My Arch Install To-Do

While there are certainly no lack of guides available regarding the arch installation, I have put up one for myself just because it suits my setup more. By no means is this better than the official Arch Installation Wiki, but it's really verbose and considers EVERY possible edge case, which is good in some cases.

I generally follow the guide by itsfoss which uses saner assumptions but I would like to add a few more points to it.

Those who are reading this guide, I would encourage you to read both of them. Read itsfoss guide for a basic understanding, and the Arch Wiki in case you are facing issues.

Assumptions

  1. You have installed grub and you are just about to reboot into your new arch install.
  2. You are chroot'ed into your partition.

Before you reboot, these are somethings you should do.

Enable Networking

Enable networking, otherwise you won't have network access after the reboot.

Install networkmanager

pacman -S networkmanager

Enable networkmanager as a service

systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

Enable SSH

I typically enable ssh in all my machines. You can skip this step if you don't want to.

pacman -S openssh

Enable ssh as a service

systemctl enable sshd.service

Create an account

You should create a new account as you don't want to ssh as root, as it's heavily discouraged.

useradd -m <username>
passwd <username>

You can choose to give this account root permission as well.

Enable swap

I typically keep a swap partition. As this point, it's just a force of habit, even though I don't use the hibernate feature on my machines. You can also use a swap file which you can check out here

mkswap /dev/<swap partition>
swapon -a

Edit fstab

I typically have a different partition for root and home. It has some advantages, like if your home fills up due to some bug your OS can still work since root is free. Also, you can create an image of your home partition easily.

So make sure to edit your fstab such that on reboot both your home and swap partition are automatically mounted.

The way to do it is as follows

  1. Check your partition UUID by typing blkid

  2. Make an entry in /etc/fstab with the UUID

    UUID=<the partition ID> /home   ext4    defaults    0   0
UUID=<swap ID>          swap    swap    defaults    0   0

  3. Save and exit

Now you can reboot and enjoy your Arch install.

Post Installation

I like to install the following programs to make my life easier in Arch.

An AUR Helper - yay

yay helps us download and install applications from the Arch User Repository, which is a community-maintained list of package descriptions for popular applications which are not available on the official Arch repository. Once you get used to AUR, you will not want to download and compile from source again.

There are multiple AUR helpers; i decided to use yay simply because it's currently the most popular.

To install yay, you need to install the git and base-devel package, clone yay and then install it.

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

Now you can install any package from the AUR using yay using the command yay -S <package name>. Make sure not to run yay as root.

Check out my post regarding the different applications that I use here

Happy Arch'ing!