hello everyone i'm jacob kaufman i'm the
nerd in the street and today we're
installing arch linux
[Music]
okay everybody we've got a simpler video
today i work with a variety of different
linux distributions
throughout everything that i do i use
debian i use ubuntu i use ubuntu based
distributions i use fedora and centos on
some machines
it really depends on exactly what a
machine is for which distribution i end
up using on it but for all of my
personal computers my desktops and
laptops that i'm actually sitting down
at and using on a day-to-day basis
i pretty much always go with arch linux
now arch linux is kind of a meme in some
parts of the linux community
people make jokes about how the people
who use arch linux think that they're
these elite linux users that they're not
always
but behind all of the jokes arch linux
really is a solid distribution
it's got a package manager that i find
very robust and easy to use
it's got repositories with a very dense
collection of software
and then it's got the aur which lets you
build software that's not in the main
repositories
it's pretty much got everything that i
look for in a distribution now arch
linux is a rolling release distro
which means that it gets updates over
time unlike a fixed release distribution
such as ubuntu which makes a major
release
every six months and every single
package on your system gets upgraded
at that six month point when you upgrade
your ubuntu version
arch linux doesn't have releases it's
just a continual
system where you install updates when
it's convenient for you to do that if
that's every week or if that's every
month or if that's
more often or less often whenever you
want to install updates you install them
and when you install updates all the
software on your system gets updated
to basically the latest version
available arch linux does do
some testing before certain packages
move from their testing repo to the main
repo but for the most part if a project
a program out there publishes a new
version
if that's a feature release then ubuntu
is not going to include that new version
until their next major six month release
whereas arch linux is going to include
it
probably within a matter of days now if
you talk to linux users about rolling
release distributions and how
stable they are you'll probably hear
differing opinions
personally i find rolling release
distributions to be more suitable for
personal machines
i find them to be more stable on
personal machines
with a fixed release distribution you're
upgrading thousands of packages
every six months so when you make that
upgrade there's a pretty high chance
that something is going to break or need
your attention
after all of those packages are all
upgraded at the same time
with a rolling release distribution
since things are upgraded just here and
there as the updates actually
come out you don't have that damn
breaking open
of just all these updates coming in at
the same time as long as you keep your
rolling release distribution relatively
up to date
you might spring a leak here or there
something might require your attention
at any moment basically which is why
some people don't like rolling release
distros
but chances are it's only going to be
one or two packages
that have changed and one or two things
that you need to actually look at
as opposed to the entire system changing
drastically like you get with a fixed
release distro
and even on top of that i personally
don't find that rolling release distros
have all that many small breaks either
but that's just addressing a common
concern with rolling release
distributions
well you know jacob when i come home
after a long day and i just want to use
my pc for gaming or watching youtube
videos or whatever
i don't want to have to worry about
things breaking and that's a valid
concern and it's a concern of mine
and that's why number one i generally
don't update my system when i'm about to
use it for something
if the system is working and i'm about
to do a live stream or
you know if i come home after work i
only have a couple hours to work on a
video or something
that's not the time to install updates
you know i install updates usually on
the weekends when i have more
time to fix things if they break and
then the other aspect of it
is if you're a little bit more
comfortable with linux then you might be
more comfortable with a rolling release
distribution because honestly if
something breaks on my system i'm fairly
confident in my ability
to get it back up and running pretty
quickly so that's just a little bit of
background about why i like arch linux
it is straightforward for me personally
it gets updates to my programs very
quickly i don't like waiting for a big
feature release
you know if it's been released by the
application developers if there's a new
caden live version out
i want those improvements now you know i
don't want to wait until the next six
month cycle ticks over
and one last thing that i really like
about arch linux is that it's pretty
desktop environment agnostic you can
install a number of different desktop
environments on it gnome kde plasma
xfce lxqt you know basically any desktop
environment i just named some larger
ones but any desktop environment that
exists for linux somebody's probably
packaging it for arch
and unlike something like ubuntu where
ubuntu is a gnome distribution they ship
gnome so they're checking for gnome bugs
if you've got a bug in kde the ubuntu
folks won't help you
the kubon 2 folks might but they're kind
of dependent on ubuntu as an underlying
system
and it creates more layers between you
and the software that you're using
whereas arch the people making the
distribution
they don't care what desktop environment
you're using and honestly they don't
even
mind not having as many users as some of
the larger distros
they're just making a really robust
bedrock for you to construct and
maintain your own ideal system on top of
so with all of those really nice things
about arch linux said
i've tried showing how to install arch
linux a couple of times in the past
i've done videos on it before but it was
pretty long ago it was a few years ago
the last time i attempted it the last
time i had a successful arch linux
installation on video was probably
around five years ago
and obviously the quality of my content
was a lot lower back then
i was pointing a camera at a laptop
screen back then
i didn't have a capture card or you know
a nice microphone or any of the things i
have today so i wanted to do arch linux
justice
and that way when somebody asks me in a
comment of a video one of the most
common comments that i get is oh
what distribution are you using what
version of linux is that and i always
tell people i'm using arch linux with
kde plasma because that's what is on my
daily driver
this way if somebody wants to try out
arch if you've heard good things about
it from people like me but you've never
installed it before
everything that i'm about to show you is
detailed in the installation guide on
the archwiki
everything i'm about to show you every
single command is in the archwiki
somewhere and it's fairly easy for me to
skim through that installation guide and
pick out exactly what i need to do
but there's an interesting phenomenon
i've witnessed helping other people
install arch linux over the phone and
things like that
where people actually they get
overwhelmed by all the information they
think that every single command is
something they need to run
they don't actually read the english
text that's explaining what's going on
and then they get confused and they mess
things up which is kind of their fault
for not reading
but if you're somebody who finds it
easier to listen to somebody talk then
to read
maybe this video will be helpful for you
so that's what we're doing today we're
going to install
arch linux i'm going to show you how to
install it with kde plasma
it's extremely easy to install gnome or
anything else once again if you want a
different system
you can check the archwiki out for
whatever particulars you want but
i'm showing you the basic setup with
plasma since once again that's what i
use and that's what people tend to ask
me about
the one step i'm not going to show you
today is how to make the live disk
for installing arch linux you are going
to need a flash drive with arch linux on
it you're going to need to download the
iso file from arch linux's website and
flash it onto the flash drive using a
program like etcher
if you've never done that before check
out my video on how to install ubuntu
20.04 because i showed that process
at the beginning of that video it's the
exact same process for the arch iso
you're just using the arch iso instead
of the ubuntu iso
so download the arch iso it's very small
since it only contains a minimal set of
packages
flash it onto a flash drive plug it in
and
then we're going to cut to the desktop
and i'll show you how to do the rest of
this now
all right guys so here we are like i
said i'm using a capture card
so you're actually going to see the boot
menu of the computer that i'm using
right now i'm using a felio system so
we've got a system 76 splash screen
i'm hitting f12 right now for the boot
menu your system might have you hit a
different function key
take a look at the text at the bottom of
your bio splash screen or uefi splash
screen
to see which key you actually need to
hit as you can see i've got an option
right here for my flash drive so i'm
going to select that
and here we have our grub menu for arch
linux
now at this point i'm going to perform a
step that's only necessary on
nvidia graphics systems so if you've got
a system with intel graphics
or with amd graphics you can just hit
enter to boot
since i have an nvidia graphics card in
the system right now i'm going to hit e
for edit
that's going to bring up the command
line options at the bottom of the screen
here that we're actually using to boot
the system i'm going to hit end to move
to the end of that line and i'm going to
type in
nouveau n o u v e a u dot
mode set equals zero
this is going to turn off the mode
setting features of the nuvo driver
because nouveau
or as i like to call it novu the reverse
engineered open source driver
for nvidia cards it is a marvel of
engineering but it does not always work
the best so to ensure that we don't have
any freezing or anything like that
we're going to make sure to enter that
in i'll hit enter and we will go ahead
and boot our live system
and it's just going to take a few
seconds to boot here we saw welcome to
arch linux a little bit higher up as you
can see we do have systemd
one of the main criticisms of arch linux
is how much it depends on systemd it's
not really made to have an
interchangeable in it system
personally i'm okay with systemd i'm not
a fan of
everything about it but i know how to
use it so here we are
we're finished booting and you can see
we just have a command line there is no
graphical installer for arch linux
personally i don't have a problem with
that because i'm able to go through this
manually and you'll be able to do it too
after this video
now the first thing you want to do is
connect to the internet
if you have ethernet plugged in dhcp
will work so this will probably happen
automatically
and i can ping archlinux.org just to
check that i am connected and yes i'm
connected to the internet
that's important because we're going to
be downloading all the packages we're
about to install
unlike other distros like ubuntu that
actually include the full
operating system image on your flash
drive on your iso file
the arch linux iso is meant to be used
with an internet connection
and you're going to download the latest
versions of all the packages as you're
installing them
now i have ethernet so that's pretty
easy but what if you don't what if you
have wi-fi well here's how we can
connect to wi-fi
we're going to use iwctl that's the
current tool that is included on the
arts linux iso that's going to bring us
into a different prompt this is iwd
so in here we're going to type in device
list and that's going to list
out our wireless cards in the system you
can see i've got one it's called wlan
one so we're going to type in station
wlan 1
scan and that's going to tell the system
to have wlan 1
start scanning for available networks
that it can connect to
we're going to type in station wlan 1
git networks
and that's going to list the networks
that it's seeing in its scan
you can see not wireless in there and
also not stash aux
those are my two networks that i'm
running here so i'm going to connect to
nas wireless to do that i'm going to
run station wlan one connect
not wireless if your wireless network is
protected with a
pass phrase which it should be you will
be prompted for that
and i'll go ahead and type in my
passphrase
and that's all that you need to do we
can type exit to get out of iwd
and at this point once again you can
ping archlinux.org or you can run
something like ip
address to check that you have an ip
address on your wireless link
once you're connected to the internet we
want to synchronize our system clock
that's going to make it easier to
download things and avoid potential
problems
in a few minutes so we'll run time date
ctl
set ntp true ntp is the network time
protocol so we're just turning it on
at this point we also want to verify if
we're booted in uefi or legacy bios mode
now if your system supports uefi mode i
would highly recommend that you install
in uefi mode i'm going to show you how
to do it right now i avoided uefi
for years because i didn't really
understand it as well as i understood a
legacy bio system
now that i do understand it i prefer it
it makes things easier with regards to
firmware updates
and even just managing your bootloader
so to check if you're booted into uefi
or legacy bios mode we're going to run
ls-l
on sys firmware efi
efi vars now what this is going to do is
list
out the contents of this directory if
you're booted in bios mode
cis firmware efi actually won't exist so
if you see a no such file or directory
error
that just means that you're booted in
legacy bios mode if you see
a listing of files like i see right here
you're booted in uefi mode
so we know that we're in uefi mode next
we need to partition our operating
system drive
i'm going to run fdisk dash l to list
out the drives in this system
you can see i've got dev nvme zero in
one at the top there it's a 230 gigabyte
samsung drive
or 250 gigabyte on the label it
currently has two partitions on it from
when i was practicing this before i
started recording
but that's the drive we want to use so
we are going to wipe it re-partition it
and then we'll install onto it
so to begin working with that disc we're
going to run g disk
dev nvme 0 in one i have made a video
about working with fdisk and g disk for
partitioning on the command line so if
you want a little bit more information
about that
go check that video out once we're in
gdisk the first thing we're going to run
is o that is going to create a new guid
partition
table as you can see doing that is going
to delete all partitions so we will
confirm and enter next we are going to
type in
in to make a new partition we use the
default partition number and the default
first sector now the last sector
we're actually going to make our efi
system partition
or our esp at the beginning of the drive
with a legacy bios system you have a
master boot record
and that is where your bootloader is
going to install some of its files
so that your system's bios knows where
to boot to
with a uefi system we actually need a
partition
and that's why i consider uefi to be
better because it's a partition
that's actually exposed unlike the mbr
that's a lot more
behind closed doors so the efi system
partition we're going to make it a 512
megabyte partition so type in a plus
512 capital m and we'll press enter and
for the hex code for an efi system
partition in g
disk that is ef00 if you're ever unsure
of what the hex code that you need is
you can always type l to list all of
them
and it'll also let you search if you do
that but efi system partition is ef00 so
i'll type that in
next i'm going to make the root
