
Arch Linux – Do it yourself - dolftax
http://dolftax.com/2014/05/Arch-Linux-Do-It-Yourself/
======
burntsushi
There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial, but the canonical install
instructions for Arch are instructive and detailed:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide)

Also, if you want to use Arch in a dependable way, subscribing to arch-
announce is important[1]. It's a low traffic mailing list that notifies you of
any manual steps you may need to take during a package upgrade.

(I've been using Arch for years, both at home and at work. I love it.)

[1] - [https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-
announce](https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-announce)

~~~
joncameron
>There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial

That's often true, but I was disappointed that this was little more than a
rephrased version of what's on the Arch Wiki.

I love the Arch documentation on the Wiki. It's perfect for me– laid out well,
easy to follow, arranged in a logical wiki order, and stuffed with insanely
useful tips. The pages on stuff like tmux are fantastic.

~~~
spystath
Most of the time the information is already in the wiki. And it's nice how the
installation guide covers every corner case. I smoothly migrated my laptop
from a simple installation to luks+lvm, just by following the guide. You can
_actually_ read TFM because it's already there. It's also kinda funny how many
google searches that relate with configuration issues on linux link back to
the arch wiki. Definitely documentation is one of the stronger parts of arch.

------
nextos
I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most
hassle-free distro I've encountered. As vanilla and up-to-date as possible,
but with the right amount of automation (binary pkgs and great simple
utilities) baked in.

That said, some distros like nix and guix are addressing a much needed problem
now---how to be able to get reproducible builds. Sadly, they haven't learnt
many lessons Arch taught us. Last time I tried nix, installing mutt eventually
pulled in python as a dependency!

~~~
coldpie
> I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most
> hassle free distro I've encountered.

I completely agree. I tried switching to Linux a few times in high school
(early-mid '00s), and always had false starts with Fedora or Ubuntu. Usually
the package manager would break and everything would fall to pieces. I ended
up installing Arch as a Subversion server for some personal projects, and
that's what finally made it click.

I use Arch exclusively at work and at home. I do Linux development, which
means I have to test out our product on other distros, usually Ubuntu. Eight-
plus years later, and Ubuntu's package manager _still_ falls over nine times
out of ten. Fedora falls over. Mint falls over. I don't know what I'm doing
wrong.

Arch Just Works. It's dead simple, requires very little maintenance, and when
something does go wrong (maybe once a year), it's easy to fix or roll back.
Arch is just files on a hard drive, not some nebulous set of five different
package sources and databases and "releases" and blech.

~~~
pimeys
I've been using Arch on my workstation and on my laptop for several years
already. I can sign all the points you gave in here and I really appreciate
how easy it is to setup and use the distribution.

Although many years ago I had problems when updating, in the recent years
everything just works and I don't need to worry about upgrading the whole
distro every 6 months.

~~~
coldpie
Yeah, there were more upgrade conflicts years ago before most system software
switched to the "conf.d" directory-style configuration system. Now the Arch-
provided config upgrades cleanly as the user configuration is separate.
Upgrade conflicts have been very rare lately.

------
olalonde
> The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do
> it yourself'. Yes, that's it! -Linus Torvalds

Surprisingly, Linus is actually quite critical of the more technical Linux
distributions. Here's another quote from him:

> And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been
> one of my main issues - I'm a technical person, but I have a very specific
> area of interest, and I don't want to fight the rest. So the only
> distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be
> "overly technical" \- like the ones that encourage you to compile your own
> programs etc.

> Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution
> for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I've never
> used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu.

[https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-
week/linus-t...](https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-
torvalds,-geek-of-the-week/)

Not that I think it takes anything away from Arch, but I thought it was an
interesting piece of trivia.

~~~
nextos
I don't think Linus opinion is necessarily against Arch. I am using Arch
precisely because I don't want to fight my OS!

