The installation guide of Archlinux is very good for a simple and “vanilla” setup. But if you want a bit more customization it is not enough, since the wiki is very large I write here what I do need to perform installations.

Archiso page.

The installation media is usually fine, unless one wants ZFS support. Archlinux supports well ZFS, but it is not in the official repositories, so to use ZFS one needs to:

Install archiso, download and sign the ZFS repo keys:

# pacman --needed -S archiso
# pacman-key -r F75D9D76
# pacman-key --lsign-key F75D9D76

Prepare for making a full image:

$ cp -r /usr/share/archiso/configs/releng archlive

And inside archlive edit few files.

In the file ./packages.x86_64 add to the end:

archzfs-dkms
linux-headers

In the file ./pacman.conf add to the end, nearby the other repos:

[archzfs]
Server = http://archzfs.com/$repo/$arch

In the file ./airootfs/etc/systemd/system/pacman-init.service add in the bottom of the section [Service]:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/pacman-key -r F75D9D76
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pacman-key --lsign-key F75D9D76

I use the archzfs-dkms package because it works with all kernels and so it cannot stop your system from updating because the zfs and the kernel package are not aligned. The downside is that on updating the kernel the module will be recompiled requiring a bit of time.

Finally build the image:

# ./build.sh -v

The image will be in ./out. Finally prepare the USB stick for installation:

# dd bs=4M if=./out/archlinux-YYYY.MM.DD-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress oflag=sync

The steps of editing the pacman configuration file, downloading, and signing the keys will have to be repeated in the installed system.

The package pacman-contrib contains rankmirrors a program that sorts the mirrors in order of speed. To use it, from the /etc/pacman.d directory one needs to execute:

# pacman --needed -S pacman-contrib
# mv mirrorlist mirrorlist.orig
# rankmirrors -m 2 -n 12 mirrorlist.orig > mirrorlist

It may require a bit of time, but since the list of mirrors does not change often it is worthwhile to do it. Once you got the new mirrorlist file add as last line:

Server = https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/.all

So when installing a package with pacman -S a package is not found anymore in the mirrors because a new version come out, pacman will fall back downloading it from the archive. Of course, if you see that pacman downloads from the archive often probably you should update the system (pacman -Sc and pacman -Syu).