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Arch installation with LUKS encryption and LVM

This is the English version of the German installation guide on rvbg.eu. This guide is based upon a german arch wiki entry.

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

1. Preparation

Ahead of the installation an Arch boot-stick has to be created. The iso-file can be found on the official website. The iso can be written on an USB-stick using dd. 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.

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.

modprobe dm-crypt - load kernelmodule for encryption
cryptsetup -c aes-xts-plain -y -s 512 luksFormat /dev/sda2 - encryption
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)
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. Prepare base installation (optional)

In this step the country specific mirrorserver for the installation will be configured. This will improve the download speed.

cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak - Create a backup of mirrorlist
grep -E -A 1 ".*Germany.*$" /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak | sed '/--/d' > /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist - Example command to only use German mirrors
cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist - Check if the file is to your liking. If it is not, you can just recover by using mirrorlist.bak

7. Starting base installation

Now you need a working internet connection. Plug in your lan cable or use wifi-menu to get a wireless connection.

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel dosfstools gptfdisk lvm2 linux linux-firmware vim dialog dhcpcd - Installation of main system with needed tools
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.

8. 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
tzselect - Set region

9. 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 modconf block keyboard keymap encrypt lvm2 filesystems fsck shutdown)
mkinitcpio -p linux - generate Kernel-Image

10. Install and configure UEFI bootloader

bootctl install - Prepare bootloader
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid - find out the UUID
lsblk -no UUID /dev/sda2 | head -n1 > /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf - print the UUID in your configuration file

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
vim /boot/loader/loader.conf - Create loader configuration
- Insert the following text
```
timeout 0
default arch
```

11. Finishing base installation

passwd - set password for the root account
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. Now you can follow my larbs installation script (curl -o larbs.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiyn/larbs/master/larbs.sh or go on to other guides.

Changelog and versions

03.04.2020 - Version 1.1en (based on 03.04.2020 - Version 1.1)

05.04.2020 - Version 2.1en (based on 05.04.2020 - Version 2.1)

28.05.2020 - Version 3.0en

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