Arch Linux installation

My installation notes on installing Arch Linux to Thinkpad T480s. Heavily inspired and adapted from Mischa van den Burg's excellent install Arch Linux THE RIGHT way video series.

Preparations

Boot Arch Linux ISO from USB or some other way

• Load Finnish keymap

  • loadkeys fi

• Connect WiFi interface

  • iwctl

    • station wlan0 scan

    • station wlan0 connect $SSID

Disk

Partitioning

• Delete old partitions with fdisk fdisk /dev/nvme0n1

  • write changes to disk

• Delete old partition table

  • sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdX

  • wipefs --all /dev/sdX

• Create new partitions with fdisk

  • 1Gb boot partition with type EFI

  • Rest of the disk space with Linux LVM type

Encryption

• Create LUKS encryption container to bigger partition

  • cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2

LVM

• Create physical volume on top of the opened LUKS container

  • pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptlvm

• Create volume group

  • vgcreate thinkpad /dev/mapper/cryptlvm

• Create logical volumes

  • lvcreate -L 4G thinkpad -n swap

  • lvcreate -L 32G thinkpad -n root

  • lvcreate -l 100%FREE thinkpad -n home

• Create filesystems

  • mkfs.ext4 /dev/thinkpad/root

  • mkfs.ext4 /dev/thinkpad/home

  • mkswap /dev/thinkpad/swap

Mount rest of the partitions

• mount /dev/thinkpad/root /mnt

Prepare boot partition

• mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

• mount --mkdir /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot

Enable swap

swapon /dev/thinkpad/swap

Install base system

• Install basic packages

  • pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware

• Generate fstab

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

• Chroot to the installed Linux filesystem

  • arch-chroot /mnt

• Install CPU microcode updates

  • pacman -Syu intel-ucode

• Set timezone

  • ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Helsinki /etc/localtime

• Sync clock

  • hwclock --systohc

• Configure locales

  • locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

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

Setup networking with systemd-networkd

• Enable systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved

  • systemctl enable systemd-networkd

  • systemctl enable systemd-resolved

• Use systemd-resolved stub resolver

  • sudo ln -sf /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

• Configure wireless interface

cat << 'EOF' > /etc/systemd/network/25-wireless.network 
[Match]
Name=wlan0

[Network]
DHCP=yes
IgnoreCarrierLoss=3s
EOF

• Install ìwd

  • pacman -Syu iwd

• Enable iwd

  • systemctl enable iwd

Configure initrmfs hooks

Following is needed to decrypt root filesystem

In /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, set:

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

• Install lvm2 package

  • ``pacman -Syu lvm2

• Regenerate initrmfs

  • mkinitcpio -P

Install bootloader (systemd-boot)

• bootctl install

• Configure bootloader entry with correct option for the LUKS partition

cat << 'EOF' > /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf
title   Arch Linux
linux   /vmlinuz-linux
initrd  /initramfs-linux.img

options rd.luks.name=61c24ef5-ba64-493a-8fbf-9f6050a9026a=thinkpad root=/dev/thinkpad/root rw
EOF

• Build initrmfs once more, just in case

  • mkinitcpio -P

Mount home and create user

• mount /dev/thinkpad/home /home/

• Fstab needs to be configured. genfstab is part of arch-install-scripts package

  • pacman -Syu arch-install-scripts

  • Remove old entrie from /etc/fstab

  • Generate new fstab

    • genfstab / >> /etc/fstab

• Install sudo

  • pacman -Syu sudo

• Create user

  • useradd -m tatu

• Set password

  • passwd tatu

• Add user to wheel group

  • usermod -aG wheel tatu

• With visudo remove comment from line

  • # %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Set hostname

echo "thinkpad" > /etc/hostname

Booting to the new system

That's all, base system is now installed and it should be bootable.