Install Arch Linux The Easy Way With The Official Install Script

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 f disk 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 archwiki 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 uh 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 uh command line installation that's not in curses there's nothing graphical going on xor 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 uh 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 it's set to a us 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 you will it take me down to the use in the list no it will not so let me just arrow down i'm sure page up and page now would have worked it looks like we can scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and then yeah 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 drives 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 uh that first one is just a very small uh 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 sda slash dev slash sdb etc 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 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 uh you 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 4 for our file system and i want to see if the automatic partitioning works right that'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 boot loaders 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 dash vert just to change it then we need to set a root password so let me hit enter on that type of 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 is 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 you know 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 it'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 apache and you know mariadb things like that looks like it's going to install httpd and nginx and we have an 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 xor 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 desktop environment or window manager awesome vspwm budgie cinnamon deepen enlightenment gnome i3 kde lxq monte q tile nice choice a sway xfce uh which is a shame they're missing x monad but you know what i really love q-tile 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 it's definitely smaller than things like a gnome and kde plasma so hopefully it won't take as long to install so i'm going to choose lx cute 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 pipe wire 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 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 use 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 base devil linux the kernel because it doesn't install the kernel by default so linux 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 vm on the system because vm 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 vi might not be installed either i need a text editor so i'm going to install vm 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 alacrity 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 vm 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 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 them 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 maybe part of the extra repository you know some some community repository that we don't have access to at least right now so let's see if i chose neovim would it accept that now i can't find uh it says some packages could not be found firefox could not be found i wonder if i shouldn't have yeah i should have read the very first line it says space separated leave blank to skip so vm is there but i should not have added the comma that's my fault and now yeah it's going to install both vm 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 us central or i could find america chicago is typically what all the graphical uh tools like the calamari's installer and always they always put me america 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 might you save configuration ah 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 the choices i want all the desktop environments i want all the extra packages it knows my username and hostname and all of that that's very nice it's almost like arch linux realizes that distributions like nyx os and gnu geeks you know they have this reproducible build right where the way you install distributions like nicks 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 a hundred different computers or a thousand different computers that's really nice i like the fact that they're doing this now save user configuration save user credentials 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 it says enter a directory i guess it doesn't like config i guess it can't make that directory and 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 to 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 extend4 file system should create our users for us maybe that's part of the reason why i 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 get to this portion of the installation so and 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 deville and 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 uh now it's asking do we want to root into our newly created installation and perform post installation configuration which means we're still in the live environment but we could run it to root meaning change the root file system meaning we could change the root file system over to the disk and the new file system our extend4 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 boot loader and it is in fact booting up so the installation went perfectly fine it does give us a login manager sddm is our display manager here for the lxeq desktop environment let's log in and this is lxq 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 that was a very easy arch linux installation right there wasn't much to it to get up and running with a base system with plain jane vanilla lxq one thing about these desktop environments in arch arch ships everything as it comes from upstream meaning when you install something like lx cued 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 gonna 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 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 htop 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 lx cute settings let's see if i go to appearance uh let's see what icon themes yeah we don't have any icon themes right i'll execute 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 lxq or like the base and base devel packages which are all command line stuff so 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 gen 2 and things like that any kind of server distributions uh if you do like a minimal debian install things like that you know you 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 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 lx cubed if i go to background browse they do have six wallpapers here in their default lx cute wallpaper pack um but i mean that's really all you get let me hit 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 our file manager system tools do we not have a file manager installed pcman fm slash home slash dt so that directory is here but for whatever reason it doesn't it doesn't want to do that if i hit execute it works but i don't know why the exclamation is there again you know 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 lx cubed 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 a lot of uses 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 thank a few special people of course i need to thank the producers of this episode devon gabe james maxim matt michael mitchell paul scott west allen armored dragon shell commander ingrid yokai dylan george lee linux ninja mike her young alexander peace orchestra polytechnic reality square likes red prophet stephen willey 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's 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 the community if you like my work want to see more videos about linux free software open source software look for distro tube over on patreon these guys and how is xmo ned not a choice you