Arch Linux Installation Guide

Last updated August 3, 2017

This post will be a comprehensive guide to installing Arch Linux. I will be installing Arch Linux on a refurbished ThinkPad T430 Laptop, first as a guest OS on a Windows 10 Pro host, and then on a secondary SSD that will replace the optical drive. I will try to cover absolutely everything you need from creating a bootable USB drive to customizing the desktop interface and installing development environments and tools.

Put Arch Linux on a USB drive

I recommend that you download a BitTorrent client such as Deluge, and then grab the ISO magnet link from https://www.archlinux.org/download/. It should take just a few minutes to complete the download via BitTorrent.

If you are using a Mac to build the bootable drive, I have read that you can use the dd command. This didn't work for me.

I found out that my 2011 MacBook Air is not capable of creating Windows 10 bootable media. Only the options for Windows 7 and 8 were available in Boot Camp Assistant (the Mac utility for installing Windows and creating bootable media). I also found that the latest MacBooks can't create bootable media. I was able to find another Mac that had the option for creating "Windows 7 or later", and this finally worked.

Another solution that is probably much faster is using Rufus, a Windows/Linux utility for burning ISO images to bootable media. The Arch Wiki has a highlighted note about using Rufus:

Note: Be sure to select DD mode or the image will be transferred incorrectly.

A problem I found is that you can't select the ISO with DD mode selected. I was able to select ISO (in ISO mode), choose the ISO file in my downloads folder, and then select DD mode.

VirtualBox

The T430 came with a copy of Windows Pro, which I installed right away. I also picked up a SSD sleeve that can replace the optical drive for dual booting or additional storage. I have installed Arch Linux on my Windows desktop machine, as well as my MacBook Air. Land of Linux has a great tutorial on installing Arch Linux in Virtual Box, but it is frustrating because there is no date and no comments. This part of the guide will closely follow this guide and provide some corrections where you might get stuck following the directions command for command.

First we want to set up a new virtual machine with the options Linx / ArchLinux / 64-bit. You are probably using a 64-bit machine (although some old netbooks are 32-bit). The first obstacle is you will probably face with VirtualBox is that there are no options for 64-bit. This is because Intel Virtualization is often disabled by default. You will need to go into the BIOS (by pressing delete of F10/F12 at boot time) and then change this option, save the BIOS settings and restart. With this done, you will want to create a virtual machine with at at least 20GB of storage and around 4GB of memory.

Quick note about fonts

The default font when installing Arch Linux is quite small, so you may want to increase the font size.

ls /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/

This command will list the available fonts. To set a font, run the following command:

setfont sun12x22

To revert back to the default font, just run:

setfont

You can also view the current font with

showconsolefont

Using `fdisk` for partitioning

fdisk is a dialogue-driven program for creation and manipulation of partition tables.

This part of the guide will be similar for installation on virtual machines and regular installions (on harddrives in desktops and laptops). If you are installing on a physical machine that has other disks of similar size to your target disk, I recommend that you first remove all other drives so you don't accidentaly format partitions (I did this by accident, but luckily it was just my Windows Boot Partition and I was able to recover my Windows installation).

We want to run fdisk and enter the device we want to work with as the first argument after the command:

fdisk /dev/sda

On your Virtual Machine it will most likely be sda, but on a physical machine it could vary slightly.

Note about fdisk

When installing Arch Linux on a disk that has Windows or Linux installed (and you want delete the existing Windows or Linux completely to make room for a fresh Arch Linux istallation), you can delete the partitions on the drive (which is usually labeled /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc). Run lsblk to determine which drive you want to format, then run fdisk /dev/sdX where X corresponds to the drive we will be using. You should be inside the fdisk menu. Press d to start deleting partitions. You may get some warnings about a partition containing some type of trace (such as ext4). This is fine. You can delete all of the partitions.

Create a root partition

Press n and then p. When prompted for first sector press ENTER, and for last sector enter +10G for a 10GB partition.

Create a SWAP partition

Press n for a new partition, press p for primary partition. Select partition number 2. Press ENTER to select the default start sector, and then type +1G to create a 1GB swap partition. Press t to indicate the type of partition this will be. Specify that we are still working with partition 2, and then enter 82, the code for SWAP partition.

