ArchLinuxハンドブック

Arch Linuxのインストールはそれほど難しくありませんでしたか？実際、私の意見では、インストールは構成よりもはるかに簡単です。ここでやるべきことはたくさんあります。それでは始めましょう。

Fstabファイルを生成する方法

ArchWikiによると、

fstab fileを使用して、ディスクパーティション、他のさまざまなブロックデバイス、またはリモートファイルシステムをファイルシステムにマウントする方法を定義できます。

UbuntuやFedoraのような他のディストリビューションでは、これはインストール中に自動的に生成されます。ただし、Archでは手動で行う必要があります。これを行うには、次のコマンドを実行します。

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

genfstab プログラムは、指定されたマウントポイントより下の現在のすべてのマウントを検出し、それらをfstab互換形式で標準出力に出力できます。したがって、genfstab -U /mnt /mntの下に現在のすべてのマウントを出力します マウントポイント。その出力を/mnt/etc/fstabに保存できます >>を使用したファイル オペレーター。

Arch-Chrootを使用して新しくインストールされたシステムにログインする方法

現在、新しくインストールしたシステムではなく、ライブ環境にログインしています。

新しくインストールしたシステムの構成を続行するには、最初にシステムにログインする必要があります。これを行うには、次のコマンドを実行します。

arch-chroot /mnt

arch-chroot bashスクリプトはarch-install-scriptsの一部です package and lets you change to the newly installed system's root user without any reboot.なんてクールだ！

How To Configure the Time Zone

Once you've switched root, the first thing to configure is the time zone. To see a list of all the available zones, execute the following command:

ls /usr/share/zoneinfo

All the major zones should be in the directory.

I live in Dhaka, Bangladesh which resides inside the Asia zone. If I list out the content of Asia, I should see Dhaka there:

To set Asia/Dhaka as my default time zone, I'll have to make a symbolic link of the file at the /etc/localtime location:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Dhaka /etc/localtime

The ln command is used for creating symbolic links. The -sf options indicate soft and force, respectively.

How To Configure the Localization

Now you'll have to configure your languages. Arch Linux has an easy way to set that up as well.

First, you'll have to edit the etc/locale.gen file according to your localization. Open the file in the nano text editor:

nano /etc/locale.gen

You'll see a long list of languages:

You'll have to uncomment the languages that you want to enable. I usually only need English and Bengali. So I'll locate the en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 , bn_BD UTF-8 , and bn_IN UTF-8 言語。 Save the file by pressing Ctrl + O and exit nano by pressing the Ctrl + X key combination.

Now you'll have to execute the following command:

locale-gen

The locale-gen command will read your /etc/locale.gen file and generate the locales accordingly.

Now that you've enabled multiple languages, you'll have to tell Arch Linux which one to use by default. To do so, open the /etc/locale.conf file and add the following line to it:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

That's all you gotta do to configure your locale. You can always go back to the /etc/locale.gen file and add or remove languages from it. Just remember to run locale-gen whenever you do that.

Apart from the locales, if you've made any changes to your console keymaps in the first step of installation, you may want to persist them now. To do so, open the /etc/vconsole.conf file and add your preferred keymaps there.

For example, if you changed the default keymaps to mac-us in the first step, then you may want to add the following line to the vconsole.conf ファイル：

KEYMAP=mac-us

Now every time you use the virtual console, it'll have the correct keymap and you will not have to configure it every time.

How To Configure the Network

Configuring a network manually in any Linux distribution can be tricky. That's why I advised you to install the networkmanager package during the system installation. If you did as I said, you're good to go. Otherwise, use pacman to install the package now:

pacman -S networkmanager

Pacman is a package manager. You'll learn more about it later. Let's set the host name for your computer now. A host name is a unique name created to identify a machine on a network, written in the /etc/hostname ファイル。

Open the file with nano and write your host name in it. You can use anything to identify your machine. I usually use my device brand or model as my hostname and as I'm on a legion laptop, I'll simply write the following:

legion

Local host name resolution is provided by nss-myhostname (an NSS module provided by systemd) without having to edit /etc/hosts ファイル。 It is enabled by default.

