I haven’t updated this site in a while, and thought I’d start of by sharing the notes I wrote back in 2024 while installing Arch for the first time. I reworked it into a full guide recently after needing to install Arch again for a new PC build, to skip any repetitive steps I’d need to do in the future. Because this is my guide for personal use, it’s assumed:

• You’re got a UK keyboard, want British English on your system and are in the London timezone.
• You might need to set up WiFi (my students halls didn’t have Ethernet)
• You want to use GRUB as your boot manager. If you don’t know the differences between boot managers, just use GRUB.
• You know how to use the vim text editor. If not, you might want to use nano.

If any of those apply to you, you might find some value in reading this alongside the official guide. If you want something more beginner friendly, I’d highly recommend Denshi’s comfy guide.

Set the keyboard layout

Boot into your live media from the BIOS. Once you’re greeted, load your keyboard settings.

loadkeys uk

Connecting to WiFi

The easiest way to connect to WiFi on the live ISO is with iwd, a wireless daemon for Linux written by Intel.

First, if you do not know your wireless device name, list all WiFi devices:

[iwd]# device list

Then, to initiate a scan for networks (note that this command will not output anything):

[iwd]# station NAME scan

You can then list all available networks:

[iwd]# station NAME get-networks

Finally, to connect to a network:

[iwd]# station NAME connect SSID

Automatic IP and DNS configuration via DHCP

For automatic IP and DNS configuration via DHCP, you have to manually enable the built-in DHCP client:

echo "[General]\nEnableNetworkConfiguration=true" > /etc/iwd/main.conf
sudo systemctl restart iwd

Setting the timezone

After configuring the internet, timedatectl should sync the correct time from the internet. If not, use:

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London

Partition the disks

While the Arch Linux Installation Guide recommends using fdisk, a command-line application for partitioning disks, cfdisk is a simpler and more graphical option.

cfdisk

• Select gpt if prompted. Assuming you want to wipe the drive and use exclusively Arch Linux, use the left and right arrow keys to move to the [ Delete ] option at the bottom, before using the up and down keys and enter to delete the partitions.
• Select [ New ] and create a partition size of 500M. This will be our boot partition, ensuring we have enough space for several kernels if needed.
• Create a swap partition for virtual memory. Consider how much RAM your system has, and how much you are likely to need in the future. 32G total of available RAM and swap is likely to be plenty. For example, 16G for a system with 16Gb of RAM.
• Create a final partition, leaving the default value to ensure all the available space is used. This will be the main partition.
• [ Write ] the changes.
• [ Quit ], list the partitions with lsblk, and format them as described in the wiki.

Format partitions

Warning!

From this point onwards, substitute sda1, sda2 and sda3 for the name of these partitions listed in lsblk

• sda1 - name of the boot partition
• sda2 - name of the swap partition
• sda3 - name of the main or root partition

Now that the empty partitions have been created, they must be formatted with appropriate file systems.

If you created a new EFI boot partition, format it to FAT32:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda1

Next, initialise the swap partition.

mkswap /dev/sda2

Finally, format the main partition to the ext4 file system.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3

Mounting the file systems

We’ll need to do this one out-of-order, starting with sda3 first. Mount the root volume to the /mnt directory.

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

Create the /mnt/boot/efi directory, and mount the boot partition to it.

mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi

Finally, initialise the swap partition (this does not need to be mounted to a directory).

swapon /dev/sda2

Using lsblk again should show that the partitions are now mounted appropriately.

Installation

Install essential packages

Use pacstrap to install packages in a way that is optimised for a new system installation. The -K option here initialises an empty pacman keyring in the target.

pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware

As you can see, we have listed base, linux and linux-firmware packages separated by spaces, to show that we want these in our installation. You will also need to append several others to this command, including:

• CPU microcode updates (amd-ucode or intel-ucode) for hardware bug and security fixes.
• base-devel for various important functions, such as the AUR.
• A boot manager such as grub, combined with efibootmgr.
• A text editor, such as vim or neovim.
• iwd and networkmanager for Wi-Fi, as discussed before.
• sof-firmware for sound cards.
• Consult the wiki for any other essential packages that may be needed.

Configuration

Fstab

An fstab (file system tab) file is used to define how disk partitions, or other file systems, should be mounted into the file system. This can be displayed in the terminal.

genfstab /mnt

Redirect this output to the a file in the /mnt/etc/fstab directory. -U ensures the output uses UUIDs, rather than labels.

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

Chroot

Enter your new system, by changing root into the /mnt directory.

arch-chroot /mnt

Time

Set the timezone by creating a symlink from the London timezone to /etc/localtime

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime

Run hwclock to generate a file in /etc/adjtime, to synchronise with the system clock.

hwclock --systohc

Localisation

To ensure software knows to display British English, you will need to define your locale in two files. Open /etc/locale.gen in a text editor.

vim /etc/locale.gen

Scroll until you find the following locale, and uncomment it by deleting the proceeding #.

#en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8

Save the file, and enter the following command.

locale-gen

Some programs, however, will look at /etc/locale.conf to find your locale. Enter the following string into the blank document.

echo "LANG=en_GB.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf

Finally, edit etc/vconsole.conf in order to make your keyboard layout persistent. Set the keyboard using the syntax from the start of the tutorial.

echo "KEYMAP=uk" > /etc/vconsole.conf

Network configuration

Create the hostname file, for other devices to identify your computer.

echo "rhT480s" > /etc/hostname

Root password

Set the root password.

passwd

Adding a user

Before rebooting, it’s recommended you configure several more things. Create your personal user with useradd, using -m to create a home directory and -G wheel to add the user to the wheel group (explained later).

useradd -m -G wheel richard
passwd richard

Sudo privileges

To let the new user execute sudo-prefixed commands, open the sudoers file.

EDITOR=vim visudo

Scroll down to the following lines and uncomment the second one, allowing users in the wheel group to access sudo privileges.

## Uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

System services

It seems that the only service needing to be enabled before reboot is NetworkManager.

systemctl enable NetworkManager

GRUB setup

Before rebooting the GRUB boot loader must be setup.

grub-install /dev/sda1
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Finally, you may exit back to the USB drive, unmount any non-busy drives and reboot the system

exit
umount -a
reboot

Post install

All done! Now just install the software you want, including:

• A desktop environment, such as gnome, or a window manager, such as i3.
• A terminal emulator, such as kitty or alacritty.
• A web browser, such as firefox.
• A file manager, such as thunar.

After this, start the login manager if you downloaded one.

sudo systemctl enable --now sddm