Create home partition

Enter the following fdisk commands:

n, p, 3, ENTER, ENTER, t, 3, 83.

Before exiting the fdisk interface, enter the w command to write the proposed changes.

We should see the following:

The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

Create Filesystems and Format Partitions

Make filesystems for partitions 1 and 3:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3

mkswap /dev/sda2
swapon /dev/sda2

Verify our layout with `lsblk`

lsblk

Mount Filesystems

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

mkdir /mnt/home

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home

(The swap partition has already been initialized.)

Backup mirrorlist

cp -vf /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup

We can edit the mirrorlist to select the closest mirror, but this is not necessary.

Install reflector

This synchronizes package databases:

pacman -Syy

Next we want to install our first package: reflector.

pacman -S reflector

The following command will sort the five best mirrors based on your location:

reflector --verbose -l 5 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Re-issue the sync command:

pacman -Syy

Installing the base

The base installation is installed using a special script called pacstrap.

We will be using the base group and also the base-devel group that we will need later.

Issue the following command:

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

This will install lots of packages; it takes a few minutes. It took me 4:27.06 on my MacBook Air and about 2.5 minutes on my ThinkPad.

Create /etc/fstab

The next step is to create a mount table that will be responsible for automatically mounting filesystems at boot time.

Issue the following command:

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

We can verify the entries with cat /mnt/etc/fstab, or blkid /dev/sd# where # is the partition number.

Chroot - Configuring the base system

To configure our new installation, we need to issue the arch-chroot command. This command is used as follows: arch-chroot followed by the new root directory as the first argument.

root@archiso ~ # arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
[root@archiso /]#

We could pass in additional arguments to specify a particular shell, but here we are using bash.

Configuring locale settings

nano /etc/locale.gen

Uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 for US English.

Once the desired locales have been uncommented, run local-gen.

Next we will create /etc/locale.conf:

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

Create the following file: /etc/vconsole.conf and add the following line:

KEYMAP=us

To configure the time zone, we need to create a link to a file called /etc/localtime.

The following command won't work, we will do this in a later step, so skip the following command for now.

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime

This worked on my MacBook Air in VirtualBox, but in doing this on my Windows host in VirtualBox trying to link to the file /etc/localtime gave an error that the file already existed. Skipping this step on my ThinkPad was OK. Looking in the file, it seemed that UTC was already configured.

Set the Hardware Clock

hwclock --systohc --utc

Set the Host Name for the System

I'm using the hostname archthinkpad, you can pick whatever host name you want.

echo archthinkpad > /etc/hostname

Enable Multilib Repository

Add the following to /etc/pacman.conf:

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

And then run

pacman -Syy

Add support for Yaourt Package Tool

Add the following to the end of /etc/pacman.conf:

[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

Then run pacman -Syy.

Synchronize and Update Database Packages

Run the "update system" command:

pacman -Syu

Create a password for the root account

passwd

and enter a password for the root user.

Add a new user with sudo privileges

To add a new user we issue useradd along with primary and secondary groups. wheel group members will be able to issue commands prefixed with sudo.

useradd -mg users -G wheel,storage,power -s /bin/bash brian

Then set a password for this user:

passwd brian

Install sudo Package

pacman -S sudo

Configuring a sudo - adding user to wheel group

We now need to configure the sudo configuration file. In order to edit this file we must use a special command called visudo.

This is an editor like vi or vim and it edits the sudo config file.

When we run visudo, we might see the follwoing error:

visudo: specified editor (vim) doesn't exist.

Let's install vim:

pacman -S vim

Now we should be able to run visudo.

We need to uncomment the following line:

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

To do this, press the down arrow until we are on the line we need to uncomment, then press i, then remove the # and space. Next, press esc and then press : and then x and then press ENTER. That should save our changes. Arch Linux warns that this file ONLY be edited with vim.

Installing a bootloader

At this point the directions will fork based on your motherboard firmware. By default grub-install uses target x86_64-efi. If you don't have a UEFI system you should use the following command:

pacman -S grub
grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sdb

If this works properly you should see the following:

Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.