But some software may still read the /etc/hosts file directly. Open the file in nano and add the following lines to it:

127.0.0.1        localhost
::1              localhost
127.0.1.1        legion

Make sure to replace legion with your host name. Now you may install the aforementioned package:

pacman -S networkmanager

Enable the NetworkManager service by executing the following command:

systemctl enable NetworkManager

Make sure to write NetworkManager and not networkmanager as the service name. If the command succeeds, network manager will start automatically on boot from now on and do its thing.

How To Set the Root Password

You may want to set a password for the root user because why not? To do so, execute the following command:

passwd

The passwd command lets you change the password for a user. By default it affects the current user's password which is the root right now.

It'll ask for a new password and confirmation password. Input them carefully and make sure you don't forget the password.

How To Create a Non-root User

Using your Linux system as the root user for long is not a good idea. So creating a non-root user is important. To create a new user, execute the following command:

useradd -m -G wheel farhan

The useradd command lets you create a new user. Make sure to replace my name with the one you want to use. The -m option indicates that you also want it to create the corresponding home directory. The -G option will add the new user to the wheel group which is the administration user group in Arch Linux.

Now you can use the passwd command once again to set the password for the newly created user:

passwd farhan

The program will prompt you for a new password and a password confirmation. Again, don't forget to replace my name with the one you've used.

Finally, you'll have to enable sudo privilege for this new user. To do so, open the /etc/sudoers file using nano. Once open, locate the following line and uncomment it:

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

This file essentially means that all users in the wheel group can use sudo by providing their password. Save the file by hitting Ctrl + O and exit nano by hitting Ctrl + X. Now the new user will be able to use sudo when necessary.

How To Install Microcode

According to PCMag,

A set of elementary instructions in a complex instruction set computer (CISC). The microcode resides in a separate high-speed memory and functions as a translation layer between the machine instructions and the circuit level of the computer. Microcode enables the computer designer to create machine instructions without having to design electronic circuits.

Processor manufacturers such as Intel and AMD often release stability and security updates to the processor. These updates are crucial for the system's stability.

In Arch Linux, microcode updates are available through official packages that every user should install on their systems.

# for amd processors
pacman -S amd-ucode

# for intel processors
pacman -S intel-ucode

Just installing these packages is not enough though. You'll have to make sure that your bootloader is loading them. You'll learn about it in the next section.

How To Install and Configure a Boot Loader

According to Wikipedia,

A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader or called boot manager and bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer.

The internals of bootloader is out of scope of this article so I'll just go on with the installation process. If you've used any other Linux distribution in the past you may have encountered the GRUB menu.

GRUB is one of the most popular bootloaders out there. Although there are a number of options available, I'll demonstrate the installation of GRUB because it is what most people will likely use.

To install GRUB, you'll have to first install two packages.

pacman -S grub efibootmgr

If you're installing alongside other operating systems, you'll also need the os-prober package:

pacman -S os-prober

This program will search for already installed operating systems on your system and will make them a part of the GRUB configuration file.

Now, you'll have to mount the EFI system partition you created a few sections ago. To do so, you'll have to first create an efi ディレクトリ：

mkdir /boot/efi

According to Wikipedia,

In Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems, the /boot/ directory holds files used in booting the operating system.

This directory is present in all Unix-like operating systems. The above mentioned command creates a directory called efi inside the /boot ディレクトリ。 After creating the directory, you'll have to mount your EFI system partition in that directory.

mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

I hope you remember that we formatted the /dev/sda1 device as the EFI system partition during the partitioning phase. Make sure to use the correct one for your device.

Now, we'll use the grub-install command to install GRUB in the newly mounted EFI system partition:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --bootloader-id=grub

You can more or less use this command verbatim. You can change the --bootloader-id to something more expressive like arch or something else. If the installation finishes without any errors, you'll then have to generate the GRUB configuration file.

If you're installing alongside other operating systems, you'll have to enable os-prober before generating the configuration file. To do so, open the /etc/default/grub file in nano text editor. Locate the following line and uncomment it:

#GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

This should be the last line in the aforementioned file so just scroll to the bottom and uncomment it.

