Installation

Installation with Btrfs and full disk encryption

After using Ubuntu and Debian for a while, I decided to switch to Arch Linux to provide a simple and lightweight OS. In addition, Arch Linux allows me to keep up to date with the latest versions of packages, which I greatly appreciate.

First of all, you should know that I'm willing to bring a new tutorial because I haven't yet found a tutorial to use Btrfs, encrypting the entire disk and providing a full installation of the basic packages.

NOTE: don't forget that Arch Wiki remains the ultimate reference.

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Create a bootable UEFI USB

On the assumption that:

• X is the volume ID;
• Y is the partition ID.

Make a FAT32 partition with boot flag

sudo fdisk /dev/sdX

Formatting the USB Flash Drive

sudo mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdXY

Labeling the USB Flash Drive

sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdXY ::LABEL

Installation of Arch Linux on the USB Flash Drive

Replace archlinux by the name of your ISO image of Arch Linux:

sudo dd bs=4M if=archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress && sync

• bs (block size): on modern equipment (less than 5 years old), 4MB is a good bet;
• if: source of the ISO image of Arch Linux;
• of: destination to install the ISO image of Arch Linux;
• status: automatically print periodic updates in the standard output.

Start on USB key

To do that, checks the following things:

• USB Flash Drive is first on the priority of boot;
• Secure Boot is disabled.

Before installation

Before proceeding with the installation of Arch Linux, it is important to check if you have:

• an Internet access;
• booted in UEFI mode or not.

Internet access

To verify that your system has Internet access, you can check it by pinging to any site (e.g. Google):

ping -c 3 www.google.com

Boot mode

To find out if you started in UEFI mode (recommended), simply check that the following command returns a list of defined UEFI variables. Otherwise, it means you have started in BIOS Legacy mode:

efivar -l