Arch Linux Tutorial Installation [Part 1] at 10:34 PM

I'm feeling high right now because i got a lot of friends who come to visit this blog and like my promise on my last post about explanation how to install Arch Linux 2009.02 so...get ready on your girl..ups..sorry i mean on your computer hehehe.

Arch Linux is a lightweight and flexible GNU/Linux distribution. It uses i686 and x86_64 optimized packages that offer you an improved performance over other distributions. In today's guide, I'll try to explain you how to install this Linux distribution on your personal computer. First of all, grab the ISO from Arch Linux's Softpedia download page, burn it on a blank CD and then insert the disc in the optical drive of the PC on which you want to install Arch Linux.

Here we go..........

First of course you have to turn on your girl..upss...wrong again...i mean your computer
Once the CD booted, you'll see a welcome screen. Hit enter to boot:

When the CD loaded, you will see another screen with some options. The most important thing to remember here is the command to start the installation process: /arch/setup. But, before we launch the installation wizard, let's create some partitions with cfdisk.

Disk partitioning with cfdisk :

First of all, you should know how to use cfdisk :

- up/down arrow lets you navigate through partitions/free space
- left/right arrow lets you navigate through the existing functions
- enter key executes a function when selected

Now, if you have some leftover partitions on your hard drive, please select them (one by one) and with the left arrow select the "delete" function. Your hard drive is empty (no partitions) now so you can start the partitioning process :

Create swap partition

1. Select "New"
2. Select "Primary"
3. With the Backspace key delete the existing size (which is the total amount of your hard disk) and type a new size that should be double the RAM on your machine
4. Navigate to "Type", hit enter twice and set the value at 82 (which is default, so all you have to do is hit enter again).

Create root partition

1. Select the Free space with the down arrow
2. Select "New"
3. Select "Primary"
4. Leave the size as it is, or if you don't want to distribute all the remaining space for the server, you can type a new size (minimum 5 GB).
5. Select "Bootable"

Now the swap and root partitions are created, navigate with the left arrow until you reach the "Write" function, hit enter, type yes to write all the changes to disk. Then navigate to the "Quit" function and hit enter.

You are back to the command line, type /arch/setup



You'll see a welcome screen. Hit OK:



Select the installation source, which in our case is the first one (CD-ROM or OTHER SOURCE):




And you'll arrive to the Main Menu from which you can control the whole installation process:



The options are:

1. Prepare Hard Drive
2. Select Packages
3. Install Packages
4. Configure System
5. Install Kernel
6. Install Bootloader
7. Exit Install

Enter the first option (Prepare Hard Drive) and choose the third option (Set Filesystem Mountpoints):

Select the SWAP partition (in our case is the first one: /dev/sda1):



When asked if you want to create a filesystem on /dev/sda1, hit 'Yes':



Then select the root (/) partition (/dev/sda2):



And the filesystem for it. Ext3 is very good choice here:



When asked if you want to create a filesystem on /dev/sda1 hit 'Yes':



Hit DONE when finished:

Then you will be asked if you want to create and mount the filesystems. If it looks just as in the screenshot below, hit 'Yes':

because there are limit space on blogger posting page....so i make this tutorial to be a 3 part...let come to Arch Linux Tutorial Installation [Part 2] to finish our installation