Now execute the following command to generate the configuration file:

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

The grub-mkconfig command generates the GRUB configuration file and saves it to a given target location. In this case /boot/grub/grub.cfg is the target location.

The command will also take into account the microcode you installed earlier and any other existing operating system on your machine.

Congratulations, you now have a working Arch Linux installation. At this point, you can exit the Arch-Chroot environment, unmount the partition, and reboot. But I would suggest you to stay a bit longer and set-up the graphical user interface as well.

How To Install Xorg

To run programs with graphical user interfaces on your system, you'll have to install an X Window System implementation. The most common one is Xorg.

To install Xorg, execute the following command:

pacman -S xorg-server

Wait until the installation is done and then move on to installing the necessary graphics drivers.

How To Install Graphics Drivers

Installing graphics drivers on Arch Linux is very straightforward. You just install the packages required by your graphics processing unit and call it a day.

# for nvidia graphics processing unit
pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

# for amd discreet and integrated graphics processing unit
pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu

# for intel integrated graphics processing unit
pacman -S xf86-video-intel

If you need further assistance, feel free to check the ArchWiki page.

How To Install a Desktop Environment

Now that you've installed Xorg and the necessary graphics drivers, you're ready to install a desktop environment like GNOME, Plasma, or XFCE.

Arch Linux supports a long list of desktop environments but I've only tried out GNOME and Plasma. I'll demonstrate how you can install either of these two.

How To Install GNOME

To install GNOME, you'll have to install the gnome パッケージ。 To do so, execute the following command:

pacman -S gnome

During the installation, you'll be offered multiple choices for pipwire-session-manager and emoji-font パッケージ。 Accept the defaults by hitting Enter in both prompts. The installation may take some time to finish.

The gnome package comes with GDM or Gnome Display Manager. You can enable the service by executing the following command:

systemctl enable gdm

That's all you need to do to get GNOME up and running on your Arch system.

How To Install Plasma

The KDE Plasma installation is not that different from GNOME. You'll need to install Plasma related packages instead of GNOME.

pacman -S plasma plasma-wayland-session

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, then avoid installing the plasma-wayland-session and use plain old X11. I own two devices with NVIDIA GPUs and both of them have shown instability when using Wayland.

During the installation, you'll get multiple choices for ttf-font , pipwire-session-manager , and phonon-qt5-backend パッケージ。 Make sure to pick noto-fonts as your ttf-font and accept the defaults for the other two.

Like gdm in GNOME, Plasma comes with sddm as the default display manager. Execute the following command to enable the service:

systemctl enable sddm

And that's all you need to do to get Plasma up and running on your Arch Linux system.

How To Finalize The Installation

Now that you've installed Arch Linux and gone through all necessary configuration steps, you can reboot to your newly installed system. To do so, first come out of the Arch-Chroot environment:

exit

Next, unmount the root partition to make sure there are no pending operations:

umount -R /mnt

Now reboot the machine:

reboot

Wait until you see the GRUB menu.

Choose Arch Linux from the list and wait until the system finishes booting up.

Log in with your user credentials and voilà!

Your shiny new Arch Linux system is ready to do wonders.

How To Switch Between Desktop Environments

Unlike other distributions coupled tightly with their default desktop environment, Arch is flexible. You can switch to another desktop environment whenever you feel like it.

To do so, first logout of your current session.

As you can see, I'm currently using Plasma. Now switch to TTY2 press Ctrl + Alt + F2 key combination. You'll see a console login prompt:

Login with the root credentials and disable the sddm display manager.

systemctl disable sddm

Then uninstall the Plasma related packages you installed earlier:

sudo pacman -Rns plasma plasma-wayland-session

Once the packages have been uninstalled, install the packages needed for GNOME:

pacman -S gnome

Then perform the installation according to the section you read earlier. After the gnome package has been installed, enable the gdm display manager:

systemctl enable gdm

Restart the computer.

reboot

Wait until the Arch Linux system finishes booting.

Lo and behold, the gorgeous Gnome Display Manager. Login with your credentials.

You can switch between the desktop environments as much as you want to, but I would suggest on settling down with one of them. Also, I wouldn't recommend having multiples of them installed at the same time.

