How to Install Arch Linux (Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide)

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install Arch Linux in either real computer or virtual machine.

Arch is a popular rolling release Linux distribution targeted towards advanced users. It’s a good choice to always get the newest software as soon as it is released.

However, Arch is difficult for beginners because its installation process is entirely working in text-based command line interface. Thankfully, there’s a popular archinstall script to make the process not so hard.

1. Download Arch Linux live image

First, go to Arch Linux website and select download the .iso image.

For choice, you may choose the netboot image, though it’s not covered in this tutorial.

After downloaded, it’s better to do ISO image integrity check via either command below and compare with the one in Arch download page.

• In Linux, open terminal and run command:

  sha256sum ~/Downloads/archlinux*.iso

• For macOS, use command:

  shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/archlinux*.iso

• And for Windows, open ‘cmd’ command prompt and run command:

  cd Downloads && certutil -hashfile archlinux-2024.12.01-x86_64.iso SHA256

NOTE: In commands above, it assumed that you saved the ISO in user Downloads folder. And, you need to replace the .iso file name accordingly.

2. Burn the ISO into USB stick

The most popular way to boot live .iso image is using an USB stick, though you may stick this step if you have another choice or you’re going to install it in virtual machine.

There are quite a few tools to burn an iso image and make it bootable from USB. Personally, I use Ventoy, though there are good alternatives depends your OS.

For Windows, you may try the popular Rufus usb creator:

For Linux with GNOME Desktop, the built-in GNOME Disks tool can also do the job for you.

3. Boot Arch Linux .iso image from USB

After created the live USB installer, plug it into the target computer and boot.

Depends on your machine, you may press Esc or other key to trigger UEFI menu and select boot USB, or go BIOS settings and choose your USB as the first boot option.

For Ventoy, try “Boot in Grub2 mode” if the first normal mode does not work for you.

Once successfully booted the iso image, you’ll see the tty command console with “root@archiso” prompt.

4. Connect to Internet

To install Arch, you need internet connection to fetch required packages. For wired network, just plug in the ethernet cable, then you’re done.

For wireless network, try running the commands below one by one:

• First, run command iwctl to enter the wireless control console.
• Then, run device list to list your wireless card.
• Next, scan and list available wifi networks by running the 2 commands one by one:

  station wlan0 scan && station wlan0 get-networks

  Here you need to replace wlan0 with your wireless device name.

• Finally, connect to a wifi network by running command:

  station wlan0 connect elite01

  Also replace wlan0 and elite01 according to your device name and network name. And, enter password if prompt.

When done, run exit or press Ctrl+C to exit iwctl console, and try ping archlinux.org command to verify if you have internet connection.

5. Install & Start archinstall installer

Arch Linux has an official archinstall installer.

To get it, just run the commands below one by one to refresh cache and install the package:

pacman -Sy

pacman -S archinstall

Once installed, start the installer by running command:

archinstall

It will show you a command line wizard, like the screenshot below shows you.

6. Configure the installer

The wizard is easy to use. Simply press up and down to navigate, press enter to enter menu for selected item, space to tick/un-tick a checkbox, esc to navigate back. And, you may press ? for help.

a.) In the installer wizard, first choose your language and locale. Then, it’s better to choose a download mirror that near to you for fast downloading process.

Tips: when hitting enter on “Mirror region”,  it may take a few seconds for next menu depends on your internet speed.

b.) The Disk configuration tells where the file-system and boot menu will be installed to. There, you have 3 choices:

• Use a best-effort default partition layout, which in my case use the entire disk for only /boot and / partitions.
• Manual Partitioning, manually assign disk partitions for root, boot, and home partitions (difficult for beginners).
• Pre-mounted Configuration – not tested.

If you want to use the entire disk for Arch Linux, or you’re going to install it in a virtual machine, then the first one is good choice!

If you want to dual-boot or multi-boot with other operating systems in the same disk, then choose the second “Manual Partitioning”. In the case, you need to choose the destination disk drive, and maybe delete an existing partition if there’s no enough un-allocated space.

It’s better to take a photo of existing partition table, as you’ll need to manually input the start and end point of new created partitions.

For manual partitioning, you need to create:

• A “fat32” partition with 1 GiB size, mounted as /boot. Use the end sector of an existing operating system as start point of the new partition.
• A “ext4, btrfs, etc” partition with as large as possible size, mounted on /.
• You may also create separated /home partition, though optional.

c.) After that, you may configure whether to enable encryption, use zram (compress swap in RAM), unified kernel images, choose a boot-loader, set hostname and root password. While, all of them are OK to use default options.

Though, you need to add a user account, and it’s better to set it as admin (superuser) with sudo privilege.

d.) To install a desktop environment or server components, go to “Profiles” sub-menu. Where you can as well choose which drivers to install, though default are OK for open-source ones.

Before hitting Enter on “Install”, remember to choose a sound server and network manager which are useful for desktop cases.

NOTE: If you messed up something, just hit “Abort” to exit, then re-run ‘archinstall’ to restart the installer. All changes will NOT apply until you hit “Yes” (see screenshot below) to confirm to start installing Arch.

If the installing process failed due to any mis-configuration, you may also re-run archinstall installer and do it again. If everything goes well, it will ask whether to chroot to do any post-install configuration.

When done, run reboot to restart your computer. If Arch does not boot, try to reboot and choose “UEFI OS (something-about-you-disk)” in UEFI menu.

That’s all. Good Luck!