--target=i386-pc instructs grub-install to install for BIOS systems only. It is recommended to always use this option to remove ambiguity in grub-install.

Here is more information about GRUB from the Arch Wiki.

Finally run the following command:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

[Note: If you had a multi OS environment, you could install the "os-prober" package with "pacman -S os-prober" before running the "grub-mkconfig" command. Os-prober will detect other operating systems when generating the grub.cfg file.]

Arch Linux is now installed

Issue the following commands to exit:

exit
umount /mnt/home
umount /mnt
reboot

Boot from existing OS

At the startup screen, select "Boot existing OS".

I got a strange error message at login:

arch20815 login: [9.921142] piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade BIOS or use force_addr=0xaddr

Press ENTER to return to the login prompt.

We can check to see if this user was setup properly by running:

[brian@arch20815 ~]$ sudo whoami

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

[sudo] password for brian:
root
[brian@arch20815 ~]$

Configuring the Network

After the reboot we will have lost network connectivity. We need to create a new definition to our interface. We can isssue the command ip link.

Run sudo vi /etc/systemd/network/enp0s3.netork and add the following to this file:

[Match]
Name=en*

[Network]
DHCP=yes

Then we need to run the following commands:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-networkd
sudo systemctl enable systemd-networkd

Next issue the following command:

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

And add the following to this file:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Next we can check connectivity:

ip a s
ping -c 3 www.google.com

We should see that we have been assigned an IP address and that we can ping google.com.

Run a full System update

sudo pacman -Syu

Installing the X Environment

I have had problems with this step in the past.

The next step in the tutorial is to run:

sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-utils xorg-server-utils mesa xorg-twm xterm xorg-xclock

But this will result in:

error: target not found: xorg-utils
error: target not found: xorg-server-utils

It seems that these packages have been deprecated. I think a solution to this is to run:

sudo pacman -S xorg-apps

and then install the remaining packages:

sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit mesa xorg-twm xterm xorg-xclock

Select option 1 (don't select the options that include the word nvidia).

Next we need to install linux-headers:

sudo pacman -S linux-headers

Next we need to install some VirtualBox packages:

sudo pacman -S virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-dkms

The tutorial didn't mention the linux-headers package, but the error message that comes up if you skip this step say that this package is needed.

xorg-server-utils seems to have been removed, but it was a meta-package that simply included the following:

xorg-iceauth xorg-sessreg xorg-xcmsdb xorg-xbacklight xorg-xgamma xorg-xhost xorg-xinput xorg-xmodmap xorg-xrandr xorg-xrdb xorg-xrefresh xorg-xset xorg-xsetroot

Installing these packages individually did not help.

This does a full install of xorg (reinstalling many packages I just installed). After running this command, running startx gives no errors and lets me enter the X environment.

Installing GNOME Desktop

Next, let's install GNOME desktop. Issue the following command:

sudo pacman -S gnome gnome-extra gdm

Accept all of the defaults and then confirm by pressing Y.

Installing Networking Tools

sudo pacman -S net-tools

Installing popular packages

sudo pacman -S pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa pavucontrol gnome-terminal firefox flashplugin vlc deluge smplayer audacious qmmp gimp xfburn gedit gnome-system-monitor

Installing codecs for audio and video

sudo pacman -S a52dec faac faad2 flac jasper lame libdca libdv libmad libmpeg2 libtheora libvorbis libxv wavpack x264 xvidcore

Install Yaourt

sudo pacman -S yaourt

NEVER run yaourt with sudo or as root

Finally, enable GNOME to start automatically at boot:

sudo systemctl enable gdm

The last issue I had was getting GNOME Desktop to display in full-screen in VirtualBox. To do this, click on the Devices Tab and then Insert Guest Additions Image.

reboot

Login with the user account that you created. At this point, trying to open Terminal will probably not work. This is because of an issue mentioned earlier about a locale file. Let's look at /etc/locale.conf:

cat /etc/locale.conf

We just need to make sure that the language we want is uncommented in /etc/locale.gen. We did this previously. Now we need to run the following command:

sudo locale-gen

This should allow us to access the terminal.

Enable Wi-Fi

To enable Wi-Fi, first check lspci -k if you have an onboard wifi card or lsusb -v if you have a USB wifi adapter.