How To Manage Packages Using Pacman

You've already installed a number of packages using pacman. It's equivalent to package managers like apt in Ubuntu and dnf in Fedora.

In this section, I'll introduce you to some of the common pacman commands that you may need on a daily basis.

How To Install Packages Using Pacman

To install a package using pacman, you can use the following command syntax:

# sudo pacman -S <package name>

sudo pacman -S rust

You can install multiple packages as follows:

# sudo pacman -S <package name> <package name>

sudo pacman -S rust golang

You can also specify the repository you want to install the package from like this:

# sudo pacman -S <package repository>/<package name>

sudo pacman -S extra/rust

In this command, the -S option means synchronize which is equivalent to install in the case of apt or dnf package managers.

How To Remove Packages Using Pacman

To remove a package using pacman you can use the following syntax:

# sudo pacman -R <package name>

sudo pacman -R rust

This will remove the package but will leave the dependencies. You can remove the package with dependencies if they're not required by any other package by executing the following command:

# sudo pacman -Rs <package name>

sudo pacman -Rs rust

Pacman often saves important configuration files when removing certain applications. You can override this behavior by using the following syntax:

# sudo pacman -Rn <package name>

sudo pacman -Rn rust

I usually use sudo pacman -Rns whenever I want to uninstall something. One last thing that I want to show is how to remove orphan packages.

In Ubuntu the sudo apt autoremove command uninstalls any unnecessary package. The equivalent command in Arch is:

sudo pacman -Qdtq | pacman -Rs -

This will cleanup any leftover package from previously installed packages.

How To Upgrade Packages Using Pacman

To upgrade all the packages in your system, you can use the following syntax:

sudo pacman -Syu

In this command, the S option synchronizes the packages, y refreshes the local package cache, and u updates the system. This is like the ultimate upgrade command and I run it at least once everyday.

How To Search for Packages Using Pacman

To search for a package in the database, you can use the following syntax:

# sudo pacman -Ss <package name>

sudo pacman -Ss rust

This will print out all the packages found in the database with that search term and will also indicate if any of those are already installed.

If you would like to check if a package is already installed or not, you can use the following command:

# sudo pacman -Qs <package name>

sudo pacman -Qs rust

This is useful when you want to uninstall a package but do not know its exact name.

How To Use AUR in Arch Linux

According to It's FOSS,

AUR stands for Arch User Repository. It is a community-driven repository for Arch-based Linux distributions users. It contains package descriptions named PKGBUILDs that allow you to compile a package from source with makepkg and then install it via pacman (package manager in Arch Linux).

AUR is one of the most attractive features of Arch Linux. It's due to AUR that Arch Linux has a package count almost equal to Debian. You've already used pacman to install various packages. Sadly, you can not use that to install packages from AUR.

You'll have to install one of the AUR helpers instead. Arch Linux doesn't support any of these helpers and advises you to learn how to build packages manually. I'll explain both techniques here. If you understand how a helper works, you'll be able to do it manually as well.

How To Install Packages Using a Helper

Among the available and currently maintained AUR helpers, I like the yay or yet another yogurt package. It's written in Go and is quite solid.

You can not install yay like other packages. You'll have to get the source code and compile the program. You'll need git and the base-devel package to do so. Assuming you've already installed base-devel during Arch Linux installation:

pacman -S git

Clone the yay repository from GitHub and cd into it:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git && cd yay

To build and install yay from source, execute the following command:

makepkg -si

The makepkg script automates the build process of packages. The -si options stand for sync dependencies and install. The first option will install required dependencies (Golang in this case) and the later option will install the built package.

After the build process finishes, makepkg will ask for installation confirmation and your password. Input your password carefully and let the installation finish.

Check if yay has been installed properly or not:

yay --version

# yay v11.1.0 - libalpm v13.0.1

Now let's install something using yay. One of the common packages you may want to install is the visual-studio-code-bin package. To do so, execute the following command:

yay -S visual-studio-code-bin

Unlike pacman, you shouldn't run yay with sudo. Yay will look for the given package and will ask whether you would like to see the diff or not:

All the repositories over at AUR comes with a PKGBUILD file which contains the instructions for building this package. Yay has this nice feature where it shows you what has changed in the PKGBUILD file since the last time.

