A good friend had mentioned to me that he used Arch linux in one of his recent installs. I’ve never tried it. I have this old HP laptop that a different friend gave me, when he replaced it. It isn’t that old! I decided to try installing Arch on it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had a bunch of issues, and ultimately today I resolved to reinstall the thing again, and record my experience. One of the issues – as usual a self-inflicted wound – is that this is a UEFI capable laptop, but the disk that is in it is MBR partitioned, not GUID partitioned. It probably would have been smarter to just partition the disk with a GUID table. But I didn’t. Below is the description of what I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Here starts an additional edit, recounting how, my first (actually my second, and even my third) attempt went wrong, after appearing to work. I eventually figured out why, so before describing what worked, it may be useful to review the mistakes for the lessons they give. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was following an installation guide on the net for installing Arch, because I had no experience with Arch or pacman. But I had some differences in my environment so I was modifying the instructions as I went along and adapting. I adapted a little too aggressively, and alas incorrectly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On almost all the boxes I build I have gotten into the habit of having a separate \/boot partition. I suppose this really isn’t all that necessary anymore, particularly if one is using UEFI but I got into the habit long ago. The instructions I was following did not create a separate \/boot (so I adapted). Also, the instructions were for bios rather than uefi, and this box is uefi so I had to adapt that too – had to create an efi system partition etc. So early on in my adventure, I partitioned the disk with 4 partitions: an esp a \/boot, \/ and swap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When one installs the basic arch one apparently doesn’t automatically get an \/etc\/fstab, and the instructions at one point called for generating one, with a command genfstab, which I have never had to use on any other distribution. Being unfamiliar with it, and because I was unfortunately just following along by rote at that point, I failed to think about the fact that neither the \/boot nor the esp was actually mounted at that point in the instructions. The upshot is that therefore no fstab record got created in fstab for the \/boot partition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later in the instructions I had to “adapt” and mount \/boot before I wrote the grub onto the disk, and before I installed the grub config — and I adapted those parts “correctly”, so that the system booted up just fine. However, because there was no automount in fstab for \/boot, it wasn’t being mounted after a reboot. Well this was fine, the system boots just fine without mounting \/boot. Right up to the time you need to write something on the \/boot partition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem comes when at some point you do some update which updates the kernel (or probably if you install anything that has to build a new initramfs). Because now the “real” \/boot partition is not mounted. When grub or mkinitrd or whatever writes new stuff to reflect the new kernel (or whatever) onto \/boot, it is not writing it on the boot partition but on a local \/boot directory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what ends up happening is something like this: a new kernel n+1 (vmlinuz and initramfs) is written on the \/boot local directory, but not on the missing \/boot partition. A \/lib\/modules directory is written with the modules directory for kernel n+1. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speculation: the \/lib\/modules directory for kernel n seems at this point to have been removed, because it isn’t there later on, and I’m guessing that this is because at this point there is no kernel n visible (because the \/boot partition containing it isn’t mounted). We don’t need \/lib\/modules\/n if there is not a kernel\/initramfs for release n. I’m not sure of that part, I just know there was no \/lib\/modules\/n later on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the actual boot takes place, grub is still loading from the \/boot partition, and so it actually still loads kernel n. But now there aren’t any modules for kernel n to load anymore. With no modules the system comes up as a basic module free system, no graphics driver, no network driver, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am pretty sure this was my problem, although I haven’t worked through all the details of exactly what happens, and how it gets to the state it is in. But it was certainly true that uname -r gave me a release name which was not present in \/lib\/modules. I am a little surprised that it was able to bring up gdm at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After writing this, at one point I lost the laptop again and had to restore. Some of my instructions were wrong, and in any case I changed the laptop over to a GPT partition table, and reinstalled. I had some trouble, so I want to get the revised instructions down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Partition the hard disk <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Format the disks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And mount the root partition to-be so we can mess with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
mount \/dev\/sda2 \/mnt<\/pre>\n\n\n\nInstall the basic system<\/p>\n\n\n\n
pacstrap \/mnt base base-devel linux \\ \n linux-firmware emacs NetworkManager<\/pre>\n\n\n\nCreate fstab<\/p>\n\n\n\n
genfstab -U -p \/mnt >> \/mnt\/etc\/fstab<\/pre>\n\n\n\nNow chroot into the newly created root partition<\/p>\n\n\n\n
arch-chroot \/mnt <\/pre>\n\n\n\nSet the hostname in \/etc\/hosts and hostname and $HOSTNAME<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Generate locale info. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
uncomment US.UTF-8 in \/etc\/locale.gen\nlocale-gen \necho LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > \/etc\/locale.conf\nexport LANG=en_US.UTF-8<\/pre>\n\n\n\nSet the timezone and set hardware clock<\/p>\n\n\n\n
rm \/etc\/localtime\nln -s \/usr\/share\/zoneinfo\/America\/Denver \\ \n \/etc\/localtime \nhwclock \u2013systohc \u2013utc <\/pre>\n\n\n\nUpdate the software: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
pacman -Syu <\/pre>\n\n\n\nSet password for root <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Create user dee<\/p>\n\n\n\n
useradd -mg users -G wheel,storage,power \\\n -s \/bin\/bash dee <\/pre>\n\n\n\nSet the password for dee <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now install additional software we need. I need subversion because I pull a lot of config stuff out of my repository, including a setup script that builds a lot of stuff (sshd, postfix, samba, nfs, and much more). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
pacman -S sudo subversion \\ \n grub os-prober mtools efibootmgr \\ \n xorg xorg-server networkmanager \\\n gnome gnome-extra <\/pre>\n\n\n\nI like to not have to type in a password when I sudo. Fix group wheel to be no password. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
export EDITOR=emacs \nvisudo <\/pre>\n\n\n\nNow the booting stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mount the efi partition before trying to write grub. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
mkdir \/efi; mount \/dev\/sda1 \/efi <\/pre>\n\n\n\nInstall grub onto the new disk<\/p>\n\n\n\n
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi \\\n \u2013efi-directory=\/efi \\\n \u2013bootloader-id=GRUB \/dev\/sda <\/pre>\n\n\n\nAnd generate the grub config file for grub to drive off of<\/p>\n\n\n\n
grub-mkconfig -o \/boot\/grub\/grub.cfg <\/pre>\n\n\n\nNow exit out of the chroot, back to the live image. Then unmount and reboot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
exit \numount -a\nreboot<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWhen the system comes back up, which it should do unless I screwed something up, login as root and start gdm. Don’t enable it yet, be sure everything is working in graphical.target before doing so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
systemctl start gdm <\/pre>\n\n\n\nLog in as dee, be sure everything is working, have network, terminal, sudo, etc., then enable gdm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now retrieve the scripts to finish setup. Ensure \/usr\/local\/bin is empty the remove it. Pull in the scripts, ensure everything is executable, use a script to make symlinks for all the “common” local bin scripts (used by all my boxes). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
cd \/usr\/local\nrm bin\nsvn co \\ https:\/\/svn.wmbuck.net\/svn\/adminscripts\/localbin\\\n \/<hostname> bin\nchmod +x .\/*\ncd common\nchmod +x .\/*\n.\/commonlocalbin\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe last step is the script which finishes the setup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
box_setup<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A good friend had mentioned to me that he used Arch linux in one of his recent installs. I’ve never tried it. I have this old HP laptop that a different friend gave me, when he replaced it. It isn’t that old! I decided to try installing Arch on it. I had a bunch of … Continue reading Setting up Arch on UEFI laptop<\/span>