How I install Arch Linux

Recently I have installed Arch Linux on a shiny new Lenovo Thinkpad T14 AMD. This blog article shall mainly be a reminder for me for the future, but feel free to use anything useful in it.

I did not install Arch Linux for a long time (nearly over 8 years, lol). Therefore I never saw a need to automate an Arch Linux installation. I am aware, that there are solutions for automated Arch Linux installation. This guide, however, will be a manually guide (I will hopefully automate this later.. HAHA).

The T14 has a 512GB NVMe (this is over 3x more than my X220 with 120GB SSD) and 32GB RAM. Therefore I have decided for the following partition schema.

Next step was creating the filesystems:

# mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1
# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p3
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 system
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/system

I left the swap partition out, because I installed it later, when the base system was there. As next step I mounted everything:

# mount /dev/mapper/system /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot

The next step created my base system, with everything what i need.

# pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware sway iwd alacritty chromium fwupd \
	hplip w3m slurp pacman-contrib ttf-baekmuk noto-fonts-emoji hugo skim \
	man-db archlinux-contrib cups ttf-sazanami ttf-inconsolata noto-fonts \
	fuse2 fuse3 wl-clipboard gcr pinentry pcsclite yubico-c yubico-c-client \
	yubico-pam yubikey-manager yubikey-personalization yubikey-touch-detector \
	zsh-syntax-highlighting weechat pavucontrol xorg-xev brightnessctl \
	mlocate xorg-server-xwayland grim wf-recorder exa tlp acpi \
	sof-firmware amd-ucode tmux sudo go zsh git mako htop restic \
	gcc libnotify base-devel swaylock bemenu neovim gopass pulseaudio pamixer \
# genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

For my swap partition I entered this line into my fstab file:

# /dev/mapper/swap UUID=a4d116ea-450e-4902-8a9d-b8a829c87d35
/dev/mapper/swap          	none      	swap      	defaults  	0 0

And this line here into /etc/crypttab:

swap		PARTUUID=c89118d6-5d50-bb4e-9c31-b55205861134				/dev/urandom		swap,cipher=aes-xts-plain64,size=256

Where PARTUUID=c89118d6-5d50-bb4e-9c31-b55205861134 is the partition UUID of /dev/nvme0n1p1. Next I chrooted into the system and generated locales, mkinitcpio, boot loader etc.

# nvim /etc/locale.gen
# locale-gen
# nvim /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

My /etc/mkinitcpio.conf uses systemd hooks:

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

Finally I set up my kernel, the bootloader and set a new root password and started into the new system:

# mkinitcpio -p linux
# mkdir -p /boot/loader/entries
# nvim /boot/loader/loader.conf
# nvim /boot/loader/entries/motoko.conf
# passwd root
# bootctl install
# bootctl status
# exit
# umount /mnt/boot
# umount /mnt
# cryptsetup luksClose system
# reboot

My loader.conf:

default motoko.conf
editor no

My motoko.conf:

title motoko
linux  vmlinuz-linux
initrd amd-ucode.img
initrd initramfs-linux.img
options rd.luks.uuid=6de4dec9-6d2e-448f-a743-591194eeae8d rd.luks.options=discard rd.luks.name=6de4dec9-6d2e-448f-a743-591194eeae8d=system root=UUID=b80387fc-41de-424a-9ec7-3abc7cb14d8d rw

After rebooting, I did a few other things, just like setting up a new user, cloning my dotfiles repository into the users home, setting timedatectl, systemd-nspawn and systemd-resolved and more.

I hope this short guide gives you a rope to follow and I hope my way of installation will not be invalid in the next 10 years.