For now, I'll pick N for none and hit enter. Yay will now look for the dependencies and ask for your password to install them.

Confirm the installation and provide your password. Yay will then install the dependencies and start building the package. Once built, yay will install the package and prompt for your password where necessary.

After the installation finishes, search for Visual Studio Code in the application launcher:

Congratulations on installing your first package from AUR. Yay commands are almost identical to pacman, so if you can do something with pacman, you should be able to do that with yay as well.

In fact, yay can also install packages from official Arch Linux repositories like pacman. But I would suggest you to use yay only for installing packages from AUR when necessary and pacman for everything else.

How To Install Packages Manually

Like I said in the previous section, the ArchWiki suggests avoiding any AUR helper and installing packages from AUR manually. I'll now show you how to do it.

Make sure you have git and base-devel packages installed. If not, use pacman to install them.

For the demonstration, let's install Spotify this time. First visit the AUR page for the spotify package - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotify/ and copy the "Git Clone URL" from there.

The page even lists all the dependencies you'll need. Clone the repository to your machine:

Every AUR repository comes with a PKGBUILD file containing the instructions for building the package. Whenever you're installing a package from AUR, it's a great idea to checkout the PKGBUILD file using something like the cat コマンド：

Make sure there's nothing harmful in the file. Once you're satisfied, use makepkg to install any dependencies, build the package, and install it. Ideally there shouldn't be any issues but sometimes, things can take an unexpected turn.

In these cases, go back to the corresponding AUR page and check the user comments. Like in this case, I found the following pinned comment:

Turns out the package requires you to add the Spotify for Linux gpg key to the user kyechain. This command downloads the gpg key using curl and pipes it as the input of the gpg --import コマンド：

Try executing makepkg -si once again and everything should work fine this time:

See, told ya! Manually installing packages often involves such troubleshooting but help is almost always around the comment corner. Let's enjoy some music now.

How To Troubleshoot Common Problems

Look, I've been using Arch as my primary on all my devices for some years now but I still run into issues. Fortunately there are some great places to look for help when you're stuck:

• ArchWiki
• Arch Linux Forum
• r/archlinux

For the most part, the wiki should have the information you're looking for. In fact, if you're on a laptop and having difficulty getting something to work, there is an entire wiki category dedicated to different laptops. So look around the wiki.

If the wiki fails to solve your problem, then ask other fellow users at the forum as well as the subreddit. But whenever you're doing that, make sure to do your research first and include as much description as you can in the post. It's really annoying if other users have to keep asking you for more information and it'll also lower the chance that you'll get an answer.

How To Use the Live Arch ISO as a Rescue Media

Whatever people may say, Arch Linux is very stable as long as you know what you're doing. If you go about installing every funky package you come across in the AUR or keep switching different kernels without knowing what they're for, your system may fail to boot.

In those cases, you can use your live USB drive as a rescue media. To do so, reconnect the bootable USB to your computer and boot into the live environment. Once there, configure the time, keymaps, and fonts if you want to.

Then use fdisk to list out all your partitions and locate the one holding your Arch Linux installation. In my case it's the /dev/sda2 partition. Mount the partition like you did before:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Now use Arch-Chroot to log in as the root user.

arch-chroot /mnt

Now uninstall the bad package you installed or go back to a kernel version that used to work in the past and so on. Once done, exit the Arch-Chroot environment, unmount the partition, and reboot:

exit
umount -R /mnt
reboot

If the computer boots fine then congratulations. Otherwise try the wiki, forum, or the subreddit. If nothing works, you may have to do a fresh install.

Further Reading

If you've come this far then you've done a lot of reading already – but that's not all. This entire handbook was written by combining information from the wiki, forum, and subreddit. I'm listing out some wiki pages that I think you should read.

• Installation guide
• Network configuration
• General recommendation
• Desktop environment
• pacman
• Arch Build System
• makepkg
• List of applications

Couldn't think of any more at the moment but I'll keep this list updated.