I also found Gentoo, let alone Linux from Scratch, very complicated and time
consuming. The nice thing about Arch is that it hits the sweet spot between
simplicity, technicality and easiness. In my opinion having vanilla binary up-
to-date packages is the way to go.

~~~
laumars
I completely agree. Arch is one of the more "technical" distributions to get
to a desktop. Particularly when compared with Ubuntu and such like. But once
the desktop is running, Arch is one of the easiest distros to maintain.

For example:

1) despite the many criticisms levelled at a rolling release model, I've found
it to be more reliable and generally less painful than upgrading between
Debian / Ubuntu (for example) releases.

2) pacman is, in my _personal opinion_ , a nicer command line tool than apt-
get / apt-cache / aptitude / etc. I do quite like some of the RPM-based tools
though (yum, zypper, etc).

3) Adding 3rd party repos in Arch is probably on a par with PPAs, however
yaourt (AUR) almost makes it completely unnecessary to ever look for another
3rd party repo again.

That's not to say everything is perfect though: Occasionally updates need to
be applied manually; being bleeding edge can be a double edged sword
sometimes; and I really did prefer the old BSD-inspired rc.conf over the new
system of various files scattered around /etc and the much debated systemd.
But each to their own on that one.

------
mhax
Arch is awesome and I've used it at home and work for years, but the rolling
release cycle means that you _must_ keep on top of upgrades.

I was once a little too slack (no pun intended) and had several hundred
packages that needed upgrading and there was simply no easy way of making it
work. It was around the time of the systemd introduction, so that may have
been a significant complicating factor.

~~~
vitoreiji
Yes, the systemd introduction was a special time in Arch land. A lot of
systems got broken in those days. The only comparable time I can recall right
now is when they dropped GRUB Legacy. People who upgraded carelessly were
unable to boot. These are the two single big events in 8 years or so I've been
using Arch.

~~~
jvreeland
The filesystem package changes have caused no end of issues to people who
did't read the news and just Syu'd :)

~~~
mitosis
Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty
when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on
top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.

~~~
deelowe
Yet none of the setup guides really stress this and there's no preferred
method to keep up to date on things. Arch really needs a better system for
making it obvious when nontrivial updates are about to happen.

Note, I use pacmatic, which pulls the news feeds, but it took me getting
bitten a few times before I learned to do this.

------
tomswartz07
For myself, I appreciate the fact that almost all of the Arch packages are
'un-fooled-around-with'.

Very often, I've run into issues with Ubuntu packages solely because they have
their own strange versioning, and roll certain patches into weird versions.

I think it boils down to the management philosophy: Ubuntu tries to make it
'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take
it up with that program's developer'.

~~~
lloeki
> Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you
> have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'.

Arch says 'as vanilla as possible'.

------
zx2c4
Gentoo is a much more rewarding and educational experience:

[https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/](https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/)

[https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page)

~~~
minikites
Gentoo is ridiculous: [http://fun.irq.dk/funroll-
loops.org/#fourth](http://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/#fourth)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
This is a classic, however a decade-old selection of ignorant Gentoo users
doesn't reflect the quality of the distribution itself.

------
crypt1d
Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page.

As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and
Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I
usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand
you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style),
and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yourself(arch, gentoo,
slackware, etc). I, for one, would prefer some middle ground - eg, a system
being able to predict the most optimal setup for my box, but also allow me to
tweak it should I prefer something different. RHEL/CentOS seems to be slowly
getting this, and I enjoy its tools quite a lot (tuned daemon for kernel
params optimization, kickstart for package customizations, etc.)

~~~
SSLy
I use arch for few years already and I've found out that actually one does not
need to make any tweaks - in 99% of cases, just install the package you want
and it just works. The only thing I've replaced is font rendering pipeline --
I use the outstandingly beautiful bohoomil's repository[0].

And that's it, everything else is right there.

[0]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repos...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repository)

~~~
vitoreiji
I recently had to reinstall my arch and was pleased to find this repo. It is
much easier than installing everything from AUR and trying to keep it
consistent. And my fonts look even better now.

------
danielstocks
For those of you interested in running ArchLinux on Macbook hardware; I find
this guide/overview pretty comprehensive:
[https://gist.github.com/terlar/6143325](https://gist.github.com/terlar/6143325)

------
kitd
First

    
    
      Installing Arch Linux is pretty difficult task when you atempt to do it for your
      first time if you are not familiar with command line and basics of linux.
      But I would suggest you to install Arch Linux as you will gain a very good
      insight on how linux works.
    

then

    
    
      If you got no idea what dd is, arch ain't for you friend!
    

... do not follow

