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.

To make life easier, even if using ZFS, keep the /boot partition separate with a normal filesystem.

Check if the boot happened in EFI mode or not. If it is EFI this command will succeed:

# ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

If it is in EFI mode the boot (and EFI partition) partition (type EF00) has to be 550MB and being formatted with

# mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdXY

If it is not EFI, then 100MB formatted in ext2 are enough, the type can be left as 8300 (Linux).

ZFS pools can use unpartitioned disks, but if you need the partitions (for example for /boot) the space for ZFS pools should use the partition type BF (MBR) BF00 (GPT).

During installation, to follow the installation instruction with ease just create all zfs pools and volumes with mount point legacy or none and use the mount command.

Once you are ready to reboot in the freshly installed system then you can edit /etc/fstab to remove the needless zfs lines and set up zfs pools and volumes properly.

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).

The installation media has wifi-menu to easily connect to wireless networks easily; unfortunately the base group does not has it. So when boot strapping the new environment I use:

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel netctl dialog dhcpcd wpa_supplicant

The netctl, dialog, dhcpcd, and wpa_supplicant packages just use few megabytes of space, but they ensure you have a easy and quick way to connect to wireless networks after the reboot.

One need to check what firmware the wifi network controller is using because the package might not be installed by default in the base package.

Look for the network card in the # lspci output and use # lspci -vv -s 03:00.0 where 03:00.0 is the domain of the network card; i.e., the first column in the lspci output.

Example:

# lspci -vv -s 03:00.0
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9260 (rev 29)
      Subsystem: Bigfoot Networks, Inc. Wireless-AC 9260
      Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
      [...]
      Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
      Kernel modules: iwlwifi

Once found the kernel driver look it up in the /usr/lib/firmware directory to check if the package needs to be installed.