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Booting the installation medium

ATTENTION: The Arch Linux installation medium does not support Secure Boot. You will have to disable it to start the installation.

Point your system's current boot device to the USB flash drive plugged into one of the USB ports on your computer. This usually involves pressing a key during POST; F8, F12, TAB, etc. Refer to on screen instructions after turning on your computer or its manual for the exact key to press.

Once the GRUB boot manager comes up select the Arch installer medium option to be presented with the installation environment. You'll be logged in as root at a Zsh prompt.

Setting the keyboard layout

The default keyboard layout is US. To list all available keyboard layouts:

ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/**/*.map.gz

To change the keyboard layout pass the filename to loadkeys without the path and file extension, e.g. German:

loadkeys de-latin1

Verify boot mode

To verify the current boot mode list the efivars of the system:

ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

If there is output the system is running in UEFI mode. If it is empty the system is running in BIOS/CSM mode. Modern systems from the last 10 years should be able to boot in UEFI mode and should be preferred.

Establish a network connection

To verify network devices are actually available list them with ip:

To connect to a network simply connect the LAN cable for a wired network connection.

For WiFi connections use iwctl. To list available WiFi devices:

iwctl device list

To scan for available networks:

# $DEV  : the identifier of the device to use

iwctl station $DEV scan

This will not output a list of networks found. To list networks:

# $DEV  : the identifier of the device to use

iwctl station $DEV get-networks

To connecto to a network:

# $DEV  : the identifier of the device to use
# $SSID : the name of the network to connect to

iwctl station $DEV connect $SSID

If the network requires a passphrase you will be prompted to enter it.

Installing via SSH

If you want to install Arch Linux via SSH set a password for the root user of the installation environment with passwd. This doesn't have to be a sophisticated password, as it will only be valid for the runtime of the installation environment and won't carry over to the installed system.

After you've set a password connect to the installation environment:

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password root@archiso

Testing connection

To verify you're online ping a server on the internet of your choice, e.g.:

ping archlinux.org

Update the system time

Enable synchronization with internet time servers:

timedatectl set-ntp true
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