 Today I'm going to be running through a quick installation of Arch Linux using the Arch install script. Arch Linux now comes with a guided installation script that makes installing Arch Linux a little easier, especially for new users if you're not used to a lot of the command line utilities like FDisk and manually partitioning drives and things like that. The Arch install script is designed to be much more new user friendly. Now the Arch install script, they first released it a couple of months back and I didn't do a video on it back then because I actually tried to use the script and it failed on me. I was getting Python errors trying to execute things using the script. It was in the early days though. They've had several releases of the script since then and they recently had a big release of the script that I've seen a lot of news articles about so I wanted to give it another try today and I'm going to record it on camera. So I've downloaded the latest ISO for Arch Linux. Arch Linux puts out an ISO once a month so this is the May ISO and I've already booted into a virtual machine here and I'm going to choose the very first option here of the menu Arch Linux install medium BIOS. Let's go ahead and get into our TTY here. And we've booted into the live environment which is just the command prompt. Before getting started here I did want to pull up the official documentation for this from the Arch Wiki because a lot of times I would just read the official documentation for something but the Arch install page maybe because it's so new there really isn't anything here. The only thing it really tells me is how to launch the script which is running Arch install all one word. It does give me a link to the official documentation as far as like the Python source code and stuff like that and I have read a little bit of this just a couple of paragraphs or so just to kind of get an idea what this is about. So let me go ahead and get back into the command prompt here and type Arch install and let's see if we can figure this thing out. It looked like first it said it was testing connectivity. It was making sure that Ethernet was working here in my case and I guess it is because it continued on to the menu. So this is a menu driven command line installation. It's not in curses. There's nothing graphical going on. Xorg isn't even installed on the ISO for Arch Linux, right? So it's all a command line menu system here and you can see select Arch install language. English is the default so I'm just going to leave that but if I wanted to I could change it. I could hit enter and I've got some options here. I'm just going to go with English as the default keyboard layout. Set to a U.S. keyboard. I'm going to leave that but again if I hit enter you know you've got your list of various keyboard layouts you could choose. Select mirror region. It looks like it is empty. So let's go ahead and fill that out. Let's see if I type U. Will it take me down to the U's in the list? No it will not. So let me just arrow down. I'm sure page up and page down would have worked. It looks like we can scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and then go back to the top but let me go ahead and choose United States. If I hit enter will it mark that? It did. So it marked it and it exited us out of that particular menu. And select hard drive. So let's go ahead and select our drive. Now I created this virtual machine. This virtual machine is going to have one virtual hard drive even though it lists two devices. That first one is just a very small device. That's not actually the hard drive. The next one slash dev slash VDA. That is the actual device. VDA instead of SDA in a virtual machine. So on physical hardware your devices if it's a solid state drive they'll typically be slash dev slash SDA slash dev slash SDB et cetera. So let me go ahead and hit enter on that particular device and it did set the device. Then it says select disk layout. That is also empty. So let's go ahead and tell it what to do with that disk. And it says select what to do with each individual drive followed by partition usage. So I'm assuming if I hit enter there I could like manually partition it. Maybe I could, I don't know. Let's see if it, yeah create a new partition. Let me escape. Yeah, well just escape out of that. Because actually I don't want to manually set up anything. I want to do wipe all selected drives and use best effort default partition layout. That's essentially automatic partitioning like when you do it in the Ubuntu installer or the Calamari installer. When you tell it you'll give the operating system the whole drive and just do your thing. Set up an automatic partition. I don't care how you do it. That's what I want to do. And then I'm going to tell it to do extend for for our file system. And I want to see if the automatic partitioning works right. It's the reason I wanted to go through that. I know if I set it up myself it should work right. Then we have the option of setting up an encryption password. I don't want to encrypt this. Not for this VM but if you wanted to. I'm sure you just hit enter and set a password for it. And then select bootloader. Grub is going to be the bootloader. Most people probably use Grub. Let's