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Build your own system with ArchLinux

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE on July 11, 2020

Original of this post on my blog. I wrote a comment on dev.to recently that gathered quite some attention; It was about my custom Arch system. I f...

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tate shepherd • Jul 11 '20

This an excellent article. I'm a very novice linux user, and always considered ArchLinux way too time consuming and sort of like "whats the point?"... But you make it look fun and appealing! I think your synth-wave looking UI is beautiful!

Galuh Utama • Jul 11 '20

Real men use Gentoo and build it from stage 1.

Bramandityo Prabowo • Jul 12 '20

Real man use three pedals and Slackware :D

Daniel Albuschat • Jul 12 '20

You mean Linux from scratch?

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Jul 11 '20

My social life took a big enough toll from Arch :D

John Fajardo • Jul 13 '20 • Edited

Shameless plug: I wrote a similar series about Arch. Part 1 is an intro, part 2 is a very opinionated walk through the installation process and part 3 is common post-install stuff, check it out if you want to try Arch but are intimidated by the wiki!

Axel Navarro • Jul 13 '20

I can't even think about go back to Ubuntu, I love the flexibility of Arch and the decision that