wiki/wiki/linux/arch-linux/installation.md

Arch installation with LUKS encryption and LVM

This guide is based upon a german arch wiki article. For encryption dm-crypt is used. Inside the encrypted partition a logical volume will be created with LVM.

At the end of this guide a fully functional Arch Linux will be installed.

Test

The following is a list of installations using this guide and if it is working.

Commit	Date	Device	Working
f8b83cf	19.02.2025	Lenovo E14 AMD Version	No Problems
033ad68	02.03.2025	Acer Switch Alpha 12	No Problems

1. Preparation

Ahead of the installation an Arch boot-stick has to be created as described in the Arch Linux entry.

After that the USB can be plugged in the system on which Arch should be installed. Boot the target system and select Boot Arch Linux (x86_64).

If you need to set the keyboard layout to anything other than english you can temporarily do so by using the loadkeys command. This has to be followed by your country id (for example a german keyboard layout would be de,de-latin1 or de-latin1-nodeadkeys).

2. Formatting of the target drive

Using lsblk you can list all the drives and partitions. Select a drive to install Arch on. In this step you can see if old partitions need to be deleted. For reasons of simplicity the following guide will assume the selected drive to be /dev/sda.

Clear disk completely

This step can take quite a while especially for large drives.

dd status=progress if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Now all partitions should be removed.

Alternatively the partition table can be cleared by running the following command. This will leave old data possibly recoverable.

wipefs -fa /dev/sda

Create new partitions

If you miss click during the progress of the following commands you can press CTRL+C to close the program. No changes will be made until the confirmation at the end. The swap partition will be created later under lvm.

• gdisk /dev/sda
• N - Create a new empty partition table
• ↵ Enter - Create a partition
• ↵ Enter - Confirm first sector
• +512M - Assign size of 512 MB for the first partition
• ef00 - Make the partition bootable
• n - Create a second partition
• ↵ Enter - Confirm creation of partition
• ↵ Enter - Confirm first sector
• ↵ Enter - Confirm last sector
• ↵ Enter - Confirm partition type
• p - Show created partitions
• W - Save all changes
• Y - Confirm saving changes

3. Encryption

We need to find out which partitions is the one we want to encrypt. Using blkid | grep /dev/sda all partitions we created get listed. The right partition has the label Linux filesystem. For this guide this partition is assumed to be /dev/sda2.

cryptsetup -c aes-xts-plain -s 512 -y -v luksFormat /dev/sda2

Afterwards confirm with YES. Now you can assign a passphrase. The passphrase has to be entered at boot to decrypt the system. Recovering of this passphrase is not possible.

4. Setup LVM

• cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 lvm - Opening encrypted partition and mapping it to /dev/mapper/lvm
• pvcreate /dev/mapper/lvm - Create a LVM physical volume
• vgcreate main /dev/mapper/lvm - Create LVM Volume Group
• lvcreate -L 16G -n swap main - Create Swap in LVM (recommended: swap size is equal to ram size to enable hibernation)
• lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n root main - Create LVM Logical Volume for /

5. Create filesystems and mounting them temporarily

We have to find out which partition is our boot-partition. Using blkid | grep /dev/sda once again, we can identify it by looking for the EFI system partition label. The guide assumes this partition to be at /dev/sda1.

• mkfs.fat -F 32 -n UEFI /dev/sda1 - Assign filesystem of EFI partition
• mkfs.ext4 -L root /dev/mapper/main-root - Assign filesystem of root partition
• mkswap /dev/mapper/main-swap - Assign swap filesystem

Now the created filesystems will be mounted for the installation.

• mount /dev/mapper/main-root /mnt - Mounting root partition
• mkdir /mnt/boot
• mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot - Mount EFI partition
• swapon /dev/mapper/main-swap - Mounting swap partition

6. Starting base installation

Now you need a working internet connection. If a wireless internet connection is needed start iwctl, scan (station wlan0 scan) and connect to the router (station wlan0 connect <router ssid>). Afterwards the internet connection will be established. Exit iwctl.

