After using EndeavourOS for a while, I also decided to try Arch itself!

I did not feel ready to go through the manual procedure (but I’ll do that someday), and I heard about the archinstall script, which comes in the Arch official ISO. After watching a few videos and reading a few blog posts, I tried that myself, first on a VM and then on a real machine.

I can anticipate that I liked this installation procedure. Still, it is not perfectly usable in a multi-boot environment, as I’ll say near the end of this post, where I summarize my experience with the installation.

In this post, I’ll first show an installation on a VM (and I suggest you try that one), then briefly describe the installation on a real machine.

If you want to try that, you have to download an official Arch ISO. Once you booted into the live ISO, you must connect to the Internet as described in the official documentation.

Now, it’s time to run the installer:

And you have access to the main installation menu:

You see, it’s easy to use, especially if you’re familiar with other Linux installation programs.

The first three entries are easy to deal with.

The fourth, “Select harddrives,” requires some care because it’s where you deal with your disk! You have to select the correct drive. In my case:

Since I’m on a VM, I’ll simply choose to wipe everything on that drive and let the installer handle the partitioning automatically. That’s easy in a VM, and that’s what I’ve seen in all demos on the web (but, as I’ll show later, things are more complicated in a multi-boot environment):

Then, you choose the filesystem EXT4, BTRFS, etc.

For the bootloader, I chose GRUB, which is the one I’ve always used.

Concerning the user accounts, it’s best NOT to set a root password: it’s better to create a user with administrator rights (so that you later rely on the good ol’ “sudo”). An interesting feature of this installation procedure is that it lets you create as many users as possible. On the contrary, typically, other Linux installations only allow you to create a single user.

The other interesting menu entry is the one to choose the profile. I’m choosing “desktop”:

And in particular, I’m choosing GNOME (you see that you have plenty of choices):

Moreover, you can select the graphic drivers:

And the kernels:

Since, for the moment, you could just select from a predefined set of choices, you are given a chance to manually specify additional packages to install (but you have to know them by their name). In this example, I’m installing “firefox”:

It’s also crucial to configure the network for the installed system. If you use GNOME or KDE, I’d say that it’s best to choose “NetworkManager”:

Once you’ve done with all the menu entries, before starting the actual installation, you’re given a chance to save these configurations, which is helpful if you want to use the same configurations on other machines or to do some further customizations:

Now, it’s time to choose “Install”; a countdown starts to abort the installation in case you just remembered you’ve done something wrong:

The installation starts and in a few minutes (where a few packages will be downloaded)…

…you should get to the end of the installation, where, if you want, you can also tweak the installed system before rebooting:

If you choose “no”, you’re back to the live environment:

And you can now reboot to (hopefully) enjoy your installation:

Having installed GNOME, I’m presented with a few options, and I choose the first one, that is, GNOME on Wayland:

You see that the GNOME installation is a vanilla one.

OK, that was a VM, and it was straightforward to install Arch with the installation script. It’s also easy if you plan to install ONLY Arch on your computer (by wiping all the rest).

Things are not working completely fine if you want to install it on a computer with other Linux installations, which you want to keep and be able to boot into. In this case, of course, you cannot wipe the selected hard drive and must do manual partitioning. The installation script is still helpful in that respect (I’m not showing anything in this blog post), but you must be aware of a small problem.

In fact, due to an issue, which, at the time of writing, is still open, specifying to mount an existing EFI partition into “/boot/efi“, which, as far as I know, it’s the standard mount point in most distributions (every distribution I know at least). You must specify a mount point “/boot” and that must be a boot partition (with the boot flag). Of course, that’s what I’ve done myself; I specified the exiting EFI partition (the first partition of the installation drive in my computer) for the mount point “/boot”. However, the installer will treat that directory as if it was /boot/efi in other installations. Thus, it will copy the booting files directly there. As a sad result, the Arch installation will not be detected when rebooted. You will only see an existing installation’s GRUB menu (and running os-prober from an existing installation does not seem to help). Thus, you end up with the Arch installation that you cannot boot.

The only solution I found to boot into the Arch system was to apply the mechanisms shown in my other post and configure the Fedora GRUB with an entry pointing directly to the EFI partition, i.e., according to the post mentioned above, something like the following (remember, on my computer the EFI partition is the first one, and I installed Arch on the partition 13):

Or even like that (i.e., without specifying the root partition of the Arch installation at all and just relying on the grub that the installer created directly on the EFI partition):

Besides this problem, the installation script archinstall is really interesting and still under development.