the video

the following video shows the whole installation below the video you’ll find the transcript

getting the iso

you can grab the latest archlinux iso from https://www.archlinux.org/download/ download the iso and the matching signature to verify, if you are doing this from a arch you can use:

pacman-key -v archlinux-2020.05.01-x86_64.iso.sig
==> Checking archlinux-2020.05.01-x86_64.iso.sig... (detached)
gpg: Signatur vom Fr 01 Mai 2020 07:33:57 CEST
gpg:                mittels RSA-Schlüssel 4AA4767BBC9C4B1D18AE28B77F2D434B9741E8AC
gpg: Hinweis: Die "trustdb" ist nicht schreibbar
gpg: Korrekte Signatur von "Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de>" [vollständig]

if not you can also use gpg

gpg --keyserver-options auto-key-retrieve --verify archlinux-2020.05.01-x86_64.iso.sig

create a bootable image

you can use the tool dd to flash the image to your bootable usb media, plugin the media and run

sudo dmesg

dmesg will tell you the device name of the usb stick you just inserted use the sdX in combination with dd to create a bootable image

dd if=/path/to/arch.iso of=/dev/sdX

boot from the image

you will end up with a prompt as the root user

load your keyboard layout ( i ll be picking the german keyboard layout de-latin1 the default is us layout)

loadkeys de-latin1

verify that uefi has been loaded properly

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

Connect to the internet - most cases you will get an ip via dhcp so lets use dhclient to get an ip.

In most cases this will be dhclient eth0

dhclient enp1s0

update the system clock

timedatectl set-ntp true

prepare the disk

Prepare the Disk

create encrypted lvm

modprobing dm-crypt which is used to encrypt our disks

modprobe dm-crypt

you can use the following command to find out the throughput of various ciphers

cryptsetup benchmark

next step is to create the encryption il lb e using aes-xts-plain64 with 512 bits

cryptsetup -c aes-xts-plain -y -s 512 luksFormat /dev/vda2

as yt viewer brought to my attention that it might be better to actually use as it also works better with filesystems > 2TB

cryptsetup -c aes-xts-plain64 -y -s 512 luksFormat /dev/vda2

now lets open the container so we can start using the newly created /dev/mapper/lvm device

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/vda2 lvm

now we are going to create the logical volume groups

pvcreate /dev/mapper/lvm
vgcreate main /dev/mapper/lvm

and now we can create the actual volume groups we ll need one for root and one for the swap, for some people it might be useful to also create one for /var or for /home

lvcreate -L 2GB -n swap main
lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n root main

create the filesystems

mkfs.vfat -n BOOT /dev/vda1
mkfs.ext4 -L root /dev/mapper/main-root
mkswap -L swap /dev/mapper/main-swap

now we can mount the disks

mount /dev/mapper/main-root /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/vda1 /mnt/boot

installing the actual base

we are now using pacstrap to install into the /mnt folder where we mounted the lvms to in the last step. ( i have an intel based cpu so i ll be picking the intel-uc package )

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel syslinux nano linux linux-firmware mkinitcpio lvm2 dhcpcd inetutils intel-ucode
syslinux-install_update -i -a -m -c /mnt

in the next step we have to add one of these append lines to each the arch and the fallback definition

/mnt/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg

APPEND cryptdevice=/dev/vda2:main root=/dev/mapper/main-root rw lang=de locale=de_DE.UTF-8

make the mounts persistent

we already mounted all partitions except the swap let’s mount the swap now then we can generate an fstab file based on all the mounted partitions

swapon -L swap

now generate the fstab file and verify with cat

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

when using an ssd we append to each disk

,noatime,discard

for me this resulted in this fstab file

arch fstab example for ssds

another youtube user’s comment on this:

You shouldn't use the discard mount option with dmcrypt https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Specialties#Discard/TRIM_support_for_solid_state_drives_(SSD)

finishing touches on the installation

the power of chmod - we previsouly installed arch onto /mnt so we now chroot into this directory. so we can start executing commands as if /mnt was our /

arch-chroot /mnt

set the LANG and make it persistent by saving it to the locale.conf

echo LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf

nwo open the local.gen and uncomment all the languages you plan on using for me it’s de_DE.UTF-8

/etc/locale.gen

de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
#de_DE ISO-8859-1
#de_DE@euro ISO-8859-15

afterwards you can regenerate the local files

locale-gen
Generating locales...
de_DE.UTF-8... done
de_DE.ISO-8859-1... done
de_DE.ISO-8859-15@euro... done
Generation complete.

echo KEYMAP=de-latin1 > /etc/vconsole.conf
echo FONT=lat9w-16 >> /etc/vconsole.conf

And now we are going to save our localtime

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime

Turn on multilib by uncommenting the multilib lines

/etc/pacman.conf

[multilib]
SigLevel = PackageRequired TrustedOnly
require_once = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

and upgrade the packages for multilib

pacman -Sy

now we have to modify the loading of modules/hooks via nano we need lvm2 and encrypt

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

MODULES=(ext4)
HOOKS=(base udev autodetect modconf block keyboard encrypt lvm2 filesystems fsck)

bake that kernel

let’s generate a new kernel image

mkinitcpio -p linux

define root-passwort festlegen:

passwd

turn on dhcpd so arch will get an ip on the next startup

systemctl enable dhcpcd.service

now we define a hostname and write the /etc/hosts file

/etc/hosts

hostnamectl set-hostname archtest
echo "127.0.0.1 archtest" >> /etc/hosts

bootload systemd

bootctl --path=/boot install

now we are going to edit /boot/loader/loader.conf

#timeout 3
#console-mode keep

now we are going to add an entry to the bootloader config

/boot/loader/entries/arch.conf

make sure you type cryptdevice=UUID= ( two equal signs ) in the next step

title	Arch Linux
linux	/vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options cryptdevice=UUID=8ef2ef04-a712-4a5a-84aa-32c4d87cff90:lvm root=/dev/mapper/main-root quiet rw

set a hostname

echo "archtest" > /etc/hostname
echo "127.0.0.1	localhost" > /etc/hostname
echo "::1		localhost" >> /etc/hostname
echo "127.0.0.1 archtest.localhdomain archtest" >> /etc/hostname

leave the chroot umount the disks and reboot

exit
umount /mnt/{boot,}
reboot