partition that we'll use for everything
else i'll type in
in enter for sector last sector so
that's going to use the rest of the disk
and i'll use the default hex code
because we want to use a linux file
system we're going to use ext4 for this
personally i would not recommend
separating your home directory out from
your root partition
unless you've got a separate physical
drive that you want your home
directory stored on on a separate
partition so in this example we're going
to have one root partition
that contains everything except for our
efi files and those are going to be in
the efi system partition
we're going to write those changes that
we just made to disk
yes and as you can see we made our new
guide partition table and we
wrote our partitions that we specified
next we need to actually format those
partitions
so for the esp we're going to run make
fs dot fat
dev nvme 0 and 1 p1 and then for our
root partition we'll run makefest.ext4
dev nvme zero in one p two as you can
see i'm getting a warning since i
already had a file system on that
physical area of the disk before your
warning might look different than this
if you had a different type of file
system there before
you can just hit y and press enter to
proceed anyway and at this point we can
actually mount those partitions
so we're going to mount dev nvme zero
in one p two first we need to mount the
root partition before we mount anything
else
so we're going to mount the root
partition of our new system to slash mnt
that is a default directory that's
created in this live environment for us
now we also need to mount our esp so
that our bootloader can actually install
its efi files into there you can pretty
much mount the esp wherever
you want to the arch linux wiki uses
slash esp
i believe as an example ubuntu-based
distributions typically use
slash boot efi for their esp
so that's what i'm going to use since i
learned uefi on ubuntu based systems
that's just what i'm used to
now boot efi does not exist yet so we
need to make the directory before we can
mount a partition there
so i'm going to run makeder dash p to
also create any parents that don't exist
and then we'll put mnt boot efi
and then we're going to mount dev nvme 0
and 1p1
to mount boot efi so both those
partitions are mounted now
and we can interact with them now at
this point i want to take a look
at our mirror list like i said when we
install the system in a moment
we're not copying files from the flash
drive we're actually going to be
downloading every single package that
we're installing
from the arch linux repositories as
we're installing
and when i say we're downloading from
the repositories we're actually going to
be downloading from
mirrors of the repositories so if we
take a look in etc
pacman.d mirror list this is a file that
is going to list
out our different mirrors that we can
download packages from
now recent versions of the arts linux
installer
include a tool called reflector on the
iso file and it's pretty cool because as
soon as you connect to the internet
reflector is automatically going to run
and it's going to sort this mirror list
for you
in order of download speed so wherever
you are in the world
it's going to find out which servers
you're getting the best response time
from and it's going to put those at the
top
and then the slower mirrors will go down
toward the bottom now if for some reason
you find
one of these mirrors isn't working very
well you can always come in here and
comment it out
older versions of the arch iso didn't
include reflectors so you had to
actually come in here and
usually comment out at least a few
mirrors to make sure that you're using
one that's geographically close to you
we don't actually need to change
anything in here since we've got
reflector but i just wanted to show you
that file
and at this point we can actually
install the system this is the biggest
step and it's pretty easy to do
a lot of people say that installing arch
linux is difficult
but here's how easy it is so we're going
to type in pack strap
and pack strap is a command that is
going to install
into a directory so pacman is the normal
pack manager we would use
we're using pack strap for the initial
installation process
since we're currently running in a live
environment but we want to install into
mnt so pacstrap mnt and then we can
specify a list of groups and packages
that we want to install
so that's going to include base i'm
going to include the base
devel group now base devel is optional
you don't need to install this
i installed it on all my systems for two
primary reasons
the first one is that base devel
includes everything you need
to build packages from the arch user
repository so the aur
includes a lot of software if you use a
lot of different programs
chances are at least one of them is
going to be in the aur rather than the
main arch linux repositories so if
you're planning on using the aur
at all you're going to want to install
bass devel the second thing that it
includes that i normally end up
installing anyway even if i'm not using
the aur
is sudo sudo is required for building
aur packages
because the make package script uses it
but if you're planning on using sudo at
all in order to
execute commands while logged in as your
normal user using root privileges
so doing things like installing updates
you're going to want to install sudo so
base devel will pull that in for you
