Archlinux Install

Installing ArchLinux

Install Prep

Review the documentation and download the boot media

Before getting started you'll probably want to review the ArchLinux install guide and download the latest iso image. I copied the image to a USB drive mounted as /dev/sdf:

$ sudo dd if=Downloads/archlinix_install_image.iso of=/dev/sdf

After this, the USB was inserted into the motherboard, the system powered and the USB selected as the boot device via BIOS. After startup of the live image, Arch offers up a root prompt.

Confirm networking

Confirm you have network access by pinging google or something else. Use ifconfig to determine the local IP.

Enable ssh daemon

There is really no need to do an install by typing out command after command, so an ssh session is necessary and sufficient. In order to get this set up, the first step is to set the root password

# passwd

And then start the sshd service

# systemctl start sshd

You can then ssh into the system from another computer on your network, preferably one with internet access so you can copy-and-paste commands from the install guide or this wiki.

Preparing the disks

One of the reasons for moving on from Gentoo was a lack of any definitive process in the community forums or documentation for setting up a RAID based system. When googling this, all of the related documentation seemed to generate hits from the Arch community docs.

This guide focuses on setting up a system using twin SSD drives in a RAID1 configuration. A step-by-step guide for doing this was found here. Other considerations include simplifying the configuration by dropping the /boot and /swap partitions required by Gentoo, expanding the UEFI partition for boot purposes, and using a swap file as opposed to a swap partition.

It should also be noted that this guide focuses on setting up the system using a single drive, then adding the second after the install is complete, in order to have both systems running at the same time and perform a migration.