Installing Linux

2021-01-16 0 By Denis Bisson

If I would check the time I’ve spent on installing Linux versus time I’ve spent actually using it, I guess it would be 90% installing it and 10% using it! Ha! Ha! I hope one day this will change. No matter what, I am taking some notes here on my latest attempt of installation. This time, I’ll re-explore Arch Linux. The ISO could be downloaded here.

The following procedure is based at 99.99% of the very good video on YouTube here.

So I place the install CD or USB stick in the computer for the Arch Linux install and I boot until it reach the prompt.

I need to load in memory the proper keyboard layout so I enter:

loadkeys ca

I enable network time synchronization:

timedatectl set-ntp true

We install package for the reflector which will give us latest Pacman mirrorlist and let’s install at the same time the one for ssh:

sudo pacman -Syy reflector

We may now set our mirror list to get the fastest one base on my region:

reflector -c Canada -a 6 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

We may now check our disk:

lsblk

We will now create our partition with:

gdisk /dev/sda

We will first create a partition of 200MB for the EFI partition which will be type ef00 . We will create a second partition with remainging disk space for the system which will be of type 8300. We will then write this to this disk. It should give the following sequence:

We may verify what we’ve created with the lsblk command again:

We then need to format our EFI partition and it must be in FAT32 so I type this:

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1

Then we format our other partition in ext4:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

We then mount our partition for Linux installation:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

In order to mount our EFI partition we need to create the directory of the mounting point which will be /mnt/boot/efi so we type:

mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi

So we’re now ready to mount our EFI partition. Don’t forget, it’s sda1!

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi

We may again type the lsblk command to check if our partitions are mounted as expected:

We may now proceed to the base packages so we type:

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware vim nano

Once finished we may have auto generate mounting points to our fstab. Please be aware that the fstab we need to set is in /mnt/etc/ and not already in /etc. Also, we append the result of the genfstab command to a fstab file that already partially exists we basically just the initial comment lines. So command is:

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

We may give a look at our fstab by doing cat /mnt/etc/fstab and we should get something like this:

To continue our installation, we’ll now set the new location of our Arch Linux stsem witht this command to point its mountintpoint:

arch-chroot /mnt

We will then create a file four our swap file. It will be a 2 GB so we may write it this way:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=2 status=progress

Now we need to set the permission to it like this:

chmod 600 /swapfile

Now we need to kind of format our file to be used as a swap location typing this:

mkswap /swapfile

We’re now ready to activate it:

swapon /swapfile

We need to don’t forget to add also this swap file into our fastab file! So let’s edit it with nano that we’ve setup earlier:

nano /etc/fstab

The line we’ll be added will be

/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

So our /etc/fstab file will looks like the following:

Our new fstab file with the addition of the swapfile

We may now set our timezone. We will show the possible time zone and grepping what is probably the closest city for us. Let’s do the command:

timedatectl list-timezones | grep Montreal

If it finds nothing, let’s say with another city until it finds it:

timedatectl list-timezones | grep Toronto

So we may now set out time zone by linking to the correct file by doing this:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto /etc/locatime

The sequence should looks like something like this:

We may now synchronize our clock with the following command:

hwclock --systohc

We may now our locale by editing like this:

nano /etc/locale.gen

In my case I’ve uncomment the following one:

en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8

Now we may generate the locale by typing:

locale-gen

This should give the folloing sequence:

We may now create and edit using nano our /etc/locale.conf file. I use the first locale. It should looks like this:

We do similar for the keyboard by updating the /etc/vconsole.conf. At the end, it should looke like this:

We may now setup our hostname in the file /etc/hostname:

We now setup our hosts file still with nano in file /etc/hosts. Once edition completed it should looks like the following:

With passwd, we set the root password.

And now it’s time to install the bootloader! Fianlly! We neded to install packages for that and since we’re there, we’ll install a few other packages so our machine will have time. So we type:

pacman -S grub efibootmgr networkmanager network-manager-applet dialog os-prober mtools dosfstools base-devel linux-headers cups reflector openssh git xdg-utils xdg-user-dirs

We’re now redy to install grub by typing the following:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB

Now we need to have a configuration file to be generated by typing this:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

We many now enable some services by typing the following commands:

systemctl enable NetworkManager

systemctl enable sshd

systemctl enable cups

Let’s create a new user like this:

useradd -m netuser31

Now let’s set the password of that new user by typing this:

passwd netuser31

We may now exit the installation and go back to the installer by exiting:

exit

We then unmount all the partitions. It gives probably nothing but the guy on YouTube was doing it.

unmount -a

We may now reboot:

reboot

After that, we may remove the CD or the USB stick and the machine show boot normally and we should get this:

And then if we select ArchLinux, we should boot our installed Arch Linux and reach our login prompt:

So now that we have the basic Linux installed, let’s instal our display server and desktop environments. Let’s install at once these and with some applications by typing:

pacman -S xorg lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter xfce4 xfce4-goodies chromium materia-gtk-theme papirus-icon-theme

After will be install, we need to enable the lightdm manager. We accomplish that by typing this:

systemctl enable lightdm

We may now reboot.

reboot

If things has been installed successfully, we shoulw see the lightdm display manager log in screen like this: