A quick internet search will lead you to a number of different options for this. There are a number of tools to help you do this, Fedora has one built in called Fedora Media Writer for example. Here is how you can use a graphical tool to burn the ISO to a boot USB.įairly self-explanatory here, but if you select the ISO as the disk image, set the type as USB drive, select the drive to burn the ISO to, then click OK, you should end up with a bootable USB stick with the Arch Installer on. The second thing that I would strongly suggest is that you have another device available nearby with internet access so that you can research any small (or hopefully not large) issues that you may find along the way. If you aren’t 100% sure what you are doing with DD you can make a real mess of your existing OS installation. While you can do this with DD (assuming that you are already using a Linux / Mac OS) it is a bit clunky, I always prefer to use a graphical tool to do this for me.
If you are planning to use this tutorial to install on some physical hardware, I would suggest using a USB drive for the install media.
If you are planning to install in a Virtual Machine, you don’t need to do much apart from mount the downloaded ISO as a boot device. Section 2 – Decide how and where to install You will first need to download Arch Linux – Suggest that you do this from the site: Don’t be shy of a little trial and error here, it’s what makes it more fun, and it is how you will learn what works and what doesn’t! I for one will definitely be running through this install a couple of times for this tutorial to ensure I have captured everything Section 1 – Pre-requisites
What I will try and do in each section will be to give you the benefit of my experiences and frustrations at certain sections, especially when it comes to installing on UEFI instead of BIOS and the troubles that secure-boot can cause.
and I don’t have any of this fancy screen mirror recording equipment either to be able to show you this on any physical hardware. I’m not in possession of any HP or Dell server hardware at home with ILO, DRAC, etc.
There are already great tutorials on this site on how to set up and use VirtualBox. I found I had to use an older kernel to retain interoperability.įor this tutorial, I will be using VirtualBox, as I would have difficulty installing on a physical system while taking screenshots.
If you have any software that relies on LTS kernels, this may not be the best OS for you one package of which I have experienced issues in the past, due to LTS requirements and older (stable) kernels, is VMware workstation for Linux. I should also mention at this point, Arch it is a very lightweight bleeding edge operating system, whilst retaining stability.
There are many methods to do everything, different partitioning tools, and lots of ways to carve up your disks (if you are using a virtual machine LVM would be beneficial as it provides that dynamic disk allocation that is useful for extending your LUNs as required, etc). This can be a bit fiddly, but is a really great learning curve, especially if you are installing it on physical hardware. Here is my method for installing Arch Linux.