subtitle: With Antergos gone, it's time to install arch from scratch!
date: 2019-05-29
---
I've been an arch user for many years, and a linux user for even longer, but I've never installed arch from scratch. I was an Antergos user for many years, but after its demise, I needed an alternative. In a [previous post]({{< relref replacing-antergos >}}), I spoke of attempting to install vanilla arch from scratch on my laptop. As I write this, it works well, really well. Everything installed correctly, complete with EFI boot, encrypted partitions and sleep state.
Speaking to those who have installed arch before, they say _"oh, it's simple"_ and _"it only takes like 20 minutes"_. Both those statements are wrong! To go from booting into an arch ISO to a login shell of a remotely usable system took around three hours, and countless browser tabs. I hit a lot of hurdles which, in hindsight, I definitely should have seen coming, and almost certainly already knew. But if they tripped me up, they'll almost certainly have tripped someone else up.
So here's my one stop shop of the things which caught me up during the install and set up process. Whilst I did this install on my XPS 15, it's all pretty generic.
For someone who's never had to configure a network interface manually from the terminal, it's quite a scary thing to get a wireless network working. In contrast, a wired network _just worked_ (once the `dhcpcd` service is started), even using a sketchy type-c adapter.
The wired network was both more stable, came up faster, and had a faster network speed than a wireless one, which is critical when doing an OS install. Network cutting out basically means restarting the `pacstrap` step again, which can be annoying on a 3 MB/s connection.
I use a standard UK-ISO layout, which isn't the default on the arch installer. If you're like me, and don't use US-ANSI, you'll need to change it. For me it was as simple as `loadkeys uk`, but consult the [arch wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Linux_console/Keyboard_configuration#Loadkeys) for details.
### Your AUR helper may need to be manually installed
Many applications I use are installed from the AUR, it's the main reason I switched to arch in the first place. To my knowledge, there are no AUR helpers available in any of the default repos. Antergos provided `yay`, my AUR tool of choice, in their additional repo. Because Antergos is no more, and I don't want to install a package from a _deprecated_ repo, I had to install it manually using `makepkg`.
After this, `yay` will update itself from the AUR package once an update is available.
### Set your root password
The arch installer doesn't have a root password, and is set to auto-login. The resulting arch install also doesn't have a root password by default, but won't automatically log you in, for obvious reasons. Before rebooting, set a root password, just in case!
Fortunately, if you *do* forget to set a password, you can just reboot into the arch ISO, re-mount your partitions, and use `arch-chroot` to enter your install, and set a password from there. The installation process just taught you how to mount the partitions properly, so you should be well versed at it!
Most of the guides I saw for installing arch simply said to install the `base` package group. Originally I took this advice, thinking `base-devel` contained things I didn't need to do kernel-level development on the OS. I was wrong.
Whilst `base-devel` does contain many developer-related packages, such as `gcc` and `make`, it also contains some important system utilities, namely `sudo`, `file`, `which` and `grep`. You can see the full list of packages [here](https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/base-devel/), but changes are you want most of these, so just install it.
### Antergos tweaks
Antergos makes many tweaks compared to a standard arch installation. Not only do many of the packages in the `antergos` repo contain patched versions with modified default configurations and code, but many of the default configuration files are modified to yield a better user experience.
`Xsession` was a particularly painful example. The Antergos patched version of `Xsession` forcefully set the value of `$QT_QPA_PLATFORM`, which interfered with my styling changes. My dotfiles now contain a [patch](https://github.com/RealOrangeOne/dotfiles/blob/d8e587acf167733b15467762263cd1b41c9dcd1b/files/xsession.patch) to remove this. You can read more about how I style QT [here]({{< relref make-qt-less-ugly >}}).
## Useful references
If you're going to install arch for yourself, I highly recommend reading up on how the installation works. If there's a guide on how to do it for your device, even better!
For my install, there were a couple of sites I used in particular which were useful in installing:
Once the installation was complete, it was as simple as cloning [my dotfiles]({{< relref dotfiles >}}), and waiting for a complete system. There were a couple of issues with that, but mostly because of packages previously installed with Antergos, which I now had to explicitly install.
