Artix Linux Installation

Artix is a systemd-free Linux distribution, but does recommend some other nonsense I don't like so much. This is how I installed it.

Keyboard Setup

Network Setup

Using ethernet is simple, just make sure to stop connman before setting the IP addresses :-).

To setup the WiFi network with connman (included on the LiveCD).

# ip link set up dev wlan0
RTNETLINK answers: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
# rfkill list
0: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: yes
    Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: yes
    Hard blocked: no
# rfkill unblock 1
# ip link set up dev wlan0
# connmanctl
connmanctl> scan wifi
Scan completed for wifi
connmanctl> services
- list of networks -
connmanctl> agent on
Agent registeres
connmanctl> connect wifi_xxx_managed_psk
- passphrase -
Connected to wifi_xxx_managed_psk
connmanctl>

Tab completion is available for those long network names!

Update pacman database

# pacman -Sy

Partitioning Disks

I prefer to use sfdisk but it is not great when you want to edit the current partition table. So here we will use parted:

# pacman -S parted

encrypted root partition:

# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p5
# echo -n <passphrase> |cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p5 encrypted -d -
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/encrypted
# mount /dev/mapper/encrypted /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot

basestrap the system (install basic utilities, in this case openrc will be the init system as in Alpine and Gentoo) and a kernel along with firmware:

# basestrap /mnt base base-devel openrc seatd-openrc iptables-nft
# basestrap /mnt linux-lts linux-firmware mkinitcpio

Configure mkinicpio so that the encrypted root partition can be decrypted, in /etc/initcpio.conf the HOOKS line should contain encrypt:

HOOKS=(... encrypt ...)

Generate the /etc/fstab file for the new system using UUIDs:

# fstabgen -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
# vi /mnt/etc/fstab
- check that it is ok -
# artix-chroot /mnt

Locale stuff:

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
# hwclock --systohc
# pacman -S neovim
# nvim /etc/locale.gen
- en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8 and en_GB ISO-8859-1
# locale-gen

/etc/locale.conf:

export LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="C"

Bootloader (I prefer syslinux over grub, in know that there are some additional features in grub that many want, by all means read about how to setup grub):

# pacman -S syslinux efibootmgr
# mkdir /boot/EFI/artix
# cp /usr/lib/syslinux/efi64/syslinux.efi /boot/EFI/artix/BOOTX64.EFI
# cp /usr/lib/syslinux/efi64/ldlinux.e64 /boot/EFI/artix/
- make sure your kernel and initramfs are in the correct locations -
- /boot/EFI/artix should be ok -
# nvim /boot/EFI/artix/extlinux.conf

Content of extlinux.conf

default artixlinux
label artixlinux
    linux vmlinuz-linux-lts
    initrd initramfs-linux-lts.img
    append cryptdevice=UUID=<uuid_of_encrypted_partition>:root:allow-discards root=UUID=<uuid_of_device_mapped> rw quiet

Configure EFI with efibootmgr:

efibootmgr --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --create --label Artix --loader \\EFI\\artix\\BOOTX64.EFI

Reference