Notes on installing Arch

This is based on the offical wiki
This will install Arch, KDE and Grub.
This is just a minimal example with no real special customizations. The point is to remove some of the extra info the typical user likely won't need to worry about (yet)
This assumes you've alrady downloaded the Arch iso.
Some things may look a bit different for you; trying this on a Hyper-V virtual machine in Windows first.
Secure boot will need to be disabled during install. On Hyper-V I'm not sure what the right way is to re-enable but if you're doing an actual install, these are the provided notes

All in all, despite what you may have heard, installing Arch isn't actually that bad as long as you have a basic understanding of the terminal, there's just a lot of things to do to get a basic setup working which you should "hopefully" have at the end of this.

These directions should be working as of 10/13/2024.

First task is partitioning with FDisk...

FDisk

Probably the easiest thing to use since it's preinstalled on the iso. "Parted" also appears to be installed as well. I just went with fdisk since I'm somewhat familiar with it and all the options have simple(ish) explanations.
fdisk -l brings up the available disks on the system
fdisk <drive path> to run fdisk for the drive.

Making partition sizes

We're going to follow the recommended partition layout for UEFI found here
Select the command to add a new partition
You need to specify start and end sectors. Note that "sectors" are the unit of measurement (there is another called "cylinder" but it's marked as deprecated)
sectors can be specified in normal terms like "1mb" for megabytes
as you make partitions, fdisk should be helping you calculate where to begin the next partition.
Make sure to set each partition to the appropriate type(Fat32, EFI, etc)

When you're done

You should have the following
- /dev/sda1 - boot (aka /dev/efi_system_partition)
- /dev/sda2 - swap (aka /dev/swap_partition)
- /dev/sda3 - main (aka /dev/root_partition)
Run mkfs.fat8 -F 32 to setup Fat32 filesystem on system partition
Run mkswap /dev/sda2 to setup the swap space with a filesystem.
Run mkfs.ext4 to setup root partition with Ext4 filesystem

Mount filesystems

Mount root partition to /mnt with mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
Mount boot to /mnt/boot with mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot --mkdir
enable the swap partition with swapon /dev/sda2

Package setup

Run pacstrap -K /mnt/base linux linux-firmware
Note you can append any additional packages you might need to the end of the command
You can install other packages if you forget by running pacman -S <package name>

Packages to set up

sof-firmware - this will get default audio working
kde-utilities-meta - should allow for Konsole(terminal access). There are apparently keybindings to switch between KDE gui/terminal mode too.

Timezone setup

Probably should do this before the next step cause command doesn't work in arch-chroot
timedatectl list-timezones - America/Los_Angeles is me
Use timedatectl set-timezone <zone> to set.
You may have to do this again after completing setup; first time I tried it didn't take until I did it again. (I think I ran hwclock later on which would reset things to UTC)

Configuration

generate fstab file by running genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
root into the new system by running arch-chroot /mnt

Localization

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment the locales to support. en_US is for american english
run locale-gen
create a locale.conf file at /etc/locale.conf with the value LANG=<locale name>, in our case en_US.UTF-8

Networking

create hostname file at /etc/hostname. This basically gives your system a name when on a network.
ensure network interface exists by typing ip link. This will list all available network interfaces
You can enable/disable interfaces by running `ip link set <up|down>
In Hyper-V things should already be setup but you may still have to enable the interface.
Add a network configuration; for this example I added a file at /etc/systemd/network/20-wired.network using the sample here https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-networkd#Wired_adapter_using_DHCP
docs are here https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration

Root

set the root password by running passwd

Bootloader

Root into main disk (arch-chroot /mnt after mounting your root partition to /mnt by running mount <partition> /mnt) and install grub and efibootmgr.
Mount boot drive (/dev/sda1) to /boot (mount /dev/sda1 /boot)
run grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=GRUB (remember to change target to correct procssor architecture but for the vast majority of people this should be correct)
Generate the main configuration file. by running grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
- See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Generate_the_main_configuration_file for more info

Finishing up

Reboot
You should be presented with the Grub manager and an option to boot into Arch.
enable systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved systemctl enable <name>
To make sure settings take effect, may as well restart systemd-networkd

Make a new user

useradd -m <username>
passwd <username> to set a password
A home directory "should" be automatically created at /home/<username>. If not, you can manually create it.

GUI

Install a display manager. SDDM is recommended for KDE which we'll use for this example.
Install pacman -S sddm. Optionally install sddm-kcm which provides GUI options for settings and qt5-declarative for QT5 theme support. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM for more details.
Once thats installed, add a new configuration at /etc/sddm.conf.d/autologin.conf. The file should look something like

// from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Autologin

[Autologin]
User=john
Session=plasma

With KDE, you must have a user setup other than root.
By default, KDE will try to use Wayland. It does work on Hyper-V but performance is noticably worse so I switched to X11.
Install xinit and follow the directions here https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#From_the_console if you don't have a compatible GPU.
If you use X11, you can use this to ensure that KDE autoloads https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xinit#Autostart_X_at_login
Once you login as your non root user, you may not have acess to the arch-chroot command anymore. Installing arch-install-scripts should fix this. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot#Using_arch-chroot
For the "Discover App", you will likely need to install a backend for it. See here for more details https://www.baeldung.com/linux/discover-software-manager-backend

sortofsleepy/archnotes.md