~~~
ddoolin
Came here to post the same thing. Very strange 180 there. I had no idea what
dd was when I first got into Arch, but if I had let that deter me, I never
would have gotten past the first step. I also don't think understanding dd is
very critical to being able to use Arch as a whole.

~~~
wyclif
I agree—the problem is that it does not logically follow and is contradictory,
but he is right that knowledge of the CLI makes things a lot easier. However,
I'm with you in that I don't think there should be any pressure not to try it
anyway. I have a custom-built desktop machine that I can install anything I
want on, so if something breaks or falls over, I can simply reinstall another
OS (while getting real work done on my laptop).

------
notfoss
Please add 2014 to the submission title. Also, Since Arch is a rolling release
distro, it is encouraged to always refer to the latest documentation over at
the Arch Wiki.

------
ephexeve
It's a nice article, though for me, the Arch wiki is clear enough.

------
digi_owl
Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"?

[http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/)

~~~
spystath
LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to
compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary
packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation
while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is
probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated
distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom
init, custom udev etc). This is not bad, but different. I am not a Gentoo user
so please correct me if my assumptions are wrong. All these 3 options,
however, encourage the user to familiarise themselves with the system
internals, which is a good option if one wants to dwelve a bit deeper into
linux. Arch is probably the most accessible of the lot.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
> Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more
> opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured
> (see custom init, custom udev etc).

Gentoo offers even more freedom of customization than Arch. Choose your init
system, your udev variant, your main Python version, set around 100 build time
options for ffmpeg and so on.

LFS is great for learning and looking under the hood, but for a system that
you actually use daily, Gentoo has no rival.

~~~
Nullabillity
If customization is a goal I'd look into Nix(OS) as well. Source distro with
binary caches for the default build options. Oh, and your setup becomes
trivial to reproduce (just copy the config files). Oh, and you can easily
revert your machine to a previously known working state if you screw something
up.

------
levifig
So glad to see this on the front-page of HN! Arch is a great distro but, like
Linux in general, is struggling for support and promotion.

Now, I'm no believer in "Linux on the Desktop" any time soon (will it finally
be 2015? :P), but I'm a firm believer in Linux as a multi-purpose tool that
any hacker worth his/her salt should not only have in their toolbox, but also
be proficient on. And not just for server usage, which is a bit more common,
but on the desktop. I learned a LOT about computers from running distros like
Gentoo and Arch, where you have to make decisions and learn the process and
components that make things tick.

I highly recommend Arch. It's a super flexible and clean distro, that requires
a bit more upfront investment to get installed, but I find it easier to
maintain, with the biggest and friendliest support community, and very
customizable.

------
ekimekim
Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still
suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions.

What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to
max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI?

And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine
with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough RAM that you need to
start swapping it to disk, I'd rather just invoke the OOM killer and kill the
badly behaved process, instead of slowing my system to a crawl while it tries
to access memory at disk speeds.

~~~
spaar
I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install
more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it
to another drive and just reformat / alone.

And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning
the article has.

~~~
FreeFull
I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my
/home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher
if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.

~~~
thrownaway122
Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so
that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just
re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home
partition. It all worked out of the box.

~~~
FreeFull
Yeah, what I meant was that I had my /home on / rather than on a separate
partition, and managed to install a completely different linux distro anyway
without losing it.

~~~
thrownaway122
OK I misunderstood.

------
anonbanker
I trust Arch far more than other distros, but I can't really use it in a
production environment. Unless you take the care to automate the upgrades
every 1-3 months, your machine will quickly require a handful of hacks to fix.
As a gentoo lover, this isn't very difficult, but when you have, say, a
customized digital audio workstation for a client, that needs to "just work"
during upgrades (which, debian/KXStudio handles admirably), yaourt -Syu is
like rolling the dice whether or not things will continue to build.

AUR aside (even though, as an expert, it's a fantastic resource), the
repositories need keys trusted before they can be used, but nowhere in the
documentation is this mentioned. When browsing the forums, you are often
encouraged to _not_ use keys, and just do everything unsecured.

I no longer trust Debian or Canonical, so I'm trying to migrate to a
distribution not registered in (or under the control of) a Nation State
involved in Five Eyes agreements, which is pretty much limiting me to Manjaro,
Arch and Gentoo.

