Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

Allan · 2012-08-06 01:43:40

ebal wrote:

@banton
i lack to understand the need of pacstrap and arch-chroot or any other automate script.
genfstab failed to add my swap partition! arch-chroot is only one command chroot, why using a wrapper for just a simple command? I dont find them useful at all and i believe that complicate things in the installation process.

arch-chroot does all the background tasks needed to have a decently working chroot... such as mounting /dev, /sys, /proc....

pacstrap also does this and sets up the pacman keyring for future package installs.

bangkok_manouel · 2012-08-06 02:14:39

2ManyDogs wrote:

It's a beginners' guide, and beginners will follow your example exactly.

then you may want to add a big fat warning when you tell people to use /dev/sda or /dev/sdb

2ManyDogs · 2012-08-06 02:30:16

bangkok_manouel wrote:

2ManyDogs wrote:
It's a beginners' guide, and beginners will follow your example exactly.
then you may want to add a big fat warning when you tell people to use /dev/sda or /dev/sdb

If by "you" you mean me, it's not my guide. But it's a good point for the OP to consider. A list of "assumptions" at the beginning would be a good start.

Or we could just refer people to the Beginners' Guide. Are there any "unofficial" AIF guides out there? How did the mods handle it when people came looking for support after following an unofficial guide?

Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2012-08-06 02:34:58)

altbdoor · 2012-08-06 06:00:57

2ManyDogs wrote:

How did the mods handle it when people came looking for support after following an unofficial guide?

Since this is an unofficial guide, there should be a visible notice to tell users about this.
Hence, Arch Linux forums and its community is not liable to answer questions for support from following this guide.
Any questions for support should be redirected to the owner/author of guide.

ebal · 2012-08-06 06:14:06

@altbdoor

why people would be confused about a personal wiki page outside the official archlinux wiki ?
and what i am doing so wrong that the official archlinux forum cannt handle it ?

altbdoor · 2012-08-06 09:20:11

ebal wrote:

why people would be confused about a personal wiki page outside the official archlinux wiki ?
and what i am doing so wrong that the official archlinux forum cannt handle it ?

Don't get me wrong, and I apologize if I did give the wrong idea.
--

altbdoor wrote:

Hence, Arch Linux forums and its community is not liable to answer questions for support from following this guide.

I'm _not_ saying that the whole community must ignore all questions from people who followed your guide.
(Again, apologies if it did give the wrong idea)
I'm saying that the Arch community has no responsibility to answer to people who have problems from following your guide.
We can choose to answer, or not. Its a choice. It still is, isn't it?
--

altbdoor wrote:

Any questions for support should be redirected to the owner/author of guide.

Considering how you have worked on the guide, of course, you are the person who knows your guide the best.
If I did mess up following your guide, I should come to you, no?
Your HP laptop is not working. You go to a HP Customer Service Center, no? (Okay, maybe just me)

Of course, if its a general question (like GRUB2 not working, etc), I believe the community is happy to answer them.

Smoerrebroed · 2012-08-06 09:28:43

Looks nice to me. Good job! Just one thing that I came across the other day: When writing the .iso to a USB drive, be sure to include the bs=4M option - otherwise it may end writing prematurely which happened to me the other day:

dd if=archlinux-2012.08.04-dual.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

Cheers

Smoerrebroed

ebal · 2012-08-06 09:31:10

@altbdoor

my beliefs are to help people in areas of my expertise.
Thats why i spend time to write stuffs like that or even reply to some posts.

I do reply to personal emails but i strongly believe in "The importance of asking public"
http://ebalaskas.gr/blog/2012/05/15/the … ng-public/

If you read the guide, you will see that i keep it as simple as it gets.
People should educate their self through this process.

I am not saying that the automated scripts in official guide are crap or something like that.
I am just saying that there is another way for people to learn how to do it without them

thanks for your comments & critic - the latest post clarify a lot

tedbell · 2012-08-06 09:46:56

I can confirm this tutorial works perfect. Thanks!

Lugz · 2012-08-06 15:31:34

grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda

On this line I don't think --boot-directory is a valid argument.

Is this supposed to be --root-directory?

Last edited by Lugz (2012-08-06 15:37:26)

ebal · 2012-08-06 16:16:31

manual says otherwise !

drcouzelis · 2012-08-06 16:56:03

ebal wrote:

You only have to understand a few things: partitions and grub2.

