swapfiles are also good and they are way more flexible. Configure one like that:

fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
cat /etc/fstab

Tipp: Read about SWAP in the arch linux wiki or take a look at zram

AUR Helper

To install packages from the Arch User Repository you’ll either need to do it manually or install a helper which get’s your new package manager. It will be able to compile packages from the AUR as well as us pacman in the back to install regular packages. I use yay for that but there are other options as well:

sudo pacman -S git go
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

Note: Once yay is installed it can update itself in the future ;)

What’s next?

Okay now you have a decent system which you can work with. But there is still no graphical interface. Depending on your use case for the machine this might be fine. For me I need some sort of a graphical environment to work. If you are interested on how I have done that see my Sway-DE Guide. There I noted how to do these things and much more.

Fruther Reading

• https://paedubucher.ch/articles/2020-09-26-arch-linux-setup-with-disk-encryption.html