Next run ip link and see if there is an entry that starts with w. This is wireless interface. If you don't have WiFi working it probably says state DOWN in the description.

We need to run the following command to bring it up:

sudo ip link set <the code that starts with w> up

If we go to "Settings" we will see an error that says "NetworkManager needs to be running."

To get NetworkManager running, issue the following commands:

sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
sudo systemctl start NetworkManager.service

This will prompt you for authentication, then you can go back to Settings > Network and you should be able to find any available Wi-Fi networks.

Customizing GNOME Desktop

Next let's work on customizing our GUI.

We will now start making use of the yaourt utility to build packages for programs we want to install.

Yaourt gives us a useful flag to search packages:

yaourt -Ss search_term1 search_term2

This returns a list of packages which match search terms either in their title or description. When you find the right package you can copy the exact name and then download it with:

yaourt -S package_name

Let's start with nice custom theme, numix.

Run the following:

yaourt -Ss numix

We will see many packages, and there are three that we should install:

numix-gtk-theme
numix-circle-theme-git
numix-cursor-theme-git

The installations process for numix-gtk-theme is quite long. You need to confirm Yes and it will also ask you the following:

Edit PKGBUILD with:

Here you can type nano and press ENTER. It will then show you a file in nano or the editor you select. You can press Ctrl-X and the installation script will continue running.

You will also see the following message before being prompted to select an editor:

Please add $VISUAL to your environment variables.

Let's do that now so we are not prompted to do it later:

sudo nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following line to the end of the file:

export VISUAL="nano"

You could also set VISUAL="vim" or some other editor.

Now that we have installed the themes, let's activate them. Press ALT F2 and type gnome-tweak-tool. Under the appearance tab you can select the newly installed GTK+ theme, icons and cursor.

GNOME Shell Extensions

You can do a lot of neat customization with extensions. You will see an Extensions tab in the Tweak Tool. Click on "Get more extensions". This will take you to the GNOME Shell Extensions site. Before you start using extensions, you need to add a Firefox extensions and install a package. Click the link in the blue bar at the top of the page and install the plugin.

Next you need to install the following package:

yaourt -S chrome-gnome-shell-git

Now refresh the GNOME Shell Extensions page and the blue message should go away. Here are the extensions I use:

Applications menu
Removable Drive menu
Dash to Dock
Drop Down Terminal
Dynamic Top Bar
User Themes
System Monitor
Sensory Perception
Screen Saver and hibernate buttons (requires gnome-screensaver package and a GNOME Shell Extension called "Suspend and Lock Button")

Dash to Dock lets you place the dock wherever you want, you can also change its appearance and behavior.

Screenfetch

I like to use Screenfetch, a package that prints out ASCII art for your distro and some customizable system information.

yaourt -S screenfetch

Now edit ~/.bashrc by adding the following line at the bottom of the file:

screenfetch

Screefetch can be further customized, check out man screenfetch for more options. For example, you can exlude certain lines about system information or add custom lines like the model of your PC, etc:

                  -`
                 .o+`                 brian@archthinkpad
                `ooo/                 OS: Arch Linux
               `+oooo:                Kernel: x86_64 Linux 4.12.5-1-ARCH
              `+oooooo:               Uptime: 5h 8m
              -+oooooo+:              Packages: 1044
            `/:-:++oooo+:             Shell: bash 4.4.12
           `/++++/+++++++:            Resolution: 1366x768
          `/++++++++++++++:           DE: GNOME
         `/+++ooooooooooooo/`         WM: GNOME Shell
        ./ooosssso++osssssso+`        GTK Theme: Numix [GTK2/3]
       .oossssso-````/ossssss+`       Icon Theme: Numix-Circle
      -osssssso.      :ssssssso.      Font: Cantarell 11
     :osssssss/        osssso+++.     CPU: Intel Core i5-3320M @ 4x 3.3GHz [44.0°C]
    /ossssssss/        +ssssooo/-     GPU: intel
  `/ossssso+/:-        -:/+osssso+-   RAM: 4315MiB / 7685MiB
  `+sso+:-`                 `.-/+oso:
 `++:.                           `-/+/
.`                                 `/

Quick Note on Terminal Colors

I don't like the default white background of the terminal, so you can change this by editing the default profile. Unselect "Use colors from system theme" and select "Solarized Dark" (my preferred color scheme).

