Installing Arch Linux

John Hammond | September 29th, 2019

This are my notes while installing and setting up my Arch Linux environment.

I did this on my DELL XPS 15 laptop on September 29th, 2019.

Downloading the ISO

I downloaded the archlinux-2019.09.01-x86_64.iso from here: https://www.archlinux.org/download/. I searched for a United States mirror and chose one: specifically, I used: http://mirrors.acm.wpi.edu/archlinux/iso/2019.09.01/

Burning the ISO to a Disc

I still had Ubuntu at the time, so I burned the Arch Linux ISO to a disc with Brasero.

Booting the Arch Linux Live Disc

On my DELL XPS 15, I needed to spam the F12 key when booting to get to the menu and choose "Boot from CD". I made sure to boot in UEFI.

Once I got into the Arch Linux prompt, I followed the instructions from their Installation Guide.

I didn't need to change the keyboard layout, so I went on just to verify the UEFI boot mode:

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

This had results, so I knew I successfully booted with UEFI. Good enough!

Connecting to the Internet

On my DELL XPS 15, I wanted to connect to the Internet right away. To get started, I needed to know the name of the interface I was working with.

ip link

In my case, my interface name was wlp59s0.

Now I needed to actually connect to my Wi-Fi. I used netctl to keep it easy.

cp /etc/netctl/examples/wireless-wpa /etc/netctl/home
vim /etc/netctl/home

With that configuration file, I could fill in the interface name, SSID, and Wi-Fi password.

net start home

At that point, I could connect to the Internet!

This is incomplete. I need to keep working on this (1109 September 30th 2019)