 Hi I'm Denchie and in today's video I'm going to be doing a proper no-nonsense and calm guide on how to install Arch Linux. Now before I begin the installation, this is a UEFI install. This means that this install is going to cover steps that are only compatible with relatively modern computers released in the last four to five years. Chances are you're probably using a computer that uses UEFI so all the steps in here will be perfectly fine for you. However, if you're in doubt just make sure you see this screen when you turn on your Arch Linux USB stick. When you plug that in and boot from it you should see these options. And that's where our install is going to start by pressing enter on the first option or just letting it time out as it does by default. Now the system will begin booting. In that time I want to bring your attention towards the right of the screen where I have the Arch Linux install guide. This is linked in the description for you to follow and it's a very nice well-written text guide on how to install the distribution. As you can see the pre-installation section covers downloading the Arch Linux ISO. I'm making the assumption that you already have an Arch Linux bootable USB stick and you've just booted into it. You see this screen and you're pulling your hair out because you have no idea what you're doing. I'm going to scroll down over here to the keyboard layout option because that's the first thing you're probably going to want to set. By default Arch Linux will use the US keyboard layout. Now chances are you're probably using that as well but let's say you want to use the Italian keyboard layout. In that case you can type load keys space it and press enter and now you have the Italian layout. I'm going to run load keys US to load the United States one again because I'm using that. The next step is going to be connecting to the internet. Now I hope you do have an Ethernet connection for your Arch Linux install. If you have a laptop please stop and take a moment to plug in an Ethernet cable. If you do not have an Ethernet cable available or the Ethernet plug on your laptop isn't there or it's broken I guess you're going to have to use Wi-Fi. I'm not going to be covering how to use Wi-Fi how to set that up because that's not really possible on a virtual machine. However if you want to know how it works I will link a guide in the description that explains how to use IWD which is a tool you can use to connect to the internet which is included in the Arch Linux installer USB. So if you run IWCTL it will send you straight into their interface and you can type device list. As you can see I don't have anything here because I don't have any Wi-Fi devices so I'm just going to type exit and now we can get on with the install. One important thing to know about the terminal is you can type control L to clear the screen. This is going to be very useful because the terminal can get quite cluttered and sometimes you just need to clear your terminal. Anyways to test the internet connection we're going to run a ping command we're going to run ping archlinux.org or any other internet address and as you can see it connects. Now if you want to stop any command that's running on your terminal all you got to do is type control C and as you can see it stops the command and we're going to do control L to clear the screen again and we're going to scroll down over here to the partitioning part. Now as you can see the Arch Linux install guide recommends you use fdisk. I do not recommend you use fdisk it's not as intuitive as a different tool you can use called cfdisk so running cfdisk on your system pressing enter you'll see you'll be asked for a label type now you're on UEFI so you should probably type gpt. You might not see that screen and instead you might end up on this screen by default while you won't see a single line that says free space you will see a bunch of partitions like this so this is sort of like what a windows partitioning scheme would look like I'm not exactly sure but it looks similar to this assuming you want to delete everything and only use Arch Linux just go to each one of these little partitions and move your arrow keys the left and right ones to select an option we're going to do the delete options we're just going to press delete and press enter same thing for the next partition we're going to go over to delete and press enter and the same thing for the other ones just press enter and now we've ended up with just this free space and nothing else we're going to press enter and delete 32 gigs or whatever the size of your drive is and type 100 capital M because we're making a 100 megabyte size partition that's going to be our boot partition dev sd a 1 moving on to the next partition we're going to make this one 4 gigs in size now you can make this 4 gigs or 8 gigs or 16 gigs because this is our virtual memory partition it's used by our system to store excess memory whenever the regular system memory fills up if you do not make this partition you're going to end up with a system where as soon as the memory fills up it crashes and of course you don't want that to happen now going down to the lands partition we're going to press enter and press enter again and that will automatically create a partition with the rest of the space on the system now moving your arrow keys to the right option and pressing enter we're going to type yes and press enter and as you can see we've made three partitions now you may have noticed that I didn't fiddle with the partition format over here you see Linux file system for each of these three partitions that's because we're going to