I use ARCH btw

Revision as of 09:39, 29 November 2023

Following the guide is mostly ok ; A word on something I completely forgot about :

When you use a graphical installer, it will both assist in creating / deleting / reorganizing partitions, then at formatting them or not, 
then in assigning their roles as "root", "home", or "swap" and so on ; I never realized those where completely independent actions, and that you
can partition or not, format or not, and, assign partitions with fstab later on independently.

READ THE Fine MANUAL

(Assuming you have a thumbdrive ready and working)

• Use F12 on Fatitude to get to the Choose Your Boot Media at startup
• Load correct keymap :

# loadkeys fr-latin1

• Network interface probably gonna be wlan0 ; in doubt, do ip link

• Use iwctl to connect to the wireless network

[iwd]# station wlan0 scan
[iwd]# station device get-networks
[iwd]# station device connect SSID
[iwd]# exit
# ping archlinux.org

# timedatectl

• Check partitions architecture :

# fdisk -l

• Only format your root partition to install a fresh system on it. Add swap if you have swap:

# mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/sda6 (the -f option is to override former btrfs subvolumes)
# mkswap /dev/sda8

• Mount the filesystems you're going to use on the /mnt folder of your live system:

# mount --mkdir /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot/efi
# mount --mkdir /dev/sda7 /mnt/home
# mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/
# swapon /dev/swap_partition

• Now start reading Yes, but

Yes, but

- Yes, there's probably no need to partition if there's no need to! (esp EFI) You'll run into a permissions nightmare on your /home, but that's better than loosing data :

 When the /home partition is mounted to /mnt/home at 'pacstrap' time, just chmod -r 777 the entire contents of the previous /home folder ; 
 when you make your new user, be sure to give it another name.

- Only format your system / partition (or root partition) with makefs.<type of filesystem> -f is enough for a fresh re-install.

- It's ok to mount the EFI partition to /boot/efi and not simply /boot so as to not fill that small partition with everything in /boot, especially numerous kernels

 On my fresh install, the EFI partition is 260MB which is a factory default - and my /boot partition is already 268MB ; 
 ergo, it wouldn't fit, with just 4 kernels + the windows stub

Default install through pacstrap needs a lot more stuff, you'll probably want

- base-devel linux-lts os-prober pacman-contrib git grub efibootmgr

- grep rsync nano tar git iwd less - snapper ?

- gdm gnome networkmamager gedit - or any of your login manager and desktop environment of choice

- bluez bluez-utils usbutils git go zip wget

- firefox vlc smplayer gimp calibre

When you chroot in, it's normal for os-prober to not see the M$ partition, even if it is mounted ; you should re-run os-prober, and re-run grub-mkconfig, when you did reboot into the actual, fresh system.

don't forget to enable some systemd services, duh

- gdm.service

- NetworkManager.service

- bluetooth.service

with

 systemctl enable <name of unit>.service

If you are already in your graphic environment and instead need it to be enabled and start immediately (like for network), run

 systemctl enable --now <name of unit>.service

And make a basic user

Then create a basic user with

   useradd -m -G %wheel <name of user>

Add it to sudoers with

   EDITOR=nano visudo

Now you can reboot. Have you installed some network software? Have you enabled a graphic shell ? That's the core needs for a functional, fresh install to be tuned further as needed.

Set up aur or install flatpak for dropbox and ungoogled-chromium ; add python-gpgme for dropbox.

Other Housechores

Uncheck the os-prober-false at the bottom of /etc/default/grub ; generally speaking, tweak the grub file to your liking and re-run grub-mkconfig
Add the user to sudo with EDITOR=nano visudo
setup keyboard in gnome 
setup keyboard in GDM with localectl set-x11-keymap fr

Enable tap to click in gnome
setup wiregard 

Good luck with btrfs, and snapper, and snap-pac, and grub-btrfs, and don't forget to hack mkinitcpio as described. Then try your luck with

# snapper rollback --ambit classic <snapshot number to rollback to>

The pyhton script snapper-rollback doesn't work for me, asks for some cquota definition that is said to be damageable to performance on the root partition ; note that I nevertheless blindly imputed some commands to enable quota, rescan them and such. sources suse and oracle.

AND IF YOU FAIL...

 Just re-do the whole install thing ; it is better to loose 20 minutes re-doing it than spending 20 days fixing it

For reference, and in memoriam of failing to remember one of the basics of building a Linux system, my current fstab (mysteriously auto-generated somehow) :

 # Static information about the filesystems.
 # See fstab(5) for details.
 
 # <file system>                               <dir>    <type>   <options>                                                          <dump> <pass>
 # /dev/sda6
 UUID=38472571-3738-42e4-9561-47facca89d00    /        btrfs    rw,relatime,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=5,subvol=/        0 0
 
 # /dev/sda7
 UUID=05d5954f-f948-4d21-9813-aa687a8d4cf4    /home    btrfs    rw,relatime,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvolid=5,subvol=/        0 0
 
 # /dev/sda2 LABEL=SYSTEM
 UUID=B651-2AC6                               /boot/efi vfat     rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro    0 2
 
 # /dev/sda8
 UUID=3845f812-ba5d-4113-8dbe-635448119669    none     swap     defaults    0 0