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.
Network Setup (for installation)
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 registered
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
Install Base System and chroot
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 mkinitcpio
Configure mkinicpio so that the encrypted root partition can be decrypted,
in /etc/initcpio.conf the HOOKS line should contain encrypt:
HOOKS=(... block encrypt ...)
Now we must install the firmware and generate the cpio image
# basestrap /mnt linux-lts linux-firmware
Ensure that various required packages are available in the chroot, this
step may also re-generate the /boot/initramfs-linux-lts.img file:
# basestrap /mnt cryptsetup wpa_supplicant
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
Before you forget, set the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow entries for the
root user to be empty, I forget this often and then need to reboot with the
live environment!
Although the above may regenerate the file (see the output for confirmation):
==> Initcpio image generation successful
If this is not present then the image may be generated manually:
# ls /lib/modules
6.12.34-1-lts <-- this is the kernel version
# mkinitcpio --config /etc/mkinitcpio.conf --kernel 6.12.34-1-lts --generate /boot/initramfs-linux-lts.img
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
Discover the UUIDs of the partitions for booting:
# lsblk --output NAME,UUID
NAME UUID
nvme0n1
nvme0n1p1 CAFE-BABE
nvme0n1p5 cafebabe-cafe-babe-cafe-babecafebabe
encrypted e6779222-1199-1122-3344-556688779988
In the above output cafebabe-cafe-babe-cafe-babecafebabe is uuid_of_encrypted_partition
and e6779222-1199-1122-3344-556688779988 is uuid_of_device_mapped which
can be used to write the contents 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
The allow-discards option is for LUKS1 formatted devices but as far as I can
tell the argument will be passed to cryptsetup and so will work with LUKS2
formatted devices for when the allow-discards flag is not set. To verify
this it would be good to look in the script that is executed in the initramfs
for now though I will assume that it works ok :-P.
Configure EFI with efibootmgr:
efibootmgr --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --create --label Artix --loader \\EFI\\artix\\BOOTX64.EFI
The system should now be ready to boot! It might be worthwhile setting up the
keyboard and the repository... also perhaps installing some additional
software, such as busybox, dhclient, ifconfig to support default netifrc
used in openrc.
Keyboard Setup
Keyboard is setup via /etc/conf.d/keymaps, for compatibility with some
programmes it is a good idea to also create
/etc/vconsole.conf which is a systemd thing:
# /etc/conf.d/keymaps
keymap="uk"
And for systemd (I also think this file is used by mkinitcpio), you will
need terminus installed for this to work properly:
# /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=uk
FONT=ter-p16n
FONT_MAP=8859-2
Temporary setup can be performed with:
loadkeys uk
Wireless Networking with wpa_supplicant
To configure wpa_supplicant to start at boot, from what I can tell this is
not a preferred method, connman and NetworkManager probably do a better job.
You have been warned.
In /etc/conf.d/net:
config_wlan0="dhcp"
In /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:
ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="Network Name"
psk="PreSharedKey"
}
Configure net.wlan0 to start at boot:
# cd /etc/init.d
# ln -s net.lo net.wlan0
# rc-update add net.wlan0 default
wlan0 should be changed according to your specific system configuration.
Adding Arch Linux Repositories
Although Artix is independent of Arch they share an ancestry, as such many
packages will operate perfectly well... and there are some packages that are
not present in the Artix repositories that I make use of fairly often...
busybox being the most important. Others being the foot terminal emulator
and swayimg.
Artix Wiki - Main / Repositories
TODO: More Stuff Here
pacman -S busybox
Troubleshooting
/etc/resolv.conf
For some reason I found that /etc/resolv.conf was mounted with overlay fs
which meant I could not edit it. This is by design for arch-chroot which
artix-chroot was derived from. This probably does not matter if networking was
configured earlier so ignore this if name resolution works. If it does not
and changes are required to /etc/resolv.conf then it may be unmounted:
# umount /etc/resolv.conf
# nvim /etc/resolv.conf