 A couple of years ago, Arch Linux radically changed the way you could install Arch Linux as far as you now have a choice. Before about two years ago, you had to install Arch Linux via the command line. It was a command line installation. You read their installation guide. You entered about a dozen different commands in the terminal, and in about 10 minutes you were done. It's not a very lengthy process, but still, a lot of people solve that installation process as being hard, being difficult, because it involved typing in a terminal, and not everybody likes typing stuff in a terminal. It seems kind of scary, especially when you don't know what the commands are, you know, which new users don't know what they're really typing in the terminal. Is this going to damage my computer? What's really happening with this command? Well, the Arch Linux team kind of solved this problem because now there is a new automated way to install Arch Linux with the Arch install script. And I haven't run through a Arch install script installation since it was first introduced about two years ago. So I'm kind of interested in seeing in the last couple of years has it gotten even better? Is it still easy? Has it improved? Is there more features? I'm kind of curious. So today I'm going to run through a quick installation of Arch Linux using the Arch install script. So I'm going to do this installation using a virtual machine. The first thing you need to do to install Arch Linux, obviously, is to go grab the ISO. So go to archlinux.org, go to the download link and then grab either the magnet link or the torrent link, depending on how you want to grab that ISO. I have already downloaded the ISO. So I'm going to go ahead and launch Vert Manager. And we're going to go ahead and spin up a virtual machine here. So I'm going to create a new virtual machine and let me go forward. Choose the ISO or CD ROM. So let me go to my downloads directory. I have, oh, what do I have? Arch Linux right here. It did not automatically detect the operating system, but I can type Arch Linux and it appears in the menu here that I'm going to go forward. I'm going to give this thing about what we'll call it six gigs of RAM and two threads of my 24 thread threadripper and then go forward here. Twenty gigs of storage is plenty for this virtual machine. So that's fine. Naming the VM. It suggests Arch Linux that is fine and away we go. And now I've created this VM. Let me make it full screen and let's go ahead and launch Arch Linux. All right, and it finished booting. And of course, all we get is the TTY. We get the terminal and this is typically how you would install Arch Linux. You would go read the ArchWiki, the installation guide on the ArchWiki. And at the terminal here, you would just start entering commands. But with the Arch install script, all we have to do is type one command, Arch install, and it's checking version. And there we go. And now we get this menu system, this menu driven installation process where we just pick our selections and then at the end, it does all the configuring and installation for us without us having to enter any weird convoluted commands, we don't have to edit any config files, any of that. Let me see if I can zoom in here a little bit. The first selection here is the Arch install language. It defaults to English, and that is correct for me. So I don't need to do anything on that selection. So I'm just going to go down mirrors. Do I need to select mirrors, custom mirrors or back? I just use whatever the default mirrors are. Locals are defined. So let's see what it defined. Keyboard layout US is correct. English US for the language is correct. UTF-8, yeah, all that looks good. Bootloader, it defaults to grub. I'm going to use grub, so that's fine. Do I want to swap? It says true, so I'm assuming it's going to create a swap for us. That's fine. I did want to swap. Hostname, it defaults to Arch Linux, but if I wanted to change it, you know, I could do Arch dash invert for the hostname of the computer and root password. So this is very important. Let's set a root password. So I'm going to create a strong and complicated root password. Then we need to create a user account. So your home user name. So my user on this computer is going to be called DT. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then verify. And then should DT be a super user? Should he have sudo privileges? Yes. And do we need to add any other users? No, so I'm just going to confirm and exit. Next up is profile and profile type. And I'm going to choose desktop for the profile because I am going to install a desktop environment or window manager. But if you were doing a server, you could choose server. You were doing like a base Xorg where it installs Xorg, but it probably is not going to install any window managers or desktop environments. You could choose that, but I'll do desktop. I'm just going to ask what desktop I want. I'm going to choose the first in the list. Let's choose awesome. So let me go ahead and hit the space bar and then I just hit enter. Yeah, we go back. Do I want a graphics driver? It says all open source because I'm in a virtual machine. All open source drivers work. If I was on my home computer with my Nvidia card, I might need to go through the graphics driver menu and select the proper driver and then Greeter. That's going to be your login manager. So something like GDM or SDDM or whatever it happens to be. Light DM is an option here. I'm going to choose SDDM and now that I've selected all that. Let's go back and then audio. No audio server. So we need to choose audio server. Pipe wire is the default on Arch Linux these days. So I would suggest going with that kernels by default. It's going to use the Linux kernel. So that's your standard Linux kernel. But maybe you want something different. So I'm going to hit the space bar and turn that off. And I'm going to turn on with the space bar Linux LTS. I'm going to use the LTS kernel and I'm doing this just to verify that. You know, changing some of the defaults actually works. Additional packages. Let's see what additional packages would be. So it's going to install all the packages in base base to Ville Linux Linux firm where but if you desire anything else like a web browser and it specifies that when you're typing these, they need to be space separated. So imagine you're doing sudo pacman dash capital S and then you're listing a bunch of packages. You know, there's no commas or anything in between them is just a space. So I know I'm going to need a browser. So let's do Firefox. I know I'm going to need a text editor. Veeam, because Veeam is not installed out of the box. I know I'm going to need a file manager PC man FM. I know I'm going to need a run launcher. I don't know if awesome defaults to using the menu. But just in case we better install the menu just in case it expects the menu to be there. And honestly, I think just with those four extra packages plus awesome is