we're going to install linux and linux
firmware
if you're wondering why linux is not
part of the base group it's because you
can actually install different types of
linux if you want the lts release of
linux you can use linux lts
which is something i do sometimes on my
personal desktop
because i have found that with
third-party kernel modules such as zfs
for linux
they break a lot less often if you're
using linux lts
because it updates the kernel less often
but for this example system we'll say we
just want the latest
kernel which is perfectly fine for most
users and then linux firmware is going
to include things like
wireless card firmware that you might
need for your hardware
now for the gui like i said i'm going to
use kde plasma so we're going to install
plasma that's a group if you want gnome
instead the gnome group is just called
gnome but we're going to use plasma and
then we've got sddm
is the display manager that we're going
to use so without a display manager we
would boot into a terminal and we'd have
to run a command to actually get into
our desktop environment plasma
now in this case there's actually a
little bit of a disclaimer because
sddm is actually included within plasma
we don't technically need to write sddm
here
because plasma depends on the sddm kcm
kde control module and sddm kcm depends
on sddm so if we just installed plasma
it would pull an sddm as a dependency
for us
personally i like to also specify sddm
so that it gets installed explicitly
because if in the future some weird
dependency thing happens an
sddm was no longer a dependency of
plasma even if i switch to a different
desktop environment you know
i'm still going to want my display
manager to remain the same unless i go
and manually change it
so i like to install sddm explicitly
we're also going to install
a few more packages now these are
packages that you could just wait and
install later and the archwiki shows you
installing these later
but personally i always forget to
install them and then i reboot
to my new system and i run into problems
because they're missing so
i just make it a habit to install them
right up front the first one is nano
you've noticed i've been using nano to
get into the configuration files so far
nano is my command line text editor of
choice if something goes wrong in the
installation and i boot into a terminal
i don't want to be stuck with v
trying to figure out what's going on i'd
rather have nano so i'm going to install
that
right off the bat to make sure it's
there we're going to install iwd
this is what gives you wireless support
reason why i like to make sure we
install our networking stack
iwd is included on the live disk as we
saw
this is what provides that iwctl command
now network manager is going to get
installed as the dependency of plasma so
theoretically we shouldn't need iwd
but let's say something goes wrong with
the network manager installs so we
reboot later
after we're done with the installation
we boot up and then
network manager is not working we need
to look up how to fix it but we don't
have internet
if you're on a laptop and you can't plug
into ethernet you're not going to be
able to connect to the internet if you
don't install iwd
or something like it before you reboot
you would have to reboot into the
install media in that case i've had to
do that a number of times in the past
so i always make sure whatever we have
that we're depending on
to install packages you know connecting
to wireless
we want to make sure that it's there
before we boot into our new system
just to make our own lives easier next
up i'm also going to install
man another one you'd think would be in
a pretty basic system but it is not
installed by default
so in case you need to look up any
information about a command later you
want to have the manual pages installed
the next one is micro code
so intel code is the package name for
intel processors if you have an amd
processor then you would install amd u
code instead
if you have an intel processor that's
intel u code
and that's micro code in layman's terms
the processor manufacturers use that to
correct errors and things like that over
time
possibly security fixes so it's
generally a good idea to have them
installed
we need to make sure we install our
bootloader and just installing the
package is not enough we'll configure it
later but for right now we do want to
make sure the grub package is installed
efi boot manager is something that grub
depends on for
installing on an efi system and finally
console
is one console is not included in the
plasma group they leave it out just in
case you like plasma but you prefer a
different terminal emulator
but later when we get into our our fresh
plasma
install you're going to see it's pretty
minimal the first thing you're going to
want to do is install more packages
probably
and without a terminal emulator it's
going to be hard to install more
packages you're going to have to control
alt
f5 into a virtual terminal and you know
it works but it's just not as nice
since we know that we'll need a terminal
emulator later we'll install it right
now
so at this point i'll hit enter and as
you can see it lists out
a ton of stuff it's going to download
882 megabytes and it's going to
decompress that into about
3.3 gigabytes worth of packages you may
or may not see
a message about selecting which items
from a group you want to install
