Jumping on the Arch Bandwagon

Well, after avoiding it for a few years, I have decided to install the Arch GNU/Linux distribution on my Acer C710. At first glance, it was nice to just install the necessary packages and have a working system within 20 minutes. The downside to having everything up and running in 20 minutes is that I did not install the base packages that come with most distributions – such as a GUI terminal program (i.e. gnome-terminal). That was OK since I still had my favorite tty – 3. I am going to miss the delta packages (DRPMS) from Fedora as I particularly enjoy saving bandwidth.

Installing Arch was pretty simple compared to Gentoo or Funtoo, but not as simple as Fedora or Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, you load a LiveDVD, click the install icon on the desktop and follow the prompts. In Arch, you are presented with a terminal and are not given much instruction. The basic steps are to partition your drive, create a filesystem, mount your root partition as /mnt, run the package initializer, and chroot into the environment. In other words, it is as simple as:

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
pacstrap /mnt base
genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
arch-chroot /mnt
echo wipplertop > /etc/hostname
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime
sed -i 's/^#en_US.UTF-8$/en_US.UTF-8/g' /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
mkinitcpio -p linux
passwd
useradd -m andrew
passwd andrew
pacman -S grub os-prober
grub-install --recheck /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
exit
reboot