see if I have a different option. No you don't. So hitting enter right now does nothing. But I'm assuming this is a placeholder because eventually maybe they're going to offer alternative bootloaders to Grub. And then we have the option of using a swap. It's set to true. I normally wouldn't create a swap in a VM but I'm going to leave it set to true since it's already set to true. I specify the hostname. By default it's going to set the hostname to Arch Linux but you could change that if I hit enter. Desired hostname I'm going to do this as Arch-vert. Just to change it. Then we need to set a root password. So let me hit enter on that. Type a strong and complicated password. It's complaining the password you are using seems to be weak. Are you sure you want to use it? Yes. And then it asks for verification. Then specify user account. So let's create our home user. I'm going to call my user DT. And then we need to create a password. A strong and complicated password for the DT user. And hit enter. It's going to warn us once again. That's a weak password. I'm going to tell it it's okay. And then verify my strong and complicated password. And then it gives us the option. If we wanted to we could add more users. So we have our home user DT. And we have a root user. I really don't need anything else. So I'm just going to confirm and exit. And specify profile. And I'm assuming this would be a profile for installation purposes. It's typically a meta group of packages to install. For example, you want this to be a server. Do you want this to be a desktop environment kind of operating system. And that's what you've got going on here. We've got desktop. Which is going to set up Xorg and a desktop environment of your choice and things like that. Minimal which is a very basic Arch Linux installation. That's probably going to be super stripped down. That's probably just going to be like the Arch base and nothing else. Then we have the server installation which will probably be a very minimal installation plus some server stuff such as you know patchy, you know Maria DB things like that. Looks like it's going to install HTTPD and Nginx. And we have a Xorg package. And that will install the Xorg server. So we can get a graphical display like a desktop environment window manager. But it's not going to install any of that stuff for us. It's just going to install Xorg. And after that, you install desktop environment window manager whatever it is you want to use. I'm going to go with the first option because I think that's what most people will choose is desktop. And then we have the option for a desktop environment or window manager. Awesome. BSPWM, Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepen, Enlightenment, GNOME, i3, KDE, LXQ, Monte, Qtile, nice choice. Sway, XFCE, shame they're missing Xmoned, but you know what, I really love Qtile. But for purposes of this video, let me choose a full desktop environment. I'll choose LXQ because it's kind of minimal. It's definitely smaller than things like GNOME and KDE Plasma. So hopefully it won't take as long to install some. I'm going to choose LXQ. Select a graphics driver or leave blank to install the open source drivers. Now I'm in a virtual machine. The virtual machine graphics drivers are all open source. So I don't really need this. So I'm just going to hit escape to leave that blank. Then select our audio driver. So Pipewire is the default. Now in Arch Linux, I'm just going to leave that as the default. Select the kernel. The standard generic Linux kernel is the default. And that's what I'm going to go with. But I'm going to hit enter to show you the menu here because we could choose the hardened kernel, the LTS kernel, or the Zen kernel. But I'm going to go with the generic kernel. Additional packages to install. So let's hit enter on this. And it tells us exactly what it's going to install by default. If you've ever run through an Arch installation, like this traditional command line Arch installation, typically you install base Deville Linux, the kernel, because it doesn't install the kernel by default. So Linux firmware looks like it also installs EFI boot manager. And that's it, right? It really installs nothing else. So I know for sure, I've got to have Vim on the system because Vim is not installed. And I don't know if there's any other editor installed. I don't even know if nano is installed. I know VI might not be installed either. I need a text editor so I'm going to install Vim. Now we're installing a desktop environment. We're installing LXQ, but I probably want some kind of web browser. Let's just choose something that I know is in the core repository. So I'll choose Firefox. And typically I would install some other packages that I need. Like I like Elacrity for my terminal and you know, I may swap out various other programs, but I'm going to go with the LXQ programs. But I know whatever web browser comes with LXQ I probably will hate and I know Vim won't be installed. So I at least got these and I'm just going to leave it at that. I don't want to install a million things. It says some packages could not be found. It couldn't find Vim. So it looks like it's going to install Firefox for us, but it won't install Vim because it