{"id":2710,"date":"2023-07-12T16:53:41","date_gmt":"2023-07-12T16:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hauweele.net\/~gawen\/blog\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2023-07-12T19:21:34","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T19:21:34","slug":"post-install-archlinux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hauweele.net\/~gawen\/blog\/?p=2710","title":{"rendered":"Post install ArchLinux"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the past few months, I had to install ArchLinux several times. While it’s now my Linux distribution of choice for an everyday use, a clean install of Arch is rather bland. So in this post, I’ll try to resume the different step I took to spice a default Arch install a bit more to my taste. Most of the choices here are purely personals.<\/p>\n

New user<\/h2>\n

By default, no user is created, so you have to create one along with its home directory. Also ensure that your home is in 750 instead of 755.<\/p>\n

useradd -m youruser\r\nchmod 750 \/home\/youruser\r\n<\/pre>\n
Fstab and tmpfs<\/h2>\n
By default, on a new install, \/etc\/fstab<\/i> comes up mostly empty as most of it is hidden away by systemd. But I usually change some options and add tmpfs. Here’s an example:<\/p>\n
\r\n\/dev\/vda2 \/ ext4 rw,noatime,nodiscard,stripe=4 0 1\r\n\/dev\/vda1 \/boot vfat rw,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro\t0 2\r\n\r\n\/dev\/vdb1 none swap sw 0 0\r\n\/dev\/vdb2 \/mnt\/data ext4 rw,noatime,nodiscard 0 0\r\n\r\ntmpfs \/tmp tmpfs noatime,mode=1777 0 0\r\ntmpfs \/run tmpfs noatime,nosuid,noexec,mode=755 0 0\r\ntmpfs \/run\/shm tmpfs noatime,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777 0 0\r\n<\/pre>\n
pacman cache<\/h2>\n
If you have a separate data partition\/hdd, it may be a good idea to move the pacman cache there. However you cannot do so using symlinks, pacman won’t like that at all<\/i>. Instead you have to edit the CacheDir<\/code> entry in \/etc\/pacman.conf<\/i>.<\/p>\n
yay<\/h2>\n
Arch comes with its binary package manager (pacman<\/a>) and also the community maintained Arch User Repository (AUR<\/a>) providing access to more packages that are generally built from source. Yay<\/a> is a AUR package manager so you don’t have to clone and install AUR repos manually.<\/p>\n
Note that the commands below need to be run as your normal user, otherwise makepkg<\/code> will complain about possible catastrophic happenstances.<\/p>\n
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git\r\ngit clone https:\/\/aur.archlinux.org\/yay.git\r\ncd yay\r\nmakepkg -si\r\n<\/pre>\n
legacy network interface name<\/h2>\n
Back in the days, network interfaces on Linux had simple names like eth0<\/i>, wlan0<\/i>, and so on. This changed multiple times<\/a> because the order in which the interface drivers are loaded make these names not 100% predictable. However, if you know that your boot order is pretty static and never change, you might want to get the legacy naming scheme. To do so, either add net.ifnames=0<\/code> to the kernel parameters or override the appropriate udev rule. In this case I use the latter option.<\/p>\n
ln -s \/dev\/null \/etc\/udev\/rules.d\/80-net-setup-link.rules\r\n<\/pre>\n
netctl<\/h2>\n
I prefer to use netctl<\/a> instead of systemd-networkd<\/i> to manage the network. Since I constantly use other Unix and Unix-likes systems that are not Linux, and since I’ve been doing so for decades, I also prefer to use ifconfig<\/i> instead of ip<\/i>. When asked I also choose openresolv<\/i> instead of systemd-resolved<\/i>, the latter tries to do too many things in your back.<\/p>\n
pacman -S net-tools inetutils netctl dhcpcd dhclient\r\nsystemctl enable netctl\r\n<\/pre>\n
Then you have to create a default profile, for instance in \/etc\/netctl\/network<\/i>. Here is a default config that configures the interface with DHCP for IPv4 and SLAAC for IPv6:<\/p>\n
Description=\"Basic DHCP ethernet connection\"\r\nInterface=eth0\r\nConnection=ethernet\r\nIP=dhcp\r\nIP6=stateless\r\n<\/pre>\n
You still have to enable the profile:<\/p>\n
netctl enable network\r\n<\/pre>\n
Some packages<\/h2>\n
Here is the bare minimum I would install on a new install, whether headless or xorg powered.<\/p>\n