Brief: This tutorial shows you how to install Arch Linux in easy to follow steps.

Arch Linux is a general-purpose rolling release Linux distribution which is very popular among the DIY enthusiasts and hardcore Linux users.

The default installation covers only a minimal base system and expects the end user to configure the system by himself/herself.

This is why installing Arch Linux is a challenge in itself but at the same time, it is a learning opportunity for intermediate Linux users.

I am going to show you how to install Arch Linux. Please follow the steps carefully and read the instructions properly.

How to install Arch Linux

The installation steps can differ at some points depending upon whether you have a UEFI or legacy BIOS system. Most new system come with UEFI these days.

I have written it here with focus on the UEFI system but I’ll also mention the steps that are different for the legacy BIOS systems.

Warning! The method discussed here wipes out existing operating system(s) from your computer and install Arch Linux on it. So if you are going to follow this tutorial, make sure that you have backed up your files or else you’ll lose all of it. You have been warned.

But before you see how to install Arch Linux from a USB, please make sure that you have the following requirements:

Requirements for installing Arch Linux: – A x86_64 (i.e. 64 bit) compatible machine

– Minimum 512 MB of RAM (recommended 2 GB)

– At least 2 GB of free disk space (recommended 20 GB for basic usage with a desktop environment)

– An active internet connection

– A USB drive with minimum 2 GB of storage capacity

– Familiarity with Linux command line

Once you have made sure that you have all the requirements, let’s proceed to install Arch Linux.

Step 1: Download the Arch Linux ISO

You can download the ISO from the official website. Both direct download and torrent links are available.

Step 2: Create a live USB of Arch Linux

You will have to create a live USB of Arch Linux from the ISO you just downloaded.

You may use Etcher GUI tool to create the live USB. It is available for both Windows and Linux.

Using Etcher to create Arch Linux live USB

Alternatively, if you are on Linux, you can use the dd command to create a live USB. Replace /path/to/archlinux.iso with the path where you have downloaded the ISO file, and /dev/sdx with your USB drive in the example below. You can get your drive information using lsblk command.

dd bs=4M if=/path/to/archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdx status=progress && sync

Step 3: Boot from the live USB

Do note that in some cases, you may not be able to boot from live USB with secure boot enabled. If that’s the case with you, disable the secure boot first.

Once you have created a live USB for Arch Linux, shut down your PC. Plugin your USB and boot your system. While booting keep pressing F2, F10 or F12 key (depending upon your system) to go into boot settings.

In here, select to boot from USB or removable disk. Once you do that and the system boots, you should see an option like this:



Select Boot Arch Linux (x86_64). After various checks, Arch Linux will boot to login prompt with root user.

Not using US keyboard? Read this The default keyboard layout in the live session is US. While most English language keyboards will work just fine, the same cannot be true for French, German and other keyboards. If you face difficulty, you can list out all the supported keyboard layout: ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/**/*.map.gz And then change the layout to the an appropriate one using loadkeys command. For example, if you want German keyboard, this is what you’ll use: loadkeys de-latin1

Next steps include partitioning disk, creating the filesystem and mounting it.

Again, read all the instructions properly and follow each steps carefully. You miss one step or ignore something and you’ll have a difficult time installing Arch.

Step 4: Partition the disks

For partitioning the disks, we’ll use command line based partition manager fdisk.

Use this command to list all the disk and partitions on your system:

fdisk -l

Your hard disk should be labelled /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1. Please use the appropriate disk labeling for your system. I am using /dev/sda because that’s more common.

First, select the disk you are going to format and partition:

fdisk /dev/sda

I suggest that you delete any existing partitions on the disk using command d. Once you have the entire disk space free, it’s time to create new partitions with command n.

Check if you have UEFI mode enabled Some steps are different for UEFI and non-UEFI systems.You should verify if you have UEFI enabled system or not. Use this command: ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars If this directory exists, you have a UEFI enabled system. You should follow the steps for UEFI system. The steps that differ are clearly mentioned.

Create an ESP partition (For UEFI systems only)

If you have a UEFI system, you must create an EFI partition at the beginning of your disk. Otherwise, skip this step.

When you enter n, it will ask you to choose a disk number, enter 1. Stay with the default block size, when it asks for the partition size, enter +512M.

Creating EFI System Partition | Image Credit Sacha

One important steps is to change the type of the EFI partition to EFI System (instead of Linux system).

Enter t to change type. Enter L to see all the partition types available and then enter its corresponding number to the EFI system.

Change type of EFI System Partition | Image Credit Sacha

Create root partition

You need to create root partition for both UEFI and legacy systems.

The common partitioning practice was/is to create root, swap and home partitions separately. You may just create a single root partition and create a swapfile and home under the root directory itself.

So, in this approach, we’ll have a single root partition, no swap, no home.

While you are in the fdisk command, press n to create a new partition. It will automatically give it partition number 2. This time keep on pressing enter to allocate entire remaining disk space to the root partition.

Picture for representational purpose only

When you are done with the disk partitioning, enter w command to write the changes to the disk and exit out of fdisk command.

