- Exact model: HP Pavilion g6-1229so (I believe this is detailed enough to explain for example that the keyboard layout is Swedish)
- Firmware Interface: BIOS (i.e. UEFI not available)
- Graphics controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
- Wi-Fi controller: Ralink corp. RT5390 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe
- RAM: 4GB
Copyright (c) 2014, Anders Sjöqvist
Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
- I got inspiration from a Gist by jasonwryan.
- I read ArchWiki's Beginner's Guide multiple times.
- ArchWiki's instructions on how to encrypt a file system were very useful.
- I also learned from ArchWiki's Suspend and Hibernate.
- Bits and pieces were also picked from other parts of the wiki, as well as various online forums.
- I used nano while installing, and there's some reference to it in the guide. Feel free to use whatever editor you're comfortable with.
- Feel free to pick other names for things than lvm, system, lvswap, lvroot, arch-host and anders (especially the last one, which happens to be my given name).
- For several reasons, I never cleared my drive before installing. Typically,
you want to do this partly to get rid of old unencrypted data, and partly
to keep information about how much of your space you've used up secret. In
order to achieve the latter, you'll want to fill the encrypted drive with
data from
/dev/zero. - I'm assuming that there's a working Internet connection using an Ethernet cable during the entire installation process.
Place the Arch Linux image on a flash drive or CD, and use it when rebooting the laptop. Prepare the disk with GPT:
sgdisk -Z /dev/sda
A small partition is needed for GRUB to work with GPT:
sgdisk -n 1:0:+2M /dev/sda
sgdisk -t 1:ef02 /dev/sda
I chose 256MB for my boot partition. Some people suggest 200MB.
sgdisk -n 2:0:+256M /dev/sda
sgdisk -t 2:8300 /dev/sda
The rest of the disk will be used for LVM:
sgdisk -n 3:0:0 /dev/sda
sgdisk -t 3:8e00 /dev/sda
Make sure that the kernel handles encryption:
modprobe dm-crypt
I chose the default encryption, but used a stronger hash function for my
password, and used /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom to avoid the
theoretical possibility of a weak key. This could happen if /dev/urandom
runs out of entropy.
cryptsetup --hash sha512 --iter-time 5000 --use-random \
--verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sda3
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 lvm
Setting up a logical volume, volume group and two partitions. I picked a slightly larger swap partition than the size of my RAM (4GB).
pvcreate /dev/mapper/lvm
vgcreate system /dev/mapper/lvm
lvcreate system --size 5G -n lvswap
lvcreate system --extents 100%FREE -n lvroot
Create the file systems. In my case, I chose ext2 for the boot partitions, although there are several others that would have worked as well.
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda2
mkswap /dev/mapper/system-lvswap
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/system-lvroot
Mount everything:
mount /dev/system/lvroot /mnt
swapon /dev/mapper/system-lvswap
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot
Edit the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to use proper mirrors for downloading
the system. This file will be copied onto your newly installed system. I
installed my system while being in China, and moving Chinese mirrors above the
others made my downloads significantly faster.
Install the basic system. I decided to install the basic development tools as well at this point.
pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel
Generate /etc/fstab and verify that it looks correct:
genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
cat /mnt/etc/fstab
Change root and install the boot loader package (GRUB in our case):
arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
pacman -S grub
When configuring GRUB, we need to decide whether we want to use partition UUID or change the default settings. I chose to use UUID. You need to copy these identifiers into a config file. Do this in any way that you like. In my case, I left the 'chroot' environment since UUID couldn't be read from the disks as easily from within. Here's a (complicated) way that should work:
exit
rootvol=/dev/disk/by-uuid/$(lsblk -dno UUID /dev/sda3)
swapvol=/dev/disk/by-uuid/$(lsblk -dno UUID /dev/system/lvswap)
Check that the paths exist:
ls -l $rootvol $swapvol
To edit the GRUB configuration with a single command (otherwise do it manually according to the example below):
sed -i \
"s,^\(GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=\".*\)\"$,\1 cryptdevice=${rootvol}:system resume=$swapvol\"," \
/mnt/etc/default/grub
Now open /mnt/etc/default/grub to check that the result looks reasonable. It
should be something like
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet cryptdevice=/dev/disk/by-uuid/01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef:system resume=/dev/disk/by-uuid/fedcba98-7654-3210-fedc-ba9876543210".
The complete the detour, return to the chroot environment:
arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Then install GRUB and its config file. Don't worry about the i386-pc, it
still applies to 64-bit Arch Linux.
grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Open /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. While not necessary, I chose to require my
graphics driver early: MODULES="i915" Then edit the hooks. You'll need
encrypt and lvm2 because of the encryption, and resume because of
suspend-to-disk. These should all go before the filesystems hook. It should
look something like this:
HOOKS="... encrypt lvm2 resume ... filesystems ..."
Build the initramfs image:
mkinitcpio -p linux
Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment what you want, for example
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8. Then run
locale-gen
echo 'LANG="en_US.UTF-8"' > /etc/locale.conf
Set up the timezone. Again, I happened to be in China and in my case this meant
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Shanghai /etc/localtime
Unless you have reasons to keep the hardware clock at local time:
hwclock --systohc --utc
Make sure that the Ethernet connection works after reboot:
systemctl enable dhcpcd.service
Come up with a hostname:
echo arch-host > /etc/hostname
At this point, I chose to set up ntpd to let the system keep track of the time. If you want to do the same, run
pacman -S ntp
Then edit /etc/ntp.conf so that it refers to local servers. Afterwards:
systemctl enable ntpd
systemctl start ntpd
Check that ntpd is able to update by running ntpq -np. You can request an
update manually using ntpd -q.
At this point, I was eager to boot into my new system and log in as root (without password) to see that everything was working:
exit
shutdown -r now
From now on, the settings get more specific, and even more focused on the particular hardware on my laptop. Be selective if you have different hardware.
These should be safe options for the graphics driver:
echo "options i915 i915_enable_rc6=7 i915_enable_fbc=1 lvds_downclock=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
Installing X Windows:
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-xinit
pacman -S mesa
Graphics driver for X Windows:
pacman -S xf86-video-intel
I noticed problems with
tearing. In order to get rid of
that, create the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf and type the
following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection
In order to get the touchpad working:
pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics
The Wi-Fi card is already supported by the kernel, but this is needed to connect to networks:
sudo pacman -S iw wpa_supplicant
Time to set up a user account. I wanted zsh as my shell:
pacman -S zsh
useradd -m -g users -G wheel -s /usr/bin/zsh anders
passwd anders
export EDITOR=nano
visudo
Uncomment the line %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL. Then change the root password:
passwd
I wanted Awesome WM:
sudo pacman -S awesome
Leave the root account:
exit
Log in to your new account, and then create ~/.xinitrc with the following
content:
[[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
exec awesome
X Windows can now be started with startx.
You'll want to continue configuring the system. For example, what you've done
so far should allow suspend-to-disk, but you'll have to figure out how to
issue the actual command. A useful package might be pm-utils.
Good luck!