manually format these from the command line and not from CF disk to do that we're going to want to go to the quit option and press enter now we're going to clear the screen with control L and we're going to run the command LS BLK to list our block devices this is a very useful command just to keep a heads up on what's going on with your partitions now over here there's the format the partition section on the art wiki you can look at the commands that I'm going to be using from here the first thing we're going to want to format is our root partitions that's going to be our main partition where all our system files and documents and pictures and home folder is going to be stored that will be dev sda3 because as you can see that's the 27.9 gigabyte one we're going to run MKFS dot ex t4 ex t4 is the Linux file system space and then dev sda3 so press enter and as you can see it has formatted it now we're going to do the boot partitions that's the sda1 we're going to want to run MKFS dot fat space dash capital F space 32 that's the format it to fat 32 which is the required file system then we're going to press space and type dev sda1 and we're going to press enter and there you go we formatted it to fat 32 now we want to format sda2 so that's our swap partition this is pretty easy all you got to do is run MK swap space dev sda2 and press enter and there you go we've formatted it to swap okay so now we're going to want to start mounting all of our partitions so once again always start with the root partition to make things as clear as possible we're going to run mount dev sda3 and we're going to mount it in forward slash mnt this is just a standard mount directory this is where you're expected to mount the root directory if you're working on a system so we're going to press enter now we're going to want to mount the boot partition however the boot partition is going to be mounted in boot efi which is a directory that does not exist in our root partition as of now so if you want to make it we're going to have to run MKdir space dash p space forward slash mnt forward slash boot forward slash efi and there you go we've made the mnt boot efi directory anyway as you can see sda3 is mounted forward slash mnt but we still need to mount sda1 so running mount dev sda1 forward slash mnt forward slash boot forward slash efi pressing enter running lsblk again as you can see it's mounted there and now we're going to turn on the swap partition it doesn't have to be mounted anywhere just got to turn it on we're gonna run swap on dev sda2 and there you go we've turned on swap so run lsblk again as you can see all three partitions are activated appropriately the root partition is in mnt the swap partition is activated and sda1 our boot partition is an mnt boot efi anyways now comes the fun part which is the installation to do the installation of arch Linux we have to select the packages we want and install it into mnt so run packstrap space slash mnt space and now we got to pick the packages now I recommend installing the ones that are listed here in the essential packages on the install guides that's gonna be base linux and linux dash firmware as you can see it says that if you have a newer sound card you might want to get the soft firmware as well for sound cards so we're gonna type that in as well so f firmware and we also want a few other things to install the sudo package and all the other kind of packages that we need to compile stuff to install things from the a you are which is probably one of the most attractive features in arch linux we need to install base dash devil we're also going to want the grub boot manager which is what we need to actually boot our system without this it wouldn't work and efi boot mgr which is for efi support in grub we're also gonna want a text editor to edit text files on the terminal we're gonna use nano and we're gonna want a network manager for when we reboot the system that's gonna be network manager with no spaces okay so that should be all the basic packages we need I'm not gonna be running through installing a desktop environment and stuff I'll probably go through that at the end of this guide we're just doing a base install for now so just press enter and it's gonna start downloading all those packages and installing them so just give this a minute 10 minutes 20 minutes however long it takes because your internet may be slower than mine your inner may be faster than mine once it kicks you back to the terminal we're gonna come back through the tutorial and I'm gonna run you through the subsequent steps okay so all the packages have been installed now and we can move on to the next step which is generating the file system tab so if you run gen fs tab slash mnt as you can see you'll get an output in your terminal that it gives you information on the file systems that are mounted there as you can see this is all correct devs da3 is our root devs da1 is our boot and devs da2 is our swamp so that's all good but we don't want this on our terminal we want this on a file in our disk so we're gonna run that command again just by pressing up on your keyboard you can call back commands that you've already run we're gonna press space we're gonna type a greater than symbol which sends the output over to a different file and we're gonna send it over to mnt etc fs tab and press enter and we can check the contents of any file in our system by running cat and then the name of the file so mnt etc fs tab and as you can see it has the same contents as what was outputted to our terminal so not only is this a good way to get the file system tab carried over but it's also a great