Notes from Installing Arch Linux

About six months ago I downloaded the Arch ISO and stuck it on a thumb drive. I finally got around to installing it now - I was nervous about accidentally nuking my computer, so didn’t want to try dual-boot the way I would with a distro with a graphical installer, and running it via WSL would be missing the point. I finally got my hands on an old laptop I could mess around with and did it.

Overall, it was pretty simple following the installation guide from the Wiki. The only hairy bit was editing my disk partitions via fdisk - I relied on this guide at that point. But there were two notable issues which held me up.

The first was expired PGP keys. I ran into a lot of Key could not be verified locally messages while installing, and one page told me to update my keyring with pacman -Su archlinux-keyring. This resulted in trying to install a lot more software and running out of space in my thumb drive. I also tried deleting everything in /etc/pacman.d/gnupg and rerunning pacman-key --init && pacman-key --populate archlinux, all to no avail. Eventually I just downloaded the newest version, overwrote it onto my thumb drive, and began from scratch. This time it worked.

The other major issue I had was with BIOS vs UEFI. It seemed like my machine was using the legacy BIOS boot, since there was no directory called /sys/firmware/efi. Based on this I initially created just one partition, /dev/sda, on which I mounted root based on the above-mentioned guide. After installing and rebooting, I got stuck in a boot loop where the machine was turning to the router and asking for a DHCP lease…apparently skipping past the HDD boot medium and trying to boot from the network! That is, it didn’t recognise that there was an OS installed. I once again started over (the installation process is pretty quick, so this isn’t such a big deal) and redid it while adding /dev/sda1 for UEFI and /dev/sda2 for root. This time it worked smoothly, so apparently I did need the ESP partition?

A final note: Arch doesn’t include sudo with its basic install, so you can just grab it with pacman. But note that if you first created a non-root user, you get a “naughty, naughty” message when trying to use sudo as no-root. I had to set a default \$EDITOR, and then call visudo and add myself to sudo-capable users. Once I had this I installed yay, Firefox, and vim and called it a day.