Quickstart: Installing Arch Linux 2019.X

Firstly download the latest iso image from one of the mirrors below:

https://www.archlinux.org/download

wget https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.archlinux.org/iso/2019.08.01/archlinux-xxxx.xx.xx-x86_64.iso

and then write it to your preferred media:

dd bs=8M if=archlinux-xxxx.xx.xx-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX | sync

Upon booting the image select the default selection to boot Arch.

This will get you into the system under the root user.

The setup portion is a Gentoo style approach of efffectively 'assembling' the system yourself.

From here we'll firstly partition the disks:

lsblk

NAME            MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdX               8:0    0 1000G  0 disk 

In this example we'll create three partitions - one for the root fs, another for our home fs and finally one for swap.

parted -a optimal /dev/sdXhyu
mktable gpt
mkpart ESP boot fat32 0% 500MB
mkpart root ext4 500MB 250000MB
mkpart home ext4 250GB 750GB
mkpart swap ext4 750GB 800GB
set 1 boot on

Create the filesystems with:

mkfs.msdos /dev/sdX1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX2
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX3
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX4
mkswap /dev/sdX4
swapon /dev/sdX4

Proceed by mounting the file systems:

mount -t auto /dev/sdX2 /mnt
mkdir -P /mnt/boot/EFI && mount -t auto /dev/SdX1 /mnt/boot/EFI
mkdir /mnt/home && mount -t auto /dev/SdX3 /mnt/home

We'll need the network setup at this point so we can access the arch repo's:

dhclient

and then pull down all the nessasery compontents for the root fs:

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

Once complete we'll need to generate the fstab for the new system:

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

and then change our root password by chrooting into the new system along with the hostname:

arch-chroot /mnt
hostname arch-box
passwd

We'll also configure regional and time settings with:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/<region>/<city> /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc
locale-gen
printf "LANG=en_GB.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

I'm going to use KDE Plasma for the desktop environment:

pacman -S xorg xorg-server xorg-xinit plasma-meta sddm

Finally we will configure grub:

pacman -S grub efibootmgr dosfstools os-prober mtools
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/EFI --bootloader-id=grub_uefi --recheck
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Exit the jail:

exit

and restart:

shutdown -r now

Once booted into the new OS we'll setup the network configuration - for this example I'll be setting up DHCP.

With Arch we have a few options for network configuration - either netctl or networkd (a newer component.)

vi /etc/netctl/enp2s0

Description=LAN interface
Interface=enp2s0
Connection=ethernet
IP=dhcp

Ensure the interface will come up on boot by issuing:

netctl enable enp2s0

Enable and start the DHCP service with:

systemctl enable dhcpcd
systemctl start dhcpcd

and then attempt to start the interface with:

netctl start enp2s0