Arch Linux Installation

After Ubuntu's Unity fiasco, Linux Mint has become my distro of choice. It is everything I remembered about Ubuntu (without Unity and some of the bloat), plus some great new features.

I recently had some issues with the graphics and decided that instead of fixing Mint, I decided to make the best of the situation and start a fresh install of a new distro.

I think I want a distro that gives me more control and really lets me get elbow deep. After researching a little bit I decided on Arch Linux due to its rolling release platform and helpful user base.

I will be following the Arch installation guide found here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide

Let's get started!
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I downloaded UNetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) and downloaded and extracted the Arch Linux netinstall image to a flash drive. After backing up my .home folder from my previous Linux Mint install. After a reboot I'm greeted with a simple UnetBootin boot screen and several boot options. I chose Default and Arch Linux was soon loaded and boot to a command prompt.

/arch/setup

to run the installation

I won't go into very much detail on the installation as the Arch Linux install guide is an excellent source of information when installing. It covers just about every option you have.


Preparing the Hard Drives
I gave the following sizes to my partitions:
/boot - 200 mb
swap - 4000 mb
/ - 30000 mb
/home - 42000 (the rest of the hard drive)

I also chose for / and /home to be ext4

Select Packages
I chose the grub bootloaders as that is what I have experience with
For package groups I chose base and base-devel (as I do a lot of programming)
Extra Packages Installed:
links, ncurses, openssh, sudo
The installation will now download and install the selected packages if you have the netinstall version. If you are installing from core you won't have to wait for the packages to download.

Once the download / installation is finished it will update with a couple statistics. Select continue to... continue. If there is a bit of lag after selecting, be patient. I thought it had frozen for a little while but popped up with the menu again after a minute or so.

Configure System
There may be several things in here you wish to configure. I'm only going to set the root password. If you edit any of the other files they will open with your preferred text editor from earlier.

You're so close to being done! Exit out of the installation to find yourself at the command prompt. Type

reboot

to restart your computer.

If it was successful you should find yourself at the Arch Linux boot loader. Select Arch Linux from the menu and enjoy your new system (albeit command line only.)

Thanks, and Happy Coding!