Quick Note on yaourt

You can add a --no-confirm flag to yaourt that will prevent it from asking you if you want to proceed with each step of the installation process.

Window options

By default, GNOME only shows the X in the top right corner of windows. You can add the maximize and minimize buttons in the Windows tab of the GNOME Tweak Tool.

Icons on Desktop

Another default setting that may be strange for you is "Icons on Desktop" which is set to OFF by default. The is found under the Desktop tab in the GNOME Tweak Tool.

My other setup notes

I install Chromium and set it to my default browser. My must have extension for Chrome (and any other browser) is Last Pass for account and password management.

Default Applications

You can set default applications by opening Settings > Details > Default Applications. I use Image Viewer for photos instead of GIMP and VLC for Video.

pacman offers similar functionality, and so does pacaur. There are several options for how to download software with Arch Linux.

Other packages

Here's a list of other helpful packages:

htop (system monitoring)

htop can be customized to show some helpful information. Press F2 or click in the terminal where it says "Setup" and you will open a menu to select custom options for htop.

blender (video editing and 3d modeling)
OBS (screen recording and streaming software)

OBS took a little bit of configuring to get right. Out of the box, doing a screen capture showed just a black screen. I think the solution is to install obs-studio-git and then reboot your computer.

Dropbox

yaourt -S dropbox

Run the following command:

dropbox

And then follow the dialogue to sign into your Dropbox account. You will see a Dropbox folder in the File Manager.

Google Drive

You can get access to Google Drive by going into:

Settings > Online Accounts > Google

If you have Files set to ON, you will find your Google Drive Folder in the side bar of the File Viewer. Clicking on the icon mounts your Google Drive and gives you access to the files.

hexchat (IRC client)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an easy way to start talking to people in real-time about any topic you can think of. Hexchat is a popular GUI client for IRC. Here is how to install hexchat:

sudo pacman -S hexchat

Once you have installed hexchat, you will want to register a nickname. This article says that the steps for registering a nickname are to:

Send the following message to freenode (replace some_password with a secure password of your choice and youremail@example.com with your email address):

/msg NickServ REGISTER some_password youremail@example.com

After you send this message, check your email and you will see instructions to confirm your email that look like this:

/msg NickServ VERIFY REGISTER <your_name> <some_code_they_give_you>

This should confirm your nickname. Now you can start chatting on channels. Press Alt + S, and then J, and then type the name of the channel you want to join.

Configure VPN

I setup TorGuard VPN service by installing:

yaourt -S torguard

Setting Up Development Tools

Atom and other text editors

My preferred text editor is Atom:

sudo pacman -S atom

Spell checker didn't seem to be working for me, and this seems to be a known issue, so I recommend you install the atom/spell-checker package if you like to use atom and want spell checking.

The Arch Linux installation also came with an interesting editor called Builder which seems pretty interesting as well.

VirtualBox

Skip this step if you are installing Arch Linux as guest OS in a VirtualBox (you can't run a virtual machine in a virtual machine).

sudo pacman -S virtualbox

You will see a message that says:

:: There are 2 providers available for VIRTUALBOX-HOST-MODULES
:: Repository community
   1) virtualbox-host-dkms 2) virtualbox-host-modules-arch

Select option 2, continue the installation process and then reboot.

Quick note on deluge

You will probably want to use a BitTorrent client to download ISO images for virtual machines you want to run. Deluge works well for this, and we already downloaded it during setup. We can add one more package for a theme that Deluge uses:

yaourt -S gtk-engine-murrine

Now grab a torrent link or file for an OS you want to download and add it to Deluge.

When it is finished we can launch VirtualBox and create a virtual machine with our ISO.

npm and node.js

Here's a helpful article that is important to following when setting up npm and node.js. Be very careful here as some of the steps can completely mess up permissions on your entire system.