way to learn about how to redirect output on the terminal which is something very useful if you're looking into making scripts anyways with that out of the way we can finally go and enter our installed system running arch dash ch root or change root slash mnt now we're in our system so as you can see the prompt is no longer colored because we're using the plain bash shell and now we can start configuring everything from the inside one very very important part of setting up your system is setting the time zone all you got to do is run ln this will set up a symbolic link dash sf user share zone info and now you got to select your region in my case it's going to be Asia and then Dubai you can press tab to autocomplete and you'll get some kind of result and we're gonna want to link this over to etc local time suppressing enter and now if you run date as you can see just I'm gonna check my clock over here yes it is 104 so the time is correct now we're gonna want to run hw clock dash dash sys to hc that just synchronizes the system clock and now we're gonna clear the screen again and we're gonna do localization now this is another step where a lot of users get stuck on but don't worry I'm gonna run you through it clearly and explain what I'm actually doing so we're gonna want to run nano remember we installed nano before when we were installing the system at sea locale gen now by running this you'll be editing a file that contains all the different locales available on your system as you can see I'm using my arrow key to scroll down I mean want to scroll down until we find the locale you want now in my case I'm gonna be using this one over here en underscore us dot utf-8 space utf-8 so all I want to do is press the delete key to delete that hashtag or just go in front of it and delete it and now all we got to do is run control o press enter and control x to exit at sea locale jet now if you run the locale dash gen command as you can see it generates local for n underscore us dot utf-8 and there you go we have generated our locale we want to specify our locale in at sea locale.com because some programs will be checking this file as well so in this file we want to type lang equals en underscore us and capital letters dot utf and capital out dot utf and capital letters as well dash 8 and once again to write and quit you want to run control o press enter and control x now we can set our key map I'm not gonna do that because I already have the US keyboard layout but if you wanted to change your keyboard layout on the terminal you would have to run nano at sea v console dot comf go into here and type key map and then I don't know equals it or something I'm just gonna leave it as us you don't even have to type this because the default is us but I'm gonna do it for formalities so control o press enter control x all right so clearing the screen again now we want to specify the host name so nano at sea host name and I'm gonna name this computer Archie with a capital a control o press enter control x to write and quit okay so that's pretty much everything done that we can look at in this guide the init remfs we don't have to do this because this was already done when we installed the linux package the one thing we do want to do is the root password so run p a s s w d press enter and type a password I'm just gonna do 1 2 3 4 because I'm not actually installing this as a usable system but make sure you pick a good password for your root account so it's gonna ask you to type a password again I'm just gonna type 1 2 3 4 press enter and there you go all right so you're probably going to want your own personal user on the system rather than using the root user because using the root user for stuff it's not very viable on a home system so to add a user we're gonna have to run user ad dash m which means we're gonna make a home directory dash capital G that means we're gonna add us to a group and the group is gonna be called wheel and you'll see why I'm making that group later and then space dash s space forward slash bin forward slash bash so that specifies the shell we're using we're using bash so we can just use that then space and we got to specify our name I'm just gonna call myself den she so there you go we've added the user now if we run p a s s w d den she you can set your own personal password I'm gonna set this to 1 2 3 4 as well so that's the same as my root password although for security reasons you might want to set your root password differently to your user password now we're going to want to set up sudo so you can actually run sudo commands because if I use the su command to switch to the den she user so as you den she and if I try to run something as sudo so let's say I want to run sudo pacman dash capital S why you that's to update the system if I run that it's gonna ask them for my password I'm gonna type my password in and as you can see it gives me an error den she is not in the sudoers file this incident will be reported so how do we fix that well first of all I'm gonna type exit to exit my regular user and go back to the root user and now I'm gonna clear the screen and you're gonna want to run editor in capital letters equals nano that's gonna specify the editor we're gonna use for the next step we're just going to be space by sudo or V sudo so this edits the sudoers file so scrolling down the sudoers file once again we're in nano right to the bottom there's these options over here you want to go and on comment this option which is percentage wheel all equals brackets all all this lets anyone part of the wheel group which remember we added our user to run sudo commands so now that