Arch Linux Installation log pt. 1 – Introduction

A couple of months ago I decided to check out linux, so I did as many do, I installed Ubuntu. Not being completely satisfied with it, I switched to Linux Mint which I was happy with for a time. But as I started to read up in the linux community I heard of this linux distribution called Arch, which was supposed to be very good, but a bit hard for linux newbies. So of course I had to give it a try…

After reading the official installation documentation over at the Arch Linux Wiki, I managed to install Arch without any mishaps. But what I had was ofcourse just the bare minimum of a linux installation. There were alot of work ahead of me. And as I went along I learned alot, and after a while I decided to document what I did. At first it was just a tool for myself for when I had to reinstall or go back a few steps, but I have decided to publish my installation log on this blog, and hope that perhaps others in my situation can learn from it.

Preliminary tasks

Before I could begin there were a some things that needed to be done. First I had to download the correct image and burn it to a CD. Since I didn’t feel very adventurous I went for the 32-bit version of the Core ISO.

The second thing I had to do was document the hardware I was going to install to. This was something I wish I had done properly the first time around, for it would have saved me for a lot of work and head-scratching. The most important information is to find out what kind of network card (both wired and wireless) are installed in the computer. For without that knowledge I could end up with a computer without internet conenction. It is also advisable to find out what CPU you have and how much RAM you have installed.

I had a laptop (HP Compaq 8510w) that I was not using so I decided to use that, so I didn’t have to worry about having multiple operating systems on the same disk and such.

But what I needed to figure out was my partitioning scheme. I basically went with the Arch Installers recomendations as a basis and made changes to that where I felt it was needed. The biggest change was to the swap partition, as I had heard that you needed the swap partition to be at least the same size of installed memory to be able to use suspend/hibernation.  What I did was to pultiply my amount of RAM with 1.5 and used that as my swap size. My laptop have a 120GB disk installed, and my partitioning scheme turned out like this:

So now I had Arch burned on a CD, ready in the drive of my laptop, I had decided on a partitioning scheme and I had written down what kind of hardware my laptop consisted of. I was ready to start the install, which you can read all about in part two of this series.

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