Here's a walkthrough of the steps to get npm setup correctly.

sudo pacman -S npm

Next run:

npm config get prefix

The output of this command is probably:

/usr

If this is the case, we MUST follow the following steps (option 2 from this article:

mkdir ~/.npm-global
npm config set prefix '~/.npm-global'

If you don't already have a ~/.profile file, make one, and then add the following line:

export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH

Then run:

source ~/.profile

This will "refresh" ~/.profile so that using the npm command will work without needing sudo.

Next we can test that npm works by trying to install a package:

npm install -g jshint

This should install the package with no errors.

Heroku

yaourt -S heroku-cli

Then run:

heroku keys:add

and then type yes at the prompt. This will your computer's public key to your Heroku account.

Note about Python versions on Heroku

I have only been able to deploy with Python 3.5.2.

Redis

sudo pacman -S redis

Next, start and enable redis.service

sudo systemctl start redis.service
sudo systemctl enable redis.service

SSH

sudo pacman -S openssh

autoenv (GitHub)

yaourt -S autoenv

You need to source activate.sh in your bashrc afterwards:

echo 'source /usr/share/autoenv/activate.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

Ruby and Jekyll

I use Jekyll for my personal site and blog, which is a static site generator written in Ruby. To start using Jekyll we need to install a ruby gem, and to install the gem we will need to first install ruby. Here is the ruby page from the Arch Wiki.

sudo pacman -S ruby

Next we can install the Jekyll gem:

gem install jekyll bundler

It should say something like "20 gems installed" if everything was successful. You can read more about Jekyll here.

For now I will not be installing RVM (Ruby Version Manager), but the Arch Wiki has good notes on how this can be installed.

Before we use the Jekyll gem, we need to add the following to our ~/.bashrc file:

PATH="$(ruby -e 'print Gem.user_dir')/bin:$PATH"

This will allow you to run Jekyll commands.

Python

In the installation pIssuesrocess, the latest versions of Python has been installed (3.6.2 at the time of writing this tutorial). We need to get pip:

yaourt -S python-pip

Here's an article from the Python documentation that covers creating virtual environments.

Here is another article about creating virtual environments in python.

Currently, there are two viable tools for creating Python virtual environments: venv is available by default in Python 3.3 and later, and installs pip and setuptools into created virtual environments in Python 3.4 and later. virtualenv needs to be installed separately, but supports Python 2.6+ and Python 3.3+, and pip, setuptools and wheel are always installed into created virtual environments by default (regardless of Python version). The basic usage is like so: Using virtualenv:

virtualenv <DIR>
source <DIR>/bin/activate

Using venv:

python3 -m venv <DIR>
source <DIR>/bin/activate

For more information, see the virtualenv docs or the venv docs.

Jupyter Notebook and IPython Notebook

IPython notebooks (also known as Jupyter notebooks), provide a nice environment for combining python runtime environments, Markdown, images, graphs and other interactive Python tools such as Bokeh. You can install both Jupyter Notebooks and IPython Notebooks:

yaort -S jupyter-notebook

yaourt -S ipython2-notebook

You can launch either of these with jupyter notebook or ipython notebook from the terminal.

There seems to be an issue with LaTeX

Anaconda Distribution from Continuum Analytics

If you are doing scientific computing, statistical analysis or an type of machine learning, you will want to download the Anaconda distribution. This is Python bundled with a bunch of great packages and C libraries for doing heavy lifting. Anaconda uses a slightly different tool for managing virtual environments and package management, but it is very easy to do both using the conda command.

PostgreSQL

sudo pacman -S postgresql

sudo -u postgres -i

This switches you to the PostgreSQL user.

Before PostgreSQL can function correctly, the database cluster must be initialized:

initdb --locale $LANG -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data'

You should see the following:

[postgres@archthinkpad ~]$ initdb --locale $LANG -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data'
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale "en_US.UTF-8".
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

Data page checksums are disabled.

fixing permissions on existing directory /var/lib/postgres/data ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 100
selecting default shared_buffers ... 128MB
selecting dynamic shared memory implementation ... posix
creating configuration files ... ok
running bootstrap script ... ok
performing post-bootstrap initialization ... ok
syncing data to disk ... ok

WARNING: enabling "trust" authentication for local connections
You can change this by editing pg_hba.conf or using the option -A, or
--auth-local and --auth-host, the next time you run initdb.