Crap. Today I learned that, after three years of Arch Linux usage, I'm no longer smart enough to install it.

I guess it's time for me to start learning about GRUB2.

Lugz · 2012-08-06 18:31:17

ebal wrote:

manual says otherwise !

I lied, i had to do some other things but I finally got it working. Thanks for the guide. I used your guide in conjunction with the arch guide. Worked good except for me screwing up the grub install. lol.

mhertz · 2012-08-07 01:45:32

ebal wrote:

@mhertz
"so e.g. mkinitcpio dosen't error out during install of the kernel..." ???
i dont see this error in my guide. Why someone else would see it ?

That's because that part isn't shown in your guide!

During installing base, then there will shortly be error-messages shown when mkinitcpio tries to generate initial ramfs, as e.g. /proc isn't mounted, but you regenerate that anyways after adding locale, so it dosen't matter really.

Allthough I remember one more package stating that it couldn't do some operation(don't remember, sorry) also...

For this reason, in my automatic-install-script, i start by mounting /proc, /sys, /dev and /dev/pts before running the pacman command, and pacstrap also does this(it also mounts e.g. /dev/shm and /run, but in my testings those arent needed...)

Also remember the keyring to copy over...

Btw, when using -r with pacman, then logfile and database-dir are by default on the dir specified by -r, if not allready specified in pacman.conf, so those aren't really needed on the pacman comand-line, allthough cache is needed to be defined specifically... Nitpicking, I know

Edit: I just did a fast vm test-install with a script running pacman -r[...], and without first mounting /dev, /proc, /sys and /dev/pts:

first it showed an error during install of systemd-tools, about failing to execute command, since /dev/urandom wasen't found, and second, during the kernel install, then when the ramdisk is to be generated by mkinitcpio, then it states: error: /proc not mounted!, and stops generating the ramdisk...

The messages are flying through fast, so they're easilly missed!

If then rebooting into the installed system, without first mounting the needed dirs and generating the ramdisk, then you cannot boot the installed system, as it will stop and complain about missing ramdisk...

Last edited by mhertz (2012-08-07 02:42:40)

ebal · 2012-08-07 08:09:17

@mhertz

a.
From what i've read on your post, i am positive that you havent took a careful look at the guide.

There is a step that all necessaries psedo-filesystems, that are needed to the chroot environment, are being mounted before chroot or mkinitcpio command.

b.
The steps are according to the official installation guide.
I have only took the liberty not to use the automate scripts provided by developers.

The automate scripts can make everybody life much easiest and new users should use them.
The guide i have provided is an alternative method of not using them, but following the steps of the official guide.

c.
I'll look again the pacman syntax with -r option. I believe that you are right on that. Give me some time to review this step.
Thanks

d.
pacman is running outside the chroot environment. There is no need of mounting psedo-filesystems inside chroot.

as alan have already mentioned, you someone can use arch-chroot to chroot into the new archlinux environment and use pacstrap to install archlinux (without the need of fixing keyring at post-install)

mhertz · 2012-08-08 00:59:37

I really don't care if you believe me or not, and I don't want to spend time convinsing you that I indeed know what i'm talking about!

For the last time, as you regenerate initramfs after chrooting then it dosen't matter in that situation, but I would still do it nonetheless, as it looks better that no errors are reported during install!

Also, as said, systemd-tools also throws an error, but i dont know if that's important or not, but still, why not take precautions to avoid it...

Pacstrap and my personal script both mounts pseudo filesystems before running pacman, and in that way no errors gets reported during the pacman run!

Do what you want , i don't care

Edit:

systemd-tools, which gets installed when the base group is selected, runs systemd-machine-id-setup upon install, and it's this which fails if you haven't mounted before running the pacman -r command(needs /dev/urandom):

systemd-machine-id-setup may be used by system installer tools to initialize the machine ID stored in /etc/machine-id at install time with a randomly generated ID. See machine-id(5) for more information about this file.

Source: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/sys … setup.html

man machine-id states:

The machine ID is usually generated from a random source during system installation and stays constant for all subsequent boots. Optionally, for stateless
systems it is generated during runtime at boot if it is found to be empty.

This sounds like '/etc/machine-id' will get generated upon boot, if found empty, so in that case that's not important either, but nonetheless...