if you do see one you can just hit enter
to select everything within the group
you can always remove things later and
it won't affect the other items that
were installed as part of the group and
at this point we just sit back and wait
while the entire system is downloaded
and installed
all right and that is all finished only
took a minute or two
and at this point we're almost ready to
actually start using our new system
at least to configure it from our live
environment here
before we enter into it though we need
to generate an fstab file that's our
file system tab it's going to list
the partitions that we need mounted when
we boot so
to do that we're going to run gin fs tab
dash capital u
that's going to use uuids in our fs tab
mnt is going to be our route and we're
going to put the file in
mnt etc fs tab and once that's done we
can actually
ch root into the new system we're going
to use arch
dash ch root which is going to do some
extra stuff to make sure we have proper
networking and
service management and things like that
within the ch root so if you see this if
you run
arch ch root and you successfully get
into a prompt
then you have successfully installed
arch linux now we do need to just
configure a few things before it's
actually a usable system
we're going to set our time zone first
and foremost so for that we're going to
make a symbolic link
ln sf and we're going to link from
the time zone that we want to be our
default so that's going to be in user
share
zone info now if you're not sure what
time zone you need
you can hit tab a couple times and see
your options listed
for me i want to be in america as my
region
and then i'm going to use there are a
lot of different options here but i'm
going to use the denver time zone
and i'm going to link that to etsy local
time and that's going to basically make
our local time
appear in the denver time zone we're
going to run hw clock
dash dash cis 2 hc that is going to
synchronize
our clock from our system's hardware
clock which is usually running in
utc but now our system clock in our time
zone that we just set
should be all synced up incorrect next
we're going to set up our locale
so for that we're going to run nano
slash etc
locale dot gen now this file has a list
of different locales that you can enable
we're actually going to use one of the
examples up here we're just going to
come down to this
nus.utf8 you probably want to be using
utf
so we're going to uncomment this and i'm
just going to hit the delete key until
that
example line is the beginning of the
line here now
this exact line is also contained in its
proper alphabetical place lower down in
this file
but since it's listed up here as an
example this is just a text file
anything with a hash mark at the
beginning is a comment
so it doesn't really matter if you
uncomment the example line or if you
uncomment
the actual line later because they are
identical
after we've done that we are going to
run locale gin and that is going
to read from the file and generate
anything that we uncommented so you can
see that has been generated
next we're going to nano into etsy
locale dot
conf and this is where we're going to
set once again the exact same one that
we just set
so lang equals in us.utf-8
and we can stop there so whatever you
uncommented in
etsylocal.gen that's probably what you
want to type into etsylocal.com as well
and that lang is an environment variable
that way programs that run
know what locale they're supposed to use
next up a little bit more networking
stuff we need to set the host name
so for that we'll edit etsy host name
and i'm going to make this machine
called archbox
we'll keep it simple and then we're
going to set that same host name
in our etsy hosts file so that when we
attempt to connect to archbox our
networking stack knows that it needs to
connect to
itself so 127.0.0.1 is a loopback
address
and we're actually going to set that to
localhost when we type in localhost we
want it to resolve to our loopback
address
we're going to do the same thing for our
ipv6 loopback address
localhost and then on the third line
we're going to put 127.0.1.1
and this is where we're going to use our
hostname that we set
so archbox.localdomain and
archbox if you've actually got a domain
that you're putting this on you can type
that in
instead of local domain but this line is
saying that either of these two things
archbox or archbox.local domain if
somebody types that into a web browser
or a command or anything else
it should resolve to 127.0.1.1
so we'll save that etsy hosts file next
we're going to create an initial ram
disk
uh we're going to do that with make init
cpio
capital p and the capital p is going to
use any presets that are in our system
configuration files
now you don't technically need to do
this because it was done as part of the
installation process when we installed
the linux kernel package
as part of the pack strap command this
was run i just like to run it one more
time just to make sure that we do have
an initial ram disk because that's one
of the two things that you absolutely
need
to boot a linux system the other one
being the kernel itself
next we're going to set our root
password if we were to reboot right now
we would not be able to log in because
no users have any passwords including
the root account
and we can't log in without a password
so we are going to run