the awesome window manager will be installed for us. I think we will be good. So I'm going to hit enter. Just verifying that additional packages exist. And apparently they do. So if you'd mistyped, it would tell you, hey, that package is not in the repo. Next up is network configuration. So let me go ahead and use network manager. And that's typically what I do on the command line arch installations. I just go ahead and install network manager and it kind of takes care of your networking for you. So let me go ahead and make my life easier and use network manager. Timezone UTC is not correct. Typically in this list, I need America, Chicago in the list. So I'm going to have to go down quite a bit. Oh, I went a little bit too far. America slash Chicago, that's the central timezone in the US. I'm not actually in Chicago, guys. I know you guys always get confused. I'm a long way away from being in Chicago. But that is the correct time zone for me. Automatic time sink NTP is set to true. I'll just leave that optional repositories. So you could turn on, for example, multi lib. You probably need that if you're going to do any kind of gaming and you need 32 bit libraries, so make sure turn that on, especially if you're going to be gaming on platforms like Steam or whatever it happens to be. And then we have the option to save configuration. So if I wanted to save all my choices to a configuration file so that I could use that configuration file later for reproducibility, right? Kind of mix OS like, right? You can save a config file and use that to reinstall later. I'm not going to do that. So I'll decline saving and then let's go ahead and choose install or abort. Obviously, I want to install it says missing disconfiguration. So we didn't actually do a disconfiguration. So how did I miss that in the list? I guess I skipped right over disconfiguration. Well, let's go ahead and run through that. And let's, you know what? This is interesting. It will automatically partition this for us. I thought we would have to do this. And then F disk or CF disk or something like that. It says use best effort default partition layout. You know what? I'm going to let it do an automatic partition just to see how it does. So it does give us a confirmation. Is this partition scheme OK? And it looks fine to me. It's going to create basically one big partition, right? Slash dev slash VDA, one partition. It says select one or more of these devices to actually install Arch Linux to. So I'll turn the one partition, the one big partition, because the other really small partition there, the 803 megabyte partition is just a loopback device. So we need to choose this one here. What file system do we want? Butter FS, it looks like is I don't know if it's the default, but it's the first in the list. Extend for is also here XFS and F2FS. I typically default to extend for. So I'll go with that. And now I should be able to go to install. Yeah, I'm not getting any warning messages. So let's go ahead install. And now let me zoom back out here. It says press enter to continue. So that first bit of output was the config file. It just printed out the config file to the terminal, right? So we could review that in case there were any mistakes. And now it's going ahead. It's partitioning the drive. Once it partitions the drive, it's going to run through all the package installations. Yeah. And this typically just takes a couple of minutes. Like the actual installation process is not very long because it's not installing very much, so that's a very easy and quick installation. The only thing we need to do now is as soon as this is done, we need to reboot, make sure we get grub and then make sure that we have our login manager, SDDM, and that we can log in to awesome window manager. And the installation process has finished. Now it's asking, would I like to cheroot into the newly created installation and perform any post installation configuration? So what this is asking here is, do we want to cheroot, change route over into our new Arch Linux installation and finish up anything before, you know, rebooting the machine? And I don't really need to do anything, but let's see if this works. I'll choose yes. And let's imagine, you know what? I forgot to install of an important package I need. So let's do a sudo pacman dash capital S for install. And maybe I forgot to install Emax and I really wanted Emax on the system. Let's go ahead and install that before we reboot. And now that that has completed, I'm going to go ahead and exit out of the cheroot and then reboot and it reboots just fine. We get a grub menu so it looks like the installation did work correctly. Now the next big hurdle is to make sure the login manager launches correctly. It did. This is SDDM, a default SDDM, very ugly, very plain looking. We do have our window manager installed. Awesome. So let's go ahead and log in and see. Yeah, awesome. Window manager launches almost immediately. It's a very lightweight window manager. Now we don't really have anything installed and there's no programs really to run. I have a link here, open terminal. I did not install a terminal. You know, that's when I would have installed a Lackrity had I thought about it in the cheroot earlier. But if I do a X prop, this is a Lackrity. Well, it installs a Lackrity by default. I wonder if that's a dependency with awesome or it's probably the desktop profile. I bet when I chose desktop profile for the Arch install script, I bet it knew. Hey, everybody needs a good terminal emulator. And they're probably defaulting to a Lackrity. So that is actually very cool. I don't remember a lot of the default awesome key bindings. But I think Super P for prompt. Yeah, Super P for prompt. And you can see, actually, if I go over, I have Firefox for our browser because I chose to install Firefox. Yeah, and that is working as well. So, you know, not much to see here. This is going to be a very plain looking awesome window manager with not a lot of programs installed. But from here, you know, I could build it into whatever I want at this point. But the point was the automated Arch install script, it works. That whole installation process literally took like 10 minutes. And it's such a breeze, right? That is seriously one of the easiest Linux installation processes you'll find. So when people say, Arch Linux is hard to install, not these days. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this show. Gabe James, Matt Paul, Steve West, Arkotic Armor Dragon, Commander Anchorey, George Lee, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, Nate, Erion Paul, Peace, Arch, and Fedora, Realities for Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solastri, Tienren, Tools Deweller, Warranty into an Ubuntu and Willie. These guys, they're the highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick little arch install 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. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.