Old Guide.md

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A PERSONAL GUIDE FOR ME AND FOR MY OWN COMPUTER.

Dual Boot Arch Linux and Windows 10

Following Features

• Windows 10
• Veracrypt encrypted windows partition
• Arch Linux encrypted partition with LUKS (seperate unecrypted boot partition)
• rEFInd boot manager and en ext4 filesystem for linux
• KDE Plasma

THIS GUIDE WILL BE WITH UEFI, PLEASE VERIFY YOU HAVE THAT BEFORE PROCEEDING.

Step 1: Install Windows

I am not going to go through this as I am going to be installing arch on a machine with windows already installed but I will have a quick quide below.

1. Install the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
2. Create an ISO file for windows on your hard drive
3. Burn the ISO file to a disc or usb. I suggest using Balena Etcher. rufus also works

Setup Windows

1. Go to the control panel, go to power options, go to Change what the power buttons do and turn off fast startup
2. Configure your windows partition by searching diskmg and clicking on the Create and format hard disk partitions.
3. Configure your Windows partition to how much you want it to be. DO NOT DELETE THE RECOVERY OR EFI SYSTEM PARTITION. Right click on the windows partition and click shrink partition and shrink it to the amount you want for your arch linux partition.

Setup Veracrypt

1. Download and install veracrypt from https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Downloads.html
2. Click on Encrypt a system partition
3. Choose normal, encrypt windows partition, and click single-boot for number of operating systems. Then choose the encryption and hash algorithm you prefer, I will go with standard AES and SHA-512.
4. Create a password and confirm it
5. Generate random data with your mouse
6. Create a rescue disk for Veracrypt.
7. Choose your wipe mode (I will choose none).
8. Allow Veracrypt to restart your computer and boot up again and log back in, then the veracrypt encrypt process will begin.
9. And you are done with Windows! Power off the system

Get into arch linux

1. You need to have a bootable usb of arch linux which you can get from the downloads page. Once again, you need to create a bootable usb or disk for the arch linux iso. I suggest using rufus, which I linked above. https://archlinux.org/download/
2. If you have an ethernet cable, now is the time to plug it in. Also plug in your arch usb drive.
3. Boot your machine and from the boot menu, select the arch linux iso to open up to a menu which looks like the following.
4. Boot into the arch linux instlal medium and enter the arch iso!

Basic setup

1. If you would like to change the keyboard layout, do it now.
2. Connect to the internet, if you have an ethernet cable plugged in, you should already be connected. If not, then use iwctl to connect to the internet
3. ping archlinux.org to verify you are connected
4. timedatectl set-ntp true to start network time synchronization.

OPTIONAL STEP. ENABLE SSH FOR EASIER INSTALLATION PROCESS

If you want to install arch from a seperate machine through ssh, you can do so by following these steps.

1. run passwd and set a password for the root user of the arch iso
2. Enable sshd by running systemctl start sshd
3. determine the machine's local ip address by running ip a
4. The above image means that my local ip address is 192.168.20.159
5. You can now ssh in by doing ssh root@ip replacing ip with the address you just got

Partitioning the disk

1. run lsblk just to see what you have right now. Here is an example output from vmware
2. I will be using cgdisk to partition my drive. Type cgdisk /dev/nvme0n1 to bring up the utility
3. Above is an example of how the output may look. Do not touch the EFI System partition or microsoft/windows partitions. The only partition we are worried about is the free space partition we created earlier, the 48.8 GiB is the largest free space partition and the one I chose to have arch linux.
4. Go to the free space and use the arrow keys to go to [ New ] and click enter
5. Use the default first sector value by just pressing enter
6. Enter 512Mib for the size in sectors
7. Leave the default partition type of Linux Filesystem and create a partition with the name of boot. We will be seperating the boot and root as I do not want to encrypt the immediate boot of the computer.
8. With the free space, choose the default first sector, choose teh default size (which takes up the rest of the disk) and the default filesystem. Name this partition root.
9. Use the arrow keys to navigate to [ Write ] and type yes to confirm
10. Take note of your current partitions.
11. Specifically, the partitions which matter are (These will likely be different for you)

EFI System Partition: /dev/nvme0n1p1
Boot Partition: /dev/nvme0n1p5
Root Partition: /dev/nvme0n1p6

13. navigate to [ Quit ] and exit cgdisk
14. Verify your partitions with lsblk

Encrypt root and format boot and root

1. Run cryptsetup -y --use-random luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p6 - Change /dev/nvme0n1p6 according to your needs. We are encrypting the root partition.

• -y: interactively requests the passphrase twice.
• --use-random: uses /dev/random to produce keys.
• luksFormat: initializes a LUKS partition.

2. type YES and enter the password you want for the encrypted linux root partition
3. Now the partition is encrypted and we cannot access it! Open it up using the command cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p6 cryptroot to create a mapping in /dev/mapper/cryptroot
4. The output of lsblk should now look similar to the following with cryptroot attached to the root partition
5. Format the boot and root partitions by running: mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p5 for the boot partition (again, change the device to the name of yours) and mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/cryptroot for the root partition. We need to access the root partition through the cryptroot mapper we created.