Step 4: Create filesystem

Now that you have your disk partitions ready, it’s time to create filesystem on it. Follow the steps for your system

Creating filesystem for UEFI system

So, you have two disk partitions and the first one is EFI type. Create a FAT32 file system on it using the mkfs command:

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1

Now create an Ext4 filesystem on the root partition:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

Creating filesystem for non-UEFI system For non-UEFI system, you only have one single root partition. So just make it ext4: mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

Step 5: Connect to WiFi

You can connect to WiFi interactively using this helpful utility called wifi-menu. Just enter this command and follow the steps:

wifi-menu

You should be able to see the active connections and connect to them using the password. Once you are connected, check if you could use internet by using the ping command:

ping google.com

If you get bytes in reply, you are connected. Use Ctrl+C to stop the ping reply.

Step 6: Select an appropriate mirror

This is a big problem with installing Arch Linux. If you just go on installing it, you might find that the downloads are way too slow. In some cases, it’s so slow that the download fails.

It’s because the mirrorlist (located in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist) has a huge number of mirrors but not in a good order. The top mirror is chosen automatically and it may not always be a good choice.

Thankfully, there is a fix for that. First sync the pacman repository so that you can download and install software:

pacman -Syy

Now, install reflector too that you can use to list the fresh and fast mirrors located in your country:

pacman -S reflector

Make a backup of mirror list (just in case):

cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak

Now, get the good mirror list with reflector and save it to mirrorlist. You can change the country from US to your own country.

reflector -c "US" -f 12 -l 10 -n 12 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

All good to go now.

Step 7: Install Arch Linux

Since you have all the things ready, it’s time to finally install the Arch Linux. You’ll be installing it on the root directory so mount it first.

Do you remember the name of the root partition? Use it to mount it:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

With root mounted, it’s time to use the wonderful pacstrap script to install all the necessary packages:

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware vim nano

It will take some time to download and install these packages. If the downloads get interrupted, no need to panic. You can run the above command once again and it resumed the download.

I have added Vim and Nano text editor to the list because you’ll need to edit some files post installation.

Step 8: Configure the installed Arch system

Generate a fstab file to define how disk partitions, block devices or remote file systems are mounted into the filesystem.

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

Now use arch-chroot and enter the mounted disk as root. Actually, now you are using the just installed Arch Linux system on the disk. You’ll have to do some configuration changes to the installed system so that you could run it properly when you boot from the disk.

arch-chroot /mnt

Setting Timezone

To set up timezone on Linux, you can use timedatectl command. First find your time zone:

timedatectl list-timezones

And then set it up like this (replace Europe/Paris with your desired time zone):

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Paris

Setting up Locale

This is what sets the language, numbering, date and currency formats for your system.

The file /etc/locale.gen contains all the local settings and system language in a commented format.

Open the file using Vim or Nano editor and uncomment (remove the # from the start of the line) the language you prefer. I have used en_GB.UTF-8 (English with Great Britain).

Now generate the locale config in /etc directory file using the below commands one by one:

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

Both locale and timezone settings can be changed later on as well when you are using your Arch Linux system.

Network configuration

Create a /etc/hostname file and add the hostname entry to this file. Hostname is basically the name of your computer on the network.

In my case, I’ll set the hostname as myarch. You can choose whatever you want:

echo myarch > /etc/hostname

The next part is to create the hosts file:

touch /etc/hosts

And edit this /etc/hosts file with Vim or Nano editor to add the following lines to it (replace myarch with hostname you chose earlier):

127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 localhost 127.0.1.1 myarch

Set up root passwd

You should also set the password for the root account using the passwd command:

passwd

Step 9: Install Grub bootloader

This is one of the crucial steps and it differs for UEFI and non-UEFI systems. Let me show it for the UEFI systems first.

Make sure that you are still using arch-chroot. Install required packages:

pacman -S grub efibootmgr

Create the directory where EFI partition will be mounted:

mkdir /boot/efi

Now, mount the ESP partition you had created

mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

Install grub like this:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --bootloader-id=GRUB --efi-directory=/boot/efi

One last step:

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

Install grub on Non-UEFI systems Install grub package first: pacman -S grub And then install grub like this (don’t put the disk number sda1, just the disk name sda): grub-install /dev/sda Last step: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Step 10: Install a desktop environment (GNOME in this case)

First step is to install X environment. Type the below command to install the Xorg as display server.

pacman -S xorg

Now, you can install GNOME desktop environment on Arch Linux using:

pacman -S gnome

The last step includes enabling the display manager GDM for Arch. I also suggest enabling Network Manager

systemctl start gdm.service systemctl enable gdm.service systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

Now exit from chroot using the exit command:

exit

And then shutdown your system

shutdown now

Don’t forget to take out the live USB before powering on the system again. If everything goes well, you should see the Grub screen and then the GNOME login screen.

If you want KDE desktop, please follow this tutorial about installing KDE on Arch Linux.

Final Words on Arch Linux installation

A similar approach has been demonstrated in this video (watch in full screen to see the commands) by It’s FOSS reader Gonzalo Tormo:

You might have realized by now that installing Arch Linux is not as easy as installing Ubuntu. However, with a little patience, you can surely accomplish it and then tell the world that you use Arch Linux.

Arch Linux installation itself provides a great deal of learning. I recommend a few essential things to do after installing Arch Linux where you’ll find steps to install various other desktop environments and learn more about the OS. You can keep playing with it and see how powerful Arch is.

Let us know in the comments if you face any difficulty while installing Arch Linux.