we've edited the file we can run control o press enter control x to write and quit gonna clear the screen we're gonna switch back to the den she user and we're gonna try to run that sudo pacman su you command again so press enter we're gonna type a password in one two three four and as you can see it works this time so just like that we've added our user to the sudoers group so we can now run commands with sudo which you'll see a lot online and online guides and you will need this to install packages as your user now that we've done that comes the last essential steps before we reboot our system the first one is enabling core services so the only one we're gonna be enabling today is network manager for managing our networks so system CTL enable network manager make sure you use capital N and capital M press enter and as you can see it enabled it now if you have let's say a display manager like light DM or GDM you're probably gonna want to run system CTL enable GDM or light DM but I'll get more into that later when we set up our visual environment in the meantime we're going to want to do the last key step before rebooting and that's setting up our bootloader so remember when we installed grub in the if I boot manager there's a command on our system called grub dash install and then specify our disk so in this case it's gonna be dev SDA we're gonna press enter and as you can see it installed grub but that's not over yet we start to configure grub so for that we're gonna do grub dash MK config space dash O to send the output over to forward slash boot forward slash grub forward slash grub dot CFG pressing enter it's gonna scan for kernels and there you go it installed grub now that era where it tells you about grub disable OS prober you can ignore that because we do not have that enabled that's only useful if you're dual booting which we are not doing today anyways typing exit over here we'll bring us back to the colored prompt so that's on the USB we're gonna want to run you mount dash a to unmount all of our drives that are not busy and now we can reboot our system and end up in Arch Linux I'm gonna run reboot and we're gonna just cross our fingers and hope it works as you can see we're in GNU grub it's gonna send you to the screen as soon as you boot up we're just gonna press enter or wait for the timeout as you can see Arch Linux is booting up and here we are we're in the login for Archie which remember is the whole thing we specified now my username once again the password is one two three four as we said it before and here we are one thing though we want to check is make sure we have internet connection we set up network manager last time so as long as we have an ethernet cable plugged in we should be able to ping denchi.org and as you can see yeah it pings it so our internet connection is indeed working okay so this is all well and good but how do I set up a graphical environment from here one thing though I'm just gonna make the font bigger set font space dash D will double the size of the font in your system so you might want to do that if you're installing on a small screen so as I was saying one last thing we want to do is set up some kind of graphical environment a good graphical environment I recommend is KDE plasma so to install that we're gonna run sudo pacman dash capital S plasma which will install all the basic plasma stuff and to boot up into plasma to actually log into it we want to install SDDM as well now we're gonna press enter and it's gonna ask for a password so I'm just type my password one two three four press enter and as you can see it's gonna ask for the packages you want I'm just gonna press enter because those are perfectly fine same thing for these packages is press enter same thing for this as well just press enter and as you can see it's got a lot of downloads are just gonna press enter and let it start downloading that stuff this might take a while so just give it a second I'm gonna come back when it's finished alright so all the KDE plasma packages have been installed now but before we go into KDE we want to make sure you've installed all the packages we want so let's say we want a terminal emulator sudo pacman space dash capital S console you have to have a terminal emulator on your desktop environment or you might be locked into it so you can still type commands and and do what you need to do we're also gonna want maybe a text editor so that's Kate that's the KDE text editor and maybe a web browser so Firefox should do it's pressing enter we can start downloading those packages just give it a second and there you go so this should be pretty much everything we need for our little Linux desktop experience so to start the Linux desktop we're gonna start SDTM which is our display manager and to do that we're gonna run sudo system CTL enable SDTM but if we just run this by itself it's only gonna enable it at boot we want to start it now so to do that we can run enable dash dash now and then press enter and as you can see it kicks us to the login screen I'm gonna type in our login so in this case one two three four that's our password and that's the only user there press enter and we should be booted up into KDE here we are there's a KDE as you can see we have Kate we got Firefox and if we go into our application launcher we should be able to find our terminal emulator there we are console and it would it be an Arch Linux video if I didn't first of all install neo fetch and then ran neo fetch so I'm just gonna do that for decorative purposes there we are but anyways I've been Denshi that was a comprehensive guide to setting up Arch Linux goodbye