installation.md

Installing Arch Linux on the Dell XPS 13 (2015)

Preparation

First, create a bootable USB stick using the latest Arch Linux installation image.1

Since the Dell XPS 13 ships with a Broadcom wireless adapter, this will not be supported with the included drivers within the Arch Linux image. To get around this, first download the broadcom-wl package from the AUR. Build this package locally with makepkg -s, and copy over the resulting <package name>.pkg.tar.xz to another USB stick. You will use this later to install the drivers both during installation from the USB media and after on your newly installed system.

Following along at your comfort level, continue using installation guide, for those comfortable with the installation process and needing less guidance, or the beginners' guide, for those needing a more descriptive and verbose guide.

Partitioning

The SSD hard drive, identified as /dev/sda, included 6 partitions from the factory, the last of which is used for the Windows Recovery. Being that this was a company-issued machine, etiquette dictated leaving this partition on the device. As such, I opted to simply delete the other partitions using parted rather than format the entire device, mainly because this laptop was supplied from my employer and should they ever need it back, it would be nice (although, in a way, I feel guilty enabling Windows users!)

UEFI /boot

I created a 524 MB fat32 partition at /dev/sda1 to use for UEFI bootloader.

Root /

I created a X GB partition at /dev/sda2 to mount as /, as I didn't see much sense in creating a separate /var partition for this setup.

Home /home

All remaining space went to my /home partition (/dev/sda3).

Fileystems

For all partitions (other than my UEFI boot partition), I opted for btrfs.

Install Broadcom wireless drivers

At this point, I mounted the partitions on /mnt and installed the drivers to connect to the Internet. This can be done using the following command: pacman -U <usb mount point>/<package name>.pkg.tar.xz. Keep in mind that this only installs the drivers for the currently running Linux image from the USB stick. Once the process of installing Arch on your machine (once you remove the Arch installation USB stick and restart), you will need to install the drivers again (or, you can install the drivers again, once you have arch-chrooted into the mounted partitions). After installing, be sure to run modprobe wl.

Continue with your installation as usual, such as:

• selecting your pacman mirrors
• installing the base system
• generating your fstab file
• etc.