• pacstrap /mnt base base-devel dosfstools gptfdisk lvm2 linux linux-firmware vim networkmanager ntp
• genfstab -Up /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab - creation of fstab
• arch-chroot /mnt - Switch into the newly installed system
• echo ArchLinux > /etc/hostname - Assign hostname. ArchLinux can be changed for any name of your preference.

7. Set Region and Language

• echo LANG=en\_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf - Assign system Language to be english (you can use other languages, look into the /etc/locale.gen for a list of all available languages)
• vim /etc/locale.gen - Assigning system language by uncomment the lines depending on your needs. In this example:

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

• locale-gen - Generate languages
• echo KEYMAP=de-latin1-nodeadkeys > /etc/vconsole.conf - set the keymap
• ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime - set your timezone (select the first file accordingly to your location)
• ntpdate -q 0.de.pool.ntp.org - sync the time and date with NTP (note that a german time server is used and depending on the needs a adjustments should be made)

8. Configure and create kernel-image

• vim /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

  • Search the line MODULES=() and change it to: MODULES=(ext4)
  • Search the line HOOKS=([...]) and change it to: HOOKS=(base udev autodetect microcode modconf block kms keyboard keymap consolefont encrypt lvm2 filesystems resume fsck shutdown)

• mkinitcpio -p linux - generate Kernel-Image

9. Install and configure UEFI bootloader

• bootctl install - Prepare bootloader

• ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid - find out the UUID of your root partition (matching /dev/sda2).

• vim /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf - Create configuration

• Change the config to look similar to this:

  title    Arch Linux
  linux    /vmlinuz-linux
  initrd   /initramfs-linux.img
  options  cryptdevice=UUID=<enter your uuid here>:lvm:allow-discards root=/dev/mapper/main-root resume=/dev/mapper/main-swap rw quiet
  

• cp /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf /boot/loader/entries/arch-fallback.conf - create a fallback. Change it to the following.

  title    Arch Linux Fallback
  linux    /vmlinuz-linux
  initrd   /initramfs-linux-fallback.img
  options  cryptdevice=UUID=<enter your uuid here>:lvm:allow-discards root=/dev/mapper/main-root resume=/dev/mapper/main-swap rw quiet
  

• vim /boot/loader/loader.conf - Create loader configuration. Insert the following text

  timeout 0
  default arch
  

10. Finishing base installation

• passwd - set password for the root account
• systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

11. Optional Steps

In Arch Linux 32-bit software is managed via the multilib repository, which is for example needed for the steam package. Due to it not being enabled by default, this has to be done manually. For this navigate to /etc/pacman.conf and find and uncomment the following lines.

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

12. Finish the setup

• exit - exit the installed system
• umount /mnt/{boot,} - unmount all partitions
• shutdown now - shutdown device
• Now remove the Arch boot-stick
• Start the device again

If the system is installed in a virtual environment or a system with deactivated UEFI, don't forget to enable the EFI option, otherwise the system won't boot.

13. Further steps and graphical environment

For the following steps to work you may need to repeat the network setup if you use WLAN. This can easily be done by using nmtui.

Now you can follow the recommended larbs installation script of this wiki (curl -LO larbs.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiyn/larbs/master/larbs.sh) this will install a bunch of useful base software including a graphical environment and a window manager. You can go on to other guides aswell. Especially the Recommended practices should be checked for further setups.

In some cases the Arch keyring needs to be repopulated. This is discussed in the package manager entry.

Additionally if you have a NVidia Graphics Cards you should read the NVidia article too.

If you are interested in automatic decryption of the dm-crypt encrypted partition, take a look at the according section in the dm-crypt article.

After installing xorg windows system the language of it will be english by default. To change it - in this example to german - run the following command.

localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap de pc105 deadgraveacute