Learning Linux with Arch Linux
I had an extra computer around the house and decided to try and install Arch Linux on it because I heard it was a good version but “not for beginners”. I wouldn’t call myself an expert in Linux but decided this could be a good way of learning more about it. After starting the installation process it showed me how little I really understood about how linux works.
Installation process
The Arch wiki has an installation guide that is fairly good even if you don’t have much experience with Linux. I used that to get through most of the issues I encountered.
ISO Creation
I found the ISO on the ArchLinux site and burned it into a USB. Almost immediately upon loading it I ran into my first big problem.
Booting Problems…
During booting you are greeted with a screen like this:
If I let the system attempt to boot up the live image on my pc it will start to load into RAM but my screen would go to black.
Searching quickly brought be to the Arch Linux
Install Wiki which looked like an excellent way to get things
installed but brought no resolution for my issue. Further searching
finally led me to set the nomodeset option on the boot
screen by precessing e and adding nomodeset to
the end of the line.
My issue was due to the AMD GPU drivers not loading correctly and
setting nomodeset prevented the Kernel from setting up the
video card, waiting for the OS to do so.
The nomodeset option did allow me to continue with the
setup. Next I moved on to setting up network connections.
Network / Internet Connection
I used ip link and iwd to get connected to
the internet.
Formatting the Drive
Next I formatted the disk with fdisk setting up the
/boot parition. I learned about mounting drives with
commands like mount /dev/root_partition /mnt.
Installing the OS to your local drive
pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware got the
system installed on my machine.
User Setup (Root and user)
Next I switched my root to the new install since up to this point I
had been working off the USB drive. arch-chroot /mnt
I set up a user account here and then tried to Reboot. This is where
I ran into the same problem that I did with the USB booting. The drivers
for the video card on my machine did not install correctly and I was
required to set the nomodeset value by default on my
machine to keep using it.
Calling it Quits
Due to the fact that I wanted to test gaming on this PC this is where I decided it wasn’t worth going further with this machine. I did learn some interesting things about how linux is setup from it’s core and how to get Arch up and running on a machine. I may come back to this in the future but for now will call this learning experience complete!