------
mmarx
Interestingly, this is about as much “do it yourself” as installing debian via
debootstrap instead of the installer.

------
damcedami
Most interesting thing I want to see was bash script (or other way) to
automate install and configure the post-installed system, like this gist
[https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347](https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347)

~~~
SSLy
[https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui](https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui) Though, I
can't vouch for quality of this, I don't use it

~~~
clearing
I used aui for my recent arch install, and it's helpful for things you might
forget (like installing wpa_supplicant, wouldn't have bought an ethernet cable
for my very first install...).

I'd recommend figuring out the steps in the FIFO section yourself, as it is
largely dependent on how you partition your system, and one would benefit from
learning about things like mkinitcpio.

------
TuxLyn
I've blogged about Arch Linux back in 2014.

If anyone interested; [http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-
linux-2014-install/](http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/)

~~~
Arguggi
TFA and your blog post both mention SLiM as a login manager, according to the
Arch wiki[0]:

"The SliM project has been abandoned (the project homepage is down, leaving a
github mirror), and is not fully compatible to systemd, including logind
sessions. Consider using a different Display manager or Xinitrc."

Lightdm [1] seems to be a better alternative.

[0]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM)
[1]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM)

~~~
TuxLyn
Yes officially it is, but notice the date the post was made. It was before the
SLiM abandoned :-) I use my self and would recommend LightDM instead of SLiM
now. But thank you for pointing this out. I'll post new arch install article
one of this days ^_^

I would also like to say that I've been using Arch Linux since 2011 and it
works for my development needs. I'm using it with 3-monitors on two separate
"GeForce GT 610" video cards. I've tried many other distros including Ubuntu
and Fedora both GNOME/KDE. I prefer Arch + XFCE + LightDM my self :-)

------
collyw
I will recommend Manjaro for anyone that wants arch without the install
hassles.

[https://manjaro.github.io/](https://manjaro.github.io/)

~~~
bcook
I REALLY wanted to like Manjaro, but it was too buggy. When it was running, it
was a smoother, more functional GUI than my barebones Openbox window-manager,
which was great.

But... During the past 5+ years, I rarely ever had a problem with Arch Linux
that is not 100% my fault. Manjaro... it had some problem every few days;
updates DB would become corrupt, random freezes, login GUI would stop
functioning...

I suppose my main complaint was that Manjaro could be great it it simply eased
the installation and setup of Arch Linux. I do not understand why they use a
completely separate repository. Hopefully they continue to improve!

~~~
OvidNaso
Unfortunately, I've also had a few problems with Manjaro. I still think it is
great and would recommend it, but it certainly is a 'plan to move on'
distribution for me. I think I'm going to try Antergos next. I'm not quite
ready for the Arch install. If I had a laptop with an Internet connection next
to me, I'd probably have a go, but being a single comp desktop...will try
Antergos for a few months.

------
hydera5
I almost did this but ended up installing Gentoo! I've loved it, its a great
way to learn your way around Linux and learn new skills!

------
Thriptic
Is arch relatively approachable for a linux noob who has logged a bit of time
on Redhat and Ubuntu?

~~~
rakoo
I'd advise against it. There's no point in trying arch just for the sake of
it. My advice, based on my own experience:

\- keep using the distribution you know

\- dig inside its components to understand what they do

\- once you understand what they do, try using an alternative...

\- ... until you ultimately realize you don't need it _that_ much, or just
want to see what it's like without this component, remove it

\- once you get deep down in the customization of your distro you start to
realize that the top-down approach is interesting but there'll always be
something you didn't know. At that point, it makes sense to try the bottom-up
approach: start from nothing, and install the components one by one. The point
is that since you've already dug inside your previous distro you know what
those components are, whether they are needed or not, and what the
alternatives are. You won't spend time understanding these and spend more time
on the actual _building_ of a distro. This is where Arch comes in.

------
1234567890123
Why not Gentoo, which provides source packages. Compile it yourself!

~~~
rakoo
Archlinux also provides source packages, in the form of ABS
([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System))
for "official" packages and AUR
([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository))
for "unofficial" packages (in the "not officially supported" meaning).

