Installing Arch tonight

As the topic name suggest, I'm installing Arch on a spare laptop tonight. If it goes well and I like it, I'd consider switching my CentOS 7 box with Arch.

It seems that following the Arch wiki install guide is a solid resource. Does anyone here have any protips, gotchas, or recommendation for this install?

The fun begins in about 6-7 hours.

Aside from setting up /home on it's own partition I think you're pretty much good to go. Good luck.

If you are interested in doing encrypted partitions, you may need to do some additional reading about setting up the encryption. Also if your laptop uses Optimus technology, be sure to look into Bumblebee.

Personally, my Arch run machine runs the best out of all the distros I've setup in the past. I kept getting weird graphical glitches during boot up from Linux Mint, and all of that stuff went away when I moved to Arch.

The biggest problem I've had so far is figuring out how to get the Xbox 360 controller light to stop flashing on the ck kernel.

I had some serious issues with grub where it just won't boot so I used Systemd-Boot instead but thats just me. So if you have issues I'd advise you to go with that for the time being

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I also recommend systemd boot for uefi.
For bios I used syslinux.

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"setting up /home on it's own partition"
What exactly is that good for?

So you can not worry about losing your files if/when you reinstall the OS. There are reasons for and against it but at least for me it's just habit now.

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Downloading the Arch .iso...

Grabbing the popcorn...

I'm just going to edit this post here with updates as the night goes on rather than making 100 new posts:

  • Download completed >> Burning to USB Drive
  • This is really happening >> Booted into arch installer >> root@archiso ~ # _
  • Connected to wifi >> verified by ping google.com
  • Completed partitioning >> slightly confused what to mount in /boot (I put the efi fat32 partition I created there)... we'll see how that works out for me
  • Downloading base packages (slow internet rules!) >> grabbing late night snack.
  • I have a working Arch Linux install - No GUI yet

I find it to be very important for many reasons. You could Distro Hop, reinstall the OS and not have to wipe your HDD all the way... amongst other benefits.

I tried 8x and kept failing. I progressed but always ran into an issue. Best wishes !

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I got it to run live on a pen drive. ONCE. It's finicky on the laptop I used.

There is an on the metal install of Arch is running on my laptop. It's only still CLI - no DE yet. I'm sure installing that will have it's own challenges, but for now I'm going to bed and tomorrow I'll decide on a DE to put on there. Planning on having a GUI by tomorrow afternoon/evening. Hopefully things keep going well! :)

May I recommend i3wm? Works great on a laptop-esque space

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Okay, I googled i3wm and intrigued... please explain what I'm looking at - lol!

i3wm is a tiling window manager. You can open up windows side by side (vertically/horizontally) or in its own dedicated workspace. Customizing it is pretty amazing.The reason I say for laptop it's great is because of it's key programming and low resources to run make it a great DE for laptops. You won't have to use the mousepad as much...

check this out but it goes beyond this in functionality

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Looks totally legit! Have any advice or useful guides for installation?

If you are talking about i3, It's pretty simple. Im on Fedora 23 and to install i3wm i just :
sudo dnf install i3 i3status dmenu i3lock xbacklight feh conky

i3 is the main window manager package.
i3status is a utility to generate a string with information to be displayed in the i3bar.
dmenu is a utility to launch our apps in the i3 desktop.
xbacklight is a utility to set our laptop’s screen brightness.
feh is a utility to set a wallpaper.
conky is a utility to display information of the system in a awesome way.

I'm sure you can find all you need in the Arch repositories.

The Arch guide is pretty good at helping a new installer. But other than that, Arch is really fun to install and it really gives satisfaction when it boots into the environment the first time. Good Luck, :D