How to Install Arch Linux: Beginner’s Step-by-Step Installation Guide

41 Comments

1. U FORGOT TO MOUNT THE EFI PARTITION

   • Hi,

     The EFI partition mount is specified in point 9:
     mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

     Regards

     • Hi, thanks for your excelent tutorial! I have a question, when I run point 8 (genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab) , the fstab file does not included or added the /boot/efi partition, only swap and root partition. When I rebooted, it works perfectly but does not mount /boot/efi. It’s that ok or I needed to mount manually this partition to fstab file? Thanks

       • Hi Roberto,

         It’s OK and you should have no worries.
         If you mounted your EFI partition during installation, and set it to /boot/efi, it’s not going to be an issue.

       • The problem is that in this guide the efi partition is mounted after the creation of fstab file. We need to mount efi at the begining when mounting other partitions.

2. A good beginners’ tutorial! You could probably have mentioned *how* to find your timezone, which in my case I knew was Europe/Berlin – but maybe others don’t know that?

   For dual boot (with Windows): I stopped after creating the EFI partition. If you install Windows first, it will install a 100MB EFI partition which would be usable (worked for me in a dual boot scenario for many years), but could be a bit small for more advanced stuff. After leaving the Arch installer, install Windows first, then make it smaller, then install Arch using the already created EFI partition (rest as you wrote).

   For triple boot (which is what I did): do the dual boot steps like above, but leave /make room and more partitions. The Arch installer will not automatically detect other installed Linux distributions, so I would:

   1. create that EFI partion like above
   2. install indows, then make it smaller with its own tools (disk manager)
   3. create more partitions with the Arch installer (I used separate swap and root for each)
   4. install Arch as described in this nice guide
   5. install your second Linux (in my case, Debian Bullseye) which will detect the already installed Arch and won’t touch it

   Cheers,
   Wolfgang

   • Hi Wolfgang,

     Thank you very much for your remarks. An explanation has been added especially for the time zones.

     You can use the os-prober command that lists other operating systems. It is used during installation and reconfiguration to create a GRUB boot menu that shows other installed OSes.

     Then just regenerate GRUB with:
     grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

     Тhank you again for your valuable explanations!

     Best,
     Bobby

3. Why this difficult way. Every newby will be shocked. Better use the live system and start the installation with GUI from there?

   • Hi Marcel,

     Arch doesn’t come with its own native GUI installer. Generally speaking, there is no such thing in Arch.

     Of course, Arch-based distros such as Manjaro or EndeavorOS, offer exactly what you’re talking about.

     Best,
     Bobby

4. That was excellent, thank you. I’m a longtime Ubuntu and Linux Mint user and have always feared installing Arch. The only thing that would keep me from trying the steps in this tutorial is worrying how to keep my /home directory intact, which I have set up on a separate partition.

5. I know that most people who in stall Arch want a minimal system or to control what is installed. However, Arch needs an install script or graphical installer that takes you through the install, and at the end of it you should have a working system where you have at least one user set up, and ALL of the system hardware is functional. Part of the install script or installer should let you install a GUI desktop of your choice and install it if you choose to.

   • I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume this isn’t baiting the bear that is the Arch userbase, at least not deliberately.

     Arch does have an install script shipped with it nowadays; you can start it with ‘archinstall’. There are dozens of guides that can walk you through that script. There are, however, a lot of people who want to install it the hard way like this, to understand what is involved in an installation process and have full control over it. You absolutely can use the archinstall script and I wouldn’t hold it against you (though there are many who will). This guide is for the traditional, manual method and I’ve found it’s very useful for that.

6. Where is nano? Step “8. Configure the Installed Arch System”

   bash: nano: command not found

   • Oh forgot the trailing sudo nano in pacstrap (was using instructions in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide)

     Fixed by installing missing package

     pacman -S nano micro vim

7. What a garbage and mystification of installation. This returns us to stone age…
   The best and simplest way is to download and run calam-arch-installer (from Surceforge) with all of this described in text above but with GUI way.
   Enjoy!

8. Installing arch is not hard, just time consuming.

   Follow the wiki.
   Hit a problem.
   Follow the wiki.
   Hit a problem.
   Follow the wiki.

   Repeat until you can boot arch and your networking works.

   Then you can keep incrementally fixing it every time anything goes wrong by… following the wiki.

9. I was thrilled to see a concise and short Arch Linux install; however, after installing (virtualbox) there’s no internet connection. Even though ping -c 3 did work during the initial setup, it’s lost when you chroot into the system. No network tools are installed! Bummer.

   • Hi Michael,

     Please make sure that you do not forget to execute the command mentioned in point 10:
     systemctl enable NetworkManager

     You can run the following commands after restarting the system to make the network connectivity automatically available:
     sudo systemctl start NetworkManager
     sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager

     To install the network tools so that they are available immediately after installation, you can perform during installation (while you are in a chroot environment):
     pacman -S net-tools

     Regards

     • Thank you! I cannot believe I missed network manager. Installation is now complete with internet. I’m not a big fan of Gnome. So, I chose xfce. Only problem is I cannot get a display manager to work. I tried Slim and it errors. I guess I need to configure a conf file. Thanks again!

       • Glad to help. 🙂

10. Wow! Best archlinux installation guide ever!

11. How do I install KDE Plasma instead of GNOME? I’ve stopped at this point because I don’t want gnome.

    • Hi Dorian,

      In order to install KDE Plasma instead of GNOME, please use the command shown below:
      pacman -S plasma-meta plasma-wayland-session

      Once installed, enable SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager):
      systemctl enable sddm.service

      Best,
      Bobby

      • Thank you this worked

12. Pretty good guide for installing Arch. Of course you could make your partitions with gparted from a live distro to make it a little easier.
    Beats me why folk are using the modern UEFI installation method and then installing old tech GRUB. The way to go is to use rEFind or EFISTUB or systemd-boot. Really folks this is 2021 not 1999 😉

13. Hi,
    Thank you so much for your instruction. I think Archlinux is installed but I have a problem with archlinux login. I don’t know what are my username and password. I didn’t change them while installing and creating the account, I mean I used the same username and pass as you used here (linuxiac) but it doesn’t work. Would you please let me know what should I do now?
    Best,

    • Hi Zahra,

      Thank you for using this guide!