Success. You can now start the database server using:

    pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgres/data -l logfile start

Now type exit to return to your regular user.

Next, start and enable postgresql.service as root:

[brian@archthinkpad ~]$ sudo systemctl start postgresql.service
[sudo] password for brian:
[brian@archthinkpad ~]$ sudo systemctl enable postgresql.service
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/postgresql.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service.
[brian@archthinkpad ~]$

See the Arch Wiki article on PostgreSQL for more information.

tmux

sudo pacman -S tmux

tree

sudo pacman -S tree

Languages and Input Sources

Here is how to add support for Chinese characters and also Chinese pinyin input:

yaourt -S adobe-source-han-sans-cn-fonts

This will make Chinese characters visible. In order to type Chinese using the pinyin input method, run the following commands:

sudo pacman -S ibus
sudo pacman -S ibus-libpinyin

可以打汉字了！其它语言和文字 packages 可以参考这个 Arch Wiki 文章。

Next you can go into:

Settings > Region & Language > Input Source > + > Other

Select Chinese (Intelligent Pin Yin) from the list and you should see a language menu in the top bar. At this point I was able to see both English and Chinese in Language menu in the top bar, but the Chinese pinyin only worked after rebooting.

Spotify

Get some tunes going with the Spotfy app. It is not officially supported, but it seems to work alright. Facebook login did not work for me. You can create a new account with your existing email like this:

youremail+spotify@email.com

Using my main email to sign up for a new account didn't work because that email was linked to the Facebook login.

yaourt -S spotify

Word Processing (Libre Office)

Libre Office is an open-source Office Suite similar in functionality to Microsoft Word.

sudo pacman -S libreoffice-fresh

You can also install any language packs you may need for Libre Office:

yaourt -S libreoffice-fresh-zh-CN

Disk Usage Visualizations

You can get disk usage with the du command. There are other programs for disk space visualizations, so far I have found gdmap and filelight to be helpful. Both are available in the AUR:

yaourt -S gdmap filelight

The best way to ask for help is to ask the community. You should sign up for the Arch Wiki and post any questions you have after doing research and trying a few different solutions. The more detailed you are in your post, the better help you will get.

Miscelaneous Items

I have experienced unexpected behavior with some programs. Here's a list of some major issues and workarounds I have found:

Google Hangouts: I use Google Hangouts a lot for screen sharing and video conferencing. Trying to share my screen only showed a black screen with a cursor, although sharing invidual windows seemed to work fine (similar to what was happening with OBS). I found a Superuser thread describing the same issue. The solution is simply to select an Xorg session on login (instead of GNOME Classic or regular GNOME session). This is something I still don't know much about, but the solution worked for me and I have been able to share my entire screen in Google Hangouts.

You can check which session type you are using with the following command:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

and you should either see x11 or wayland.

Keyboard shortcuts

You can configure keyboard shortcuts by going into:

Settings > Keyboard

Search for or find the setting that says "Hide all normal windows". I set mine to Shift + Alt + D. You can configure other keyboard shortcuts here.

Night Light

If you are coming from Mac or Windows, you might be used to using f.lux to dim the blue colors from your screen. There are few options for Linux such as Red Shift and xflux. I finf that in GNOME, using the built in Nigh Light works the best for reduce eye strain. Just go into:

Settings > Displays

and click on Night Light. Like flux, you can set it for regular hours. There aren't as many modes or options, but it does a pretty goog job of what I need it to do.

Helpful Commands

To view all available commands, run the following command:

compgen -c

To view all installed packages, run:

pacman -Q

Conclusion and Next Steps

Installing Arch Linux is like trying to build a house with just a spoon. You won't get very far with a spoon, but you have the benefit of being able to order unlimited copies of free parts and materials online (the AUR, or Arch User Repository), and a great community of people that are extremely knowledgable about "building houses". Pretty soon you are able to quickly put together a foundation, scaffolding, wiring, appliances and yes even wallpaper. Arch Linux stays with its rolling release cycle, so you don't have to rebuild your house every 9 months to stay current.