password and our password i'm going to
set to a very secure password since this
is the root user we're talking about
so that's done at this point i'm going
to install the bootloader grub
now we already installed the grub
package but we actually need to run the
grub
install command to install it to our efi
system partition our esp
so we're going to run grub install
target equals x
86 64 dash efi
dash dash efi directory equals slash
boot
slash efi so if you're using something
like just
slash efi you might be able to omit this
option here
since this utility will look in a couple
of default locations
since boot efi is not the default
location for arch we're going to specify
it
and then we're going to add bootloader
id
equals grub so if your system's uefi
setup utility has a list of different
boot loaders that it can
open up for you and start this would
show up as grub
in there another common one to see is
linux boot manager
or windows boot manager for windows
systems so we'll run that and
if we see installation finish no air
reported then we should be good to go
as far as the esp goes now grub is
installed right now if we rebooted right
now grub would start
but grub would not be able to start our
arch linux system because even though
grub is installed
we haven't configured grub so to do that
we'll run grub
make config dash o for output we're
going to output to boot
grub grub dot cfg and so when grub
starts it's going to get loaded from
boot efi
and then once it's running it's going to
look in boot grub grub dot cfg
for its actual configuration so at this
point we would actually be able to boot
our system if we rebooted
and log in so that's a milestone right
there
we're going to finish it up though so
that we can get right into a gui when we
reboot
we need to make our display manager
actually start
with the system by default so to do that
we're going to type systemctl
enable sddm now if you are using a
laptop
with nvidia and intel hybrid graphics so
if you've got an nvidia gpu
and an intel gpu um there are multiple
names for that nvidia prime
nvidia optimus if you've got one of
those laptops
and that happens to include a lot of
mid-range system 76 laptops
then there's an extra step you need to
perform for sddm you need to nano into
user
share sddm scripts x setup
and the step that you need to perform
here is going to be different based on
your display manager so if you're
installing gnome with gdm
you still have to do something it's not
this exact thing
but you still do need to to make a
desktop file and make it
run the commands that we're about to
type in sddm is actually pretty simple
once again this is only if you have a
laptop that has both intel
and nvidia graphics if it's got
switchable graphics
you want to open this file up and type
in x r
and r dash set provider output
source mode setting nvidia
xero x r and r dash dash auto
and that's it um and at this point we
would save this file
now i'm not going to save this because
i'm actually on a desktop computer
and it only has nvidia graphics and if
you've got a laptop with
anything else if you've got amd graphics
or intel graphics or if you only have
nvidia you don't need this step once
again that is only for people with
switchable graphics laptops
i know that there are people out there
who have those and this is a common
thing to get hung up on when you're
trying to get arch working on one of
those machines
so i wanted to mention that now doing
that actually reminded me that i
actually forgot one package earlier when
we were running our pack strap command
that's the nvidia driver i didn't
install the nvidia driver
so when we reboot we would get that no
view driver the nouveau driver
which is liable to freeze so to correct
that just to demonstrate since we're ch
rooted into
our installed system here i can just run
pacman
s nvidia um in pac-man space dash
capital s
that's just how you install a new
package on an arch linux system
so you can see that is going to pull in
our nvidia driver and i'm going to run
that
if you think of anything else you want
to install you know you can install
firefox you can install
uh gnome 2048 you can install any
anything that you want to while we're
in this system here and then if you
install it now up front
you won't have to remember to go and
install it later so the nvidia driver is
installed now
we're getting really close uh to the end
here now we do
want networking to start up
automatically when we reboot the system
once again
um we did install iwd earlier just as a
backup plan in case network manager
doesn't work
but since we're using network manager we
are going to run systemctl enable
network manager and we can see that is
successful
the last thing we need to do before we
reboot is actually make ourself a user
account because everything we've been
doing
has been run from root and when we
reboot we're going to see right now an
sddm screen with no users listed since
we can't log into a gui as root
so to add a user account for ourself we
will run user add
dash m that is going to create our home
directory which you
need it to do that to avoid issues with
certain programs
we're going to run dash capital g wheel
and that is going to also add this user
to the wheel group as an additional
group since that g is capital this is
not going to take over as our primary
group it's just an additional group
we'll be in
and then the username i'm going to make