couldn't find that package. I know Vim is the name of the package in the arch repositories, but it may not be part of the core repository. It may be part of the extra repository and you know, some community repository that we don't have access to at least right now. So let's see if I chose Neo Vim. Would it accept that? I can't find some packages could not be found. Firefox could not be found. I wonder if I shouldn't have read the very first line. It says space separated. Leave blank to skip. So Vim is there, but I should not have added the comma. That's my fault. And now yeah, it's going to install both Vim and Firefox. So always read the messages that it gives you. You know, that's my bad there. Now we're getting close to the end. We need to select our time zone that it defaults to UTC, but of course I am in the U.S. Central or I could find America, Chicago is typically what all the graphical tools like the Calamaries installer and always they always put me America slash Chicago. I'll just go with that. That is in the central time zone here in the U.S. set automatic time sync NTP. It's set to true. Just leave that and then additional repositories to enable. So let's go ahead and multi lib. So this will give you access to some old 32 bit libraries, which you may need, especially if you're a gamer. You may want to turn that on and then there is the testing repository. I typically never play with that for purposes of this VM. I'm not going to bother adding either one of those and then finally save configuration and install. So if I choose save configuration very cool. I see what they're doing now. This is a script, right? It took everything that we did and it saves it as a script, meaning I could save this script. I could go put it on my Git lab and save it forever. And the next time I come to install Arch Linux, I can just feed this script into the Arch install command and it already knows all the choices I want all the desktop environments I want all the extra packages. It knows my user name and host name and all of that. That's very nice. Almost like Arch Linux realizes that distributions like NixOS and GNU Geeks, you know, they have this reproducible build, right? Where the way you install distributions like Nix or Geeks is you create an install script and then the install script actually installs your entire system. It's an easy script that you can always have always save and it allows you basically to take one script and install the same system to like 100 different computers or 1000 different computers. That's really nice. I like the fact that they're doing this. Now save user configuration, save user credentials, yada, yada, yada. Save all. Yeah, we'll just save it all. Why not? Enter a directory for the configurations to be saved. Now I created a user DT. I wonder if it created his home directory. So let's home slash DT slash config. Let's see if it will take that says enter a directory. I guess it doesn't like config. I guess it can't make that directory as home slash home slash DT is also not a valid directory. Well, let's just can we escape out of this? Yeah, we can. So I'm not exactly sure what kind of path I could have given it. We're currently logged in as root. I probably could have given it a path somewhere in the root file system to save that stuff too. But for now I really didn't need to save that configuration. I just wanted to see how it works. What I really want to do is actually install what we've already set. So let's go ahead and run through the installation. And once again it prints out the contents of our install script here to the terminal. But I'm going to hit enter to continue. And now it's formatting the drive. So it should format the drive, create our file system, the extend for file system to create our users for us. Maybe that's part of the reason why it couldn't find slash home slash DT that user hasn't actually been created. All that did was create the script. But the user probably isn't created until we actually did to this portion of the installation. So it's going to install 141 packages. It's going to install more than that because with a full desktop environment like LXQ especially I would think there's more stuff to install. But it's probably going to take it in chunks. It's going to install the base packages which I think that's what this is. Then it will install base devel. Then it'll install the desktop packages. So I would expect this to take I don't know 10 maybe 15 minutes. I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once the installation has completed. And it looks like that portion of the installer finished. I'm not exactly sure how long that took. I'm sure it just took a few minutes. But I actually had to step away for about 15 minutes there to take care of something. But it looks like now it's asking do we want to into our newly created installation and perform post installation configuration which means we're still in the live environment but we could run a charoute meaning change the root file system. Meaning we could change the root file system over to the disk and the new file system or extend for file system that we created and we could do things on our newly installed Arch Linux for example. We can install more programs from the command line if we wanted to. For now though I think I'm done. Let's just choose no. And it gets us back to our prompt here. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to reboot and actually see if the installation was successful. And it looks like it was because it detached the ISO automatically for me. We get our grub bootloader and it is in fact booting up. So the installation went perfectly fine. It does give us a login manager SDDM is display manager here for the LXQt desktop environment. Let's login. And this is LXQt. Let me close all of those notifications. Let me go ahead and find display. Display is not the name of the program. Is it monitor? Monitor settings. There we go. And go to 1920 by 1080. Apply. Yes. And that is it. And I've got this set up. And that was a very easy Arch Linux installation. There wasn't much to it to get up and running with a base system with plain Jane vanilla LXQt. One thing about these desktop environments in Arch. Arch ships everything as it comes from upstream. Meaning when you install something like LXQt in my case or GNOME or Plasma or XFCE it's going to be vanilla. It's going to be those desktop environments not configured in any way whatsoever. You're not going to have any extra icon sets, any themes. It's just going to be kind of ugly. You know all these desktop environments are not great out of the box. That's why so many Linux distributions they focus heavily on customizing their desktop environments is because how they ship from upstream. They're not configured at all. For example if I go into system tools. Heck I don't even have anything here. I have a terminal. And H top is installed. Arch Linux gets that right. They install H top out of the box. I didn't specify that but that's it. I have a terminal. LXQt settings. Let's see. If I go to appearance. Let's see what icon themes. Yeah we don't have any icon themes right? LXQt themes. We do have those. Those are just the built in like panel themes and stuff. GTK style. So GTK themes that are installed. These menu systems. You notice they're grayed out because I don't have any GTK stuff installed at all. Because we didn't specify any GTK programs. Because VM is not a GTK program. Neither is Firefox. And then everything else was just part of LXQt or like the base and base develop packages which are all command line stuff. Until I start installing some GTK stuff. We have no GTK themes. So this is something to take into account when you do Arch Linux or other really minimal distributions like Gen2 and things like that. Any kind of server distributions if you do like a minimal Debian install. Things like that. You don't realize how much stuff you have to install. You're going to have to install themes. You're going to have to install fonts. You're going to have to install icon packs. You're going to have to install wallpaper packs if you want wallpapers. I'm assuming that there's no wallpapers here other than whatever ships out of the box with LXQt. If I go to background, browse they do have six wallpapers here in their default LXQt wallpaper pack. But I mean that's really all you get. You got to apply just to change the wallpaper. Yeah, that's not too bad. I notice our desktop icons have the little exclamation on them. Does that mean there's an error? Yeah, the file DT seems to be a desktop entry. What do you want to do with it? I want you to open it. So it should open our file manager at slash home slash DT. But it's possible slash home slash DT doesn't exist. So let me see if I can find file manager system tools. Do we not have a file manager installed? dcmnfm slash home slash DT. So that directory is here. But for whatever reason it doesn't want to do that. If I hit execute it works. But I don't know why the exclamation is there. Again, just know that Arch Linux a little different than customized Linux distributions that heavily customize the desktop environment before you ever get to it. This is your job to actually make LXQ'd or GNOME or Plasma or XFCE usable. You're the one that's going to have to put in that work to do that on Arch Linux. Overall I'm really impressed with the Arch install script, the guided installation script it works and I love the fact it saves that configuration file. I actually didn't expect that and that opens up a whole new world of possibilities because I can think of for myself a lot of things for an install script. I'm thinking things I could do with DTOS using that install script and things like that. Now before I go let me think a few special people. Of course I need to thank the producers of this episode. Devin Gabe James, Maxim Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott-West, Alan Armoredragon, Chuck Commander-In-Greed, Yo-Kai, Dylan George-Lee, Lennox Ninja, Mike Erion, Alexander Pease, Archimandor, Polytech, Riala Teetz, Red Prophet Steven, Willie, these guys. They're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the Arch install script would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors really it's just me and you guys of the community if you like my work and want to see more videos about Lennox free software open source software look for DistroTube over on Patreon these guys. And how is X-Monad not a choice?