Mounting the arch linux partition, and installing linux

1. mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt mount cryptroot at /mnt
2. mkdir /mnt/boot create a boot directory
3. mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt/boot mount the boot partition to this directory (change the name as required)
4. mkdir /mnt/boot/efi make efi directory
5. mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi to mount the existing efi directory.
6. Now comes the fun part. Running pacstrap to install everything you need for a basic arch linux install. There are a multitude of packages you need to install depending on your needs. The following is a command to install everything I need.
7. pacstrap /mnt linux linux-headers linux-firmware intel-ucode base base-devel git nano efibootmgr xf86-input-vmmouse xf86-video-vmware mesa networkmanager sof-firmware

• linux, linux-headers, and linux-firmware are all packages for linux itself
• intel-ucode is for my processor microcode which is an intel one. Use amd-ucode for AMD processors.
• base and base-devel are some essential packages
• git is git
• nano is a text editor for the console
• efibootmgr
• xf86-input-vmmouse for the touchpad in vmware. I would use xf86-input-synaptics or libinput for my actual computer
• xf86-video-vmware as a video driver. I would use xf86-video-intel for my computer. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics
• mesa for opengl and other graphics things
• networkmanager a network and internet manager for the command line
• sof-firmware Sound Open Firmware

8. MAKE SURE TO DO THIS: genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab to generate the file system tables. We use -U to use uuids rather than the names.

Enter the system and set it up.

1. Time to enter the system! Run arch-chroot /mnt and you are now in your linux installation!
2. Set the timezone by running ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime but with your timezone
3. set the hardware clock with hwclock --systohc
4. Run nano /etc/locale.gen (or vim) and navigate to the commented out line for your locale. In my case, it would be en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 then ctrl-o and ctrl-x to save and exit in nano
5. locale-gen to generate the locale
6. echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.conf Just setting it up. Make sure to change the lang to the line you uncommented
7. echo "arkde" >> /etc/hostname Set your hostname with whatever you would like to name your pc :)
8. Set hosts. Run nano /etc/hosts and add the following lines.

127.0.0.1    localhost
::1          localhost
127.0.1.1    arkde.localdomain arkde

Rename "arkde" with your hostname

Ramdisk Config

Ramdisk is essentially what to do when you boot up your machine.

1. Use nano or any texteditor to change the HOOKS in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf with HOOKS=(base udev autodetect keyboard modconf block encrypt filesystems fsck). You will need to add encrypt and move keyboard earlier.
2. Run mkinitcpio -p linux

User configuration

1. Set the root password with passwd
2. add a user with useradd -m -G wheel abhay to create a user in the wheel group and one which has a home directory.
3. set the password of that user with passwd abhay or whatever you named your user.
4. Use EDITOR=nano visudo or whatever editor you choose to allow users of the wheel group to use sudo by uncommenting the line %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Boot manager and networkmanager

1. Enable network manager by running systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
2. Download rEFInd by running pacman -S refind
3. Install it by running refind-install
4. Now, we need to make sure refind actually works and boots up linux because right now, it is configured based on the arch iso and the flash drive. This is a simple task to do. I will be doing the following in nano because that is easiest for me but you can do it in vim as well.
5. Run cp /boot/refind_linux.conf /boot/refind_linux.conf.bak to copy the current configuration (optional, you likely will not need it)
6. Run blkid >> /tmp/id.txt to get the block ids and ouput it to /tmp/id.txt.
7. Run nano /boot/refind_linux.conf and erase everything except the first line
8. Erase the text in the second string so that your file now looks like "Boot with standard options" ""
9. Now navigate below that and use Ctrl-R and type /tmp/id.txt to paste the contents into the file.
10. Erase everything but the line with your root filesystem, which would be /dev/nvme0n1p6 for us.
11. Erase everything in that line except the PARTUUID
12. On the first line in the second set of quotations, add cryptdevice=PARTUUID={YOUR PART UUID HERE}:root root=/dev/mapper/root replacing the text inside the {} and the {} themselves with the Partuuid you saved on step 11. You can ctrl-k and ctrl-u to cut and paste.
13. Save and quit with ctrl-o and ctrl-x

Exit the environment and reboot

1. run exit to get back to the arch iso
2. unmount the partitions with umount -R /mnt
3. Reboot with reboot!

If you used grub and want refind, login and run refind-install, you should not have to do any editing and you can safely remove grub

Result

You should now have a boot menu which looks like this! You can choose the windows icon or the second icon to boot windows You can choose linux from the third option and the archiso flashdrive is the fourth option

Help! I Screwed up

Here is how to get back into your system through the arch iso

1. Boot up into the arch flash drive/iso.
2. Mount everything by running:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p6 cryptroot # To open the encrypted partition
mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt/boot 
mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi
arch-chroot /mnt

from which you can fix anything you need inside the system. 3. To exit, just follow the same instructions listed up above for exiting the environment and rebooting.

References

• https://octetz.com/docs/2020/2020-2-16-arch-windows-install/ (Video version too)
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/REFInd
• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=252853
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

Configuring Arch Linux

Allow 32bit apps

Edit /etc/pacman.conf with nano or any texteditor uncomment the below two lines.

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

You can also uncomment the line for installing packages concurrently I like to run sudo pacman -Syyu after that just to sync multilib as well as doing any updates that I need to do.

Install yay for the AUR

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

Run the above commands

Install plasma

1. Run sudo pacman -S xorg plasma plasma-wayland-session sddm pipewire
2. After installation run systemctl enable sddm.service
3. Run sudo nano /usr/lib/sddm/sddm.conf.d/default.conf (or vim) and change the theme to "Breeze" so that the result is as follows

[Theme]
Current=breeze

4. sudo pacman -S konsole dolphin
5. Run sudo pacman -S packagekit-qt5 fwupd for getting app backends for kde discover
6. pacman -S ufw for a firewall which can be managed from KDE's system settings
7. sudo ufw enable to start the firewall
8. yay -S librewolf-bin to install librewolf
9. sudo pacman -S neofetch
10. reboot into plasma!

Some settings

• Dark theme. Set screen resolution to 1920x1080.
• Wobbly windows and translucency

Other things and stuff

Smokey Arch Blue Splash Screen for KDE plasma Grub/Refind themes Plymouth Install pipewire-pulse