Last edited by mhertz (2012-08-08 02:42:01)

totte · 2012-08-08 08:15:49

mhertz wrote:

my personal script

I'd like to view your script, link please?

ebal wrote:

mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
 
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

I understand that this (sort of) creates soft links to the /dev, /proc and /sys on the installation media under /mnt, but why is this necessary?

dontbugme · 2012-08-08 08:57:34

Because - at least thats my experience - some commands fail (eg: grub2, a few months ago), if you don't mount proc, sysfs and the devfs in your chrooted environment. A few months ago, a friend of mine needed help with reinstalling grub2. At that time, I didn't know that it's necessary to mount proc/sys/dev before chrooting into the system. After 1h I gave up(grub-install always failed with a segfault). A few months later, same thing .. tried again with mounting proc/sys/dev ... surprise it worked.

masteryod · 2012-08-08 10:46:26

daneel971 wrote:

You can consider trying fdisk instead of cfdisk: it aligns the partitions correctly and the use is simpler than parted.

I've read somewhere that cfdisk is making "nicer" partition tables... so what's the true here?

ebal · 2012-08-09 05:31:26

small changes
* added gdisk (GPT) example http://ebalaskas.gr/wiki/archlinux/gdisk
* as mhertz mentioned "pacman -r /mnt -Sy base" is only what you need
* added section that pacman is using cachedir on destination disk
* added syncing pacman keys from iso (very useful)

as always:
" this is an unofficial guide – plz blame only me "

for intermediate users that want to install archlinux without any use of automate scripts from iso
and learn through the process how is done.

http://ebalaskas.gr/wiki/archlinux/netinstall

totte · 2012-08-09 07:19:28

Will you consider adding parted as well to the tutorial? I find ncurses-based interfaces confusing and irregular compared to CLI tools. From what I learned, the following would create a GUID partition table with three separate partitions - a 128 MB /boot (with boot flag set), a 8192 MB / and the remaining MB /home.

parted -s -- /dev/sda mklabel gpt
parted -s -- /dev/sda unit MB mkpart primary 1 129
parted -s -- /dev/sda set 1 boot on
parted -s -- /dev/sda unit MB mkpart primary 129 8321
parted -s -- /dev/sda unit MB mkpart primary 8321 -1

After that, proceed with mkfs to create the file systems and assign labels, as per your tutorial.

1archgamenon2 · 2012-08-11 18:41:27

ebal wrote:

inform me for any existing error

dunno...I don't think is a 'great' guide 'pal'(thus in quotation marks)! the part of install GRUB2 do not work!!

ebal · 2012-08-11 18:41:30

@totte

here it is:

http://ebalaskas.gr/wiki/archlinux/parted

(non interactive) an example of 10Gb disk.

1archgamenon2 · 2012-08-11 18:51:08

1archgamenon2 wrote:

the part of install GRUB2 do not work!!

At least 4 me!

totte · 2012-08-12 22:47:23

ebal wrote:

@totte
here it is:
http://ebalaskas.gr/wiki/archlinux/parted
(non interactive) an example of 10Gb disk.

Very cool, thank you for the tutorials! I ended up learning a lot of new stuff. The checksums were a nice touch!

Arch Linux

#26 2012-08-06 01:43:40

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#27 2012-08-06 02:14:39

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#28 2012-08-06 02:30:16

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#29 2012-08-06 06:00:57

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#30 2012-08-06 06:14:06

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#31 2012-08-06 09:20:11

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#32 2012-08-06 09:28:43

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#33 2012-08-06 09:31:10

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#34 2012-08-06 09:46:56

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#35 2012-08-06 15:31:34

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#36 2012-08-06 16:16:31

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#37 2012-08-06 16:56:03

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#38 2012-08-06 18:31:17

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#39 2012-08-07 01:45:32

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#40 2012-08-07 08:09:17

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#41 2012-08-08 00:59:37

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#42 2012-08-08 08:15:49

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#43 2012-08-08 08:57:34

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#44 2012-08-08 10:46:26

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#45 2012-08-09 05:31:26

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#46 2012-08-09 07:19:28

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#47 2012-08-11 18:41:27

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#48 2012-08-11 18:41:30

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#49 2012-08-11 18:51:08

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

#50 2012-08-12 22:47:23

Re: Archlinux Installation Guide with Screenshots based on media 20120804

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