it jacob now the reason why
i'm putting that g wheel in there is
because we're going to use the wheel
group for sudoing which we'll get to in
just a moment
first though i do just want to set the
password for the new jacob account
so i'll go ahead and do that okay my
password is set so i would be able to
log in now
and now i do want to add myself to the
sutures group because everybody knows
how annoying it is to try running a sudo
command and you get that weird error
message that's telling you that it's
reporting to somebody
that you're not on the sudoers file and
you try to use sudo and you're thinking
who can it possibly be reporting to
because i'm the owner of this machine
so to make sure that we don't have to
deal with that we're going to nano into
our
etsy sudoers file and we are going to
do a search for wheel and down here
we've got uncomment
to allow all members of group wheel to
execute any command with sudo
uh so we'll uncomment that we'll save
that file and that is everything we need
to do
to have a perfectly functional
installation of arch linux on this
system
so to demonstrate i'm going to exit out
of the ch route i do like to run
sync at this point because depending on
your hardware if the shutdown goes wrong
and you have to hold down the power
button
to actually get it to turn off i don't
want to have to guess well what was
everything that i did written to disk or
not so i just run
sync to have a little bit of peace of
mind and then we're going to run sudo
systemctl reboot to actually restart
this system
and i will show you that it is a
perfectly usable system
it looks beautiful with k2e plasma you
know just as usable as any
gui distribution and like if you had
installed kubuntu
or kde neon or something like that so
here you can see grub works
and automatically after five seconds it
is going to boot our default
image which is arch and we can see our
fs tab
checking our root partition and you can
see we do have sddm
uh so this is our login screen we've got
that showing up properly plasma is the
only
desktop environment that we have
installed right now
so i can enter in my password here and
we will log into kde plasma we can see
network manager
is working because we've got our wired
connection 2 activated automatically
there
and we have a fully functional gui
environment this is arch linux and after
just
an hour just under an hour on the
recording right now
including the introduction we have a
functioning gui here
so arts linux is not opposed to a gui
it's just opposed to a gui
during the installation if i open up our
menu here we can do just a couple of
basic tasks to demonstrate there's no
tricks here this system really is ready
for use now we can go to our theme
i'm going to set this to the breeze dark
theme since i personally think that one
looks a little bit
nicer on the eyes and then one notable
thing that is missing right now is a web
browser we don't have
firefox or anything installed like that
by default and i'm not going to install
firefox by default because i don't like
the direction that mozilla is going
and it's a very large package if you
don't actually
use it so i am going to open up console
the terminal that we luckily remembered
to install earlier
and we are going to run sudo pacman s
falcon which is kde's web browser i'm
going to run that we're going to see
that
sudo is configured properly because it
lets us run this command
so that confirms that we set that up and
installation is done
i'll x out of our console there and i'm
actually going to add console to our
favorites menu
and i'm going to do the same thing with
falcon now that that is installed
add to favorites i'll drag these up here
and i can open up falcon and now we can
actually browse the web
and do whatever it is that you were
planning on doing
with your computer so did this take a
few minutes more than
installing ubuntu yes i probably could
have done it in about half the time if i
wasn't explaining what i was doing
verbally
but it is still even for me a little bit
slower than installing ubuntu but the
upshot is that you've got a very minimal
system you know like i said we don't
have firefox we don't have
libreoffice or you know things that you
don't necessarily
need on your system are not going to be
present by default
and whatever you want to install you're
now free to install
as you wish so i hope this video was
helpful to some of you guys out there
maybe you've been
wanting to try arch linux for a while
but like i said maybe
the arch linux installation guide just
kind of overwhelms you it's got a lot of
information
you just need somebody to kind of boil
down what actually
you need to do which steps are actually
necessary
in order to get a functioning system so
hopefully this
helped with that if it did help feel
free to go to nerdclub.nots.com and join
the nerd club for just three dollars a
month i want to give a huge thank you to
all of our nerd club members both the
ones who have stuck around with us for a
while
and the ones who have joined recently
your support is greatly appreciated
i'm working on some bigger projects
right now and it's not always easy to
churn out tech videos like this one
but hopefully this had some value at
least and with that
that's everything i had to talk about in
this video so i'm jacob kauff and i'm
the nerd in the street
and i'll see you guys in the next one
bye
[Music]
you