Arch Linux is a lot of work to set up compared to popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu. Just like everyone says, you learn a lot by going through the process, breaking things and starting the installations process from scratch. I totally messed up my permissions while installing and quickly found that the only solutions was to reinstall Arch. This guide is primarily for personal use, and I am sure there are things that can be improved and even done completely differently. Here's a list of things I can start with:

Fix OBS Studio: ~~I got this to work in my earlier install and can't seem to remember how I fixed it. Currently OBS displays a black screen when set to Screen Capture~~. I finally got OBS studio to work and I think the issue was as simple as rebooting (or possibly an update with sudo pacman -Syu).
Encrypting the home folder: this is good practice and will make my computer more secure, it shouldnt be too difficult either.
Adding a boot partition and fixing GRUB: the guides I worked off of didn't include this, and I think it would be very important to figure out how this works if I want to include Windows 10 for doing Windows-specific tasks on my laptop as well without having to go into the bios each time I want to switch OSs.
Using HDDs: On my desktop I would like to be able to figure out how to mount my HDD that I use for mass file storage on my Windows machine. For simplicity I have kept everything on one SSD, but it would be good to figure out how to easily add additional disks at boot time.
NVIDIA drivers: this does not apply to my laptop, but I would like to figure out how I can get the best drivers in Arch Linux for my NVIDIA GPU on my desktop machine. This is one thing that running Linux in a Virtual Machine really doesn't allow you to do (pass a GPU through a VM), as far as I know.
All other drivers: I still have lots of questions about how to make sure that I am running things properly on my desktop PC. I feel like drivers for the laptop install were pretty automatic, but this may not be the case with additional hardware components on my desktop, such a closed-loop water cooler.
Additional Customization, Themes, Window Managers, etc.: There is so much that can be done with Arch Linux in terms of GUI. I love the setup I have but it would be interesting to explore some additional options like i3, for example.
Cusomt kernels: I am also interested in learning how I could swap out kernels. I have seen people add LTS kernels to Arch Linux for various reasons, and I'm interested to learn how this works.
Maximzing battery life: During the install process I saw the topic discussed but didn't look into it. It would be nice to see if I could make changes to get more out of the battery in my refurbished ThinkPad.
Other areas for improvement: [add here]
Install RVM
Install EMACS

Arch Linux Installation Guide

Put Arch Linux on a USB drive

VirtualBox

Quick note about fonts

Using fdisk for partitioning

Note about fdisk

Create a root partition

Create a SWAP partition

Create home partition

Create Filesystems and Format Partitions

Verify our layout with lsblk

Mount Filesystems

Backup mirrorlist

Install reflector

Installing the base

Create /etc/fstab

Chroot - Configuring the base system

Configuring locale settings

Set the Hardware Clock

Set the Host Name for the System

Enable Multilib Repository

Add support for Yaourt Package Tool

Synchronize and Update Database Packages

Create a password for the root account

Add a new user with sudo privileges

Install sudo Package

Configuring a sudo - adding user to wheel group

Installing a bootloader

Arch Linux is now installed

Boot from existing OS

Configuring the Network

Run a full System update

Installing the X Environment

Installing GNOME Desktop

Installing Networking Tools

Installing popular packages

Installing codecs for audio and video

Install Yaourt

Enable Wi-Fi

Customizing GNOME Desktop

GNOME Shell Extensions

Screenfetch

Quick Note on Terminal Colors

Quick Note on yaourt

Window options

Icons on Desktop

My other setup notes

Default Applications

Other packages

Configure VPN

Setting Up Development Tools

Atom and other text editors

VirtualBox

Quick note on deluge

npm and node.js

Heroku

Note about Python versions on Heroku

Redis

SSH

autoenv (GitHub)

Ruby and Jekyll

Python

Jupyter Notebook and IPython Notebook

Anaconda Distribution from Continuum Analytics

PostgreSQL

tmux

tree

Languages and Input Sources

Spotify

Word Processing (Libre Office)

Disk Usage Visualizations

Sign up for the Arch Wiki

Miscelaneous Items

Keyboard shortcuts

Night Light

Helpful Commands

Conclusion and Next Steps

Using `fdisk` for partitioning

Verify our layout with `lsblk`