      Look again at the things described in step 11. With the line below you create the user account.
      useradd -m -G wheel linuxiac

      In this guide I’ve used ‘linuxiac’ for the username, but of course you can choose anything else you want, for example ‘john’.
      Next you need to set a password for the newly created user account:
      passwd john

      However, if you forgot to set a password during the installation process, but you created one for the user root (step 8), you can boot your newly installed Arch Linux system, switch to terminal mode ‘Ctrl+Alt+F3’, ‘Ctrl+Alt+F4’ etc, login as user root and set a password for your user:
      passwd linuxiac

      Replace ‘linuxiac’ with the username you chose to create during installation.

      Best,
      Bobby

      • Hi Bobby,
        Thank you so much for your response. It works. I have another question, I have found that I have made some mistakes during the installation process. Now I want to uninstall everything. Is there any command for uninstalling and deleting everything?
        Best,
        Zahra

        • Hi Zahra,

          Glad to help! 🙂 My best advice is just to delete the whole installation and do it again. It’s best to do it a few times on a virtual machine so you can gain the experience and confidence you need. From there on, you’ll do it with ease.

          Best,
          Bobby

          • Yes, I agree with you but how can I uninstall it completely? When I turn on the system, it asks me about my login information, and then there is nothing except [[email protected] ~]# which is waiting for entering something. Is there any command line that can do the installation?

            Best,
            Zahra

14. Hi Bobby,
    Of course arch linux is very deferent distu.
    but i had viewed a lot of tutorials for it even videos and i can say here is a very simple and pointed tutorial.
    anyway thank you bro and really i appreciate your efforts.
    have a good time.

    • Thank you for your kind words, Hudaiby!
      It’s great that you are using Arch!

15. Great article, I have never installed Arch before. Your write-up made it easy. Thank you for for making this.

    • Thank you for your kind words, John!

16. Hi Bobby!
    Hi everyone!

    Great tutorial, thanks for this effort.
    I have been following but I’m stuck in point 9:

    # grub-install –target=x86_64-efi –bootloader-id=grub_uefi

    The expected output is not showing up, instead I get this:

    Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
    EFI variables are not supported on this system.
    EFI variables are not supported on this system.
    grub-install: error: efibootmgr failed to register the boot entry: No Such file or directory.

    ** I’m installing the system natively on a macbook pro 13″ mid 2012
    ** The only different thing I did from this tutorial was the installation of the linux kernel in point 7:

    # pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware sudo nano

    for linux-lts kernel:
    # pacstrap /mnt base linux-lts linux-firmware sudo nano

    I need some help to solve this.
    Thanks in advance.

    • Hi,

      Looks like the efivarfs kernel module was not loaded.
      If you are chrooted in to your new install, exit out, and then try to enable efivarfs:
      modprobe efivarfs
      and then chroot back in:
      arch-chroot /mnt

      Once you back in, test again:
      efivar-tester

      This will no longer report an error, and you can install grub the same way you did before:
      grub-install –target=x86_64-efi –bootloader-id=grub_uefi

      • Hi!
        I finally solved it.
        Like I said before, I was installing ArchLinux natively via usb drive.
        The instruction I needed was the next one:

        grub-install –target=x86_64-efi –bootloader-id=GRUB –efi-directory=/boot/efi –no-nvram –removable

        That was all. The last part of configurations occurred normally.

        Thanks!

17. Hi again.
    I have installed successfully archlinux following this tutorial before.

    I am installing it again in other pc but now the process is not going well this time, actually I repeated the full process twice.

    In the point 8 (genfstab) is not genereting the expected output… I have created the partitions exactly like this guide suggest and when the /mnt/etc/fstab is generated it only shows /dev/sda3 (ext4) and /dev/sda2 (root and swap respectivly) but not /dev/sda1 (-F32, for boot)…

    the fstab file shows the UUID of those partitions. When I run the command blkidI can see that /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 have normal UUID tags but /dev/sda1 has a short one (/dev/sda1 UUID=”61D6-B9f7″) while the other two UUID are a larger UUID… Could this be the problem?

    Did I missing something?
    What can be causing this?
    Thanks.

18. I was successful creating a proxmox archlinux vm with uefi following these instructions. Set bios to OVMF (UEFI) and create a EFI disk in the VM settings. Once you are done following these instructions issue “poweroff” instead of “reboot” and remove the iso installation media and start the VM. It should boot from newly created grub efi partition.

19. The enabling EFI in VM is very important step. I tried to install Arch several times and each time I used to get stuck at the GRUB install menu. Since I was using and KVM in Gnome called Boxes ( which does not have and advanced mode) I was not able to enable that feature. Thus I would always get stuck. Finally I tried install arch linux in Virtual Box and it worked. If you must use Boxes or if you don’ want to enable efi then you can use some other bootloader like LILO to boot your system which woks fine.

20. Hi Bobby, Thanks for the excellent explanation very detailed and nicely done with pictures. I wonder if you have faced this is issue where after installing gnome when I finally rebooted everything was fine except one thing. I could not open any programs. I kept trying to open “terminal” and it didn’t work.

    Secondly, if I say install XFCE or KDE instead of Gnome should i install a login manager, separately ? I did no see you installing any, login manager with GNOME