sjoqvist / arch-hp-pavilion-g6.md
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- I got inspiration from a Gist by jasonwryan.
- I read ArchWiki’s Beginner’s Guide multiple times.
- ArchWiki’s instructions on how to encrypt a file system were very useful.
- I also learned from ArchWiki’s Suspend and Hibernate.
- Bits and pieces were also picked from other parts of the wiki, as well as various online forums.
- I used nano while installing, and there’s some reference to it in the guide. Feel free to use whatever editor you’re comfortable with.
- Feel free to pick other names for things than lvm, system, lvswap, lvroot, arch-host and anders (especially the last one, which happens to be my given name).
- For several reasons, I never cleared my drive before installing. Typically, you want to do this partly to get rid of old unencrypted data, and partly to keep information about how much of your space you’ve used up secret. In order to achieve the latter, you’ll want to fill the encrypted drive with data from /dev/zero .
- I’m assuming that there’s a working Internet connection using an Ethernet cable during the entire installation process.
Place the Arch Linux image on a flash drive or CD, and use it when rebooting the laptop. Prepare the disk with GPT:
A small partition is needed for GRUB to work with GPT:
sgdisk -n 1:0:+2M /dev/sda sgdisk -t 1:ef02 /dev/sda I chose 256MB for my boot partition. Some people suggest 200MB.
sgdisk -n 2:0:+256M /dev/sda sgdisk -t 2:8300 /dev/sda The rest of the disk will be used for LVM:
sgdisk -n 3:0:0 /dev/sda sgdisk -t 3:8e00 /dev/sda Make sure that the kernel handles encryption:
I chose the default encryption, but used a stronger hash function for my password, and used /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom to avoid the theoretical possibility of a weak key. This could happen if /dev/urandom runs out of entropy.
cryptsetup --hash sha512 --iter-time 5000 --use-random \ --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sda3 cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 lvm Setting up a logical volume, volume group and two partitions. I picked a slightly larger swap partition than the size of my RAM (4GB).
pvcreate /dev/mapper/lvm vgcreate system /dev/mapper/lvm lvcreate system --size 5G -n lvswap lvcreate system --extents 100%FREE -n lvroot Create the file systems. In my case, I chose ext2 for the boot partitions, although there are several others that would have worked as well.
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda2 mkswap /dev/mapper/system-lvswap mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/system-lvroot mount /dev/system/lvroot /mnt swapon /dev/mapper/system-lvswap mkdir /mnt/boot mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot Edit the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to use proper mirrors for downloading the system. This file will be copied onto your newly installed system. I installed my system while being in China, and moving Chinese mirrors above the others made my downloads significantly faster.
Install the basic system. I decided to install the basic development tools as well at this point.
pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel Generate /etc/fstab and verify that it looks correct:
genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab cat /mnt/etc/fstab Change root and install the boot loader package (GRUB in our case):
arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash pacman -S grub When configuring GRUB, we need to decide whether we want to use partition UUID or change the default settings. I chose to use UUID. You need to copy these identifiers into a config file. Do this in any way that you like. In my case, I left the ‘chroot’ environment since UUID couldn’t be read from the disks as easily from within. Here’s a (complicated) way that should work:
exit rootvol=/dev/disk/by-uuid/$(lsblk -dno UUID /dev/sda3) swapvol=/dev/disk/by-uuid/$(lsblk -dno UUID /dev/system/lvswap) Check that the paths exist:
To edit the GRUB configuration with a single command (otherwise do it manually according to the example below):
sed -i \ "s,^\(GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=\".*\)\"$,\1 cryptdevice=$:system resume=$swapvol\"," \ /mnt/etc/default/grub Now open /mnt/etc/default/grub to check that the result looks reasonable. It should be something like GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=»quiet cryptdevice=/dev/disk/by-uuid/01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef:system resume=/dev/disk/by-uuid/fedcba98-7654-3210-fedc-ba9876543210″ .
The complete the detour, return to the chroot environment:
Then install GRUB and its config file. Don’t worry about the i386-pc , it still applies to 64-bit Arch Linux.
grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg Open /etc/mkinitcpio.conf . While not necessary, I chose to require my graphics driver early: MODULES=»i915″ Then edit the hooks. You’ll need encrypt and lvm2 because of the encryption, and resume because of suspend-to-disk. These should all go before the filesystems hook. It should look something like this: HOOKS=». encrypt lvm2 resume . filesystems . «
Build the initramfs image:
Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment what you want, for example en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 . Then run
locale-gen echo 'LANG="en_US.UTF-8"' > /etc/locale.conf Set up the timezone. Again, I happened to be in China and in my case this meant
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Shanghai /etc/localtime Unless you have reasons to keep the hardware clock at local time:
Make sure that the Ethernet connection works after reboot:
systemctl enable dhcpcd.service echo arch-host > /etc/hostname At this point, I chose to set up ntpd to let the system keep track of the time. If you want to do the same, run
Then edit /etc/ntp.conf so that it refers to local servers. Afterwards:
systemctl enable ntpd systemctl start ntpd Check that ntpd is able to update by running ntpq -np . You can request an update manually using ntpd -q .
At this point, I was eager to boot into my new system and log in as root (without password) to see that everything was working:
From now on, the settings get more specific, and even more focused on the particular hardware on my laptop. Be selective if you have different hardware.
These should be safe options for the graphics driver:
echo "options i915 i915_enable_rc6=7 i915_enable_fbc=1 lvds_downclock=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-xinit pacman -S mesa Graphics driver for X Windows:
I noticed problems with tearing. In order to get rid of that, create the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf and type the following:
Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics" Driver "intel" Option "TearFree" "true" EndSection In order to get the touchpad working:
pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics The Wi-Fi card is already supported by the kernel, but this is needed to connect to networks:
sudo pacman -S iw wpa_supplicant Time to set up a user account. I wanted zsh as my shell:
pacman -S zsh useradd -m -g users -G wheel -s /usr/bin/zsh anders passwd anders export EDITOR=nano visudo Uncomment the line %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL . Then change the root password:
Log in to your new account, and then create ~/.xinitrc with the following content:
[[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources exec awesome X Windows can now be started with startx .
You’ll want to continue configuring the system. For example, what you’ve done so far should allow suspend-to-disk, but you’ll have to figure out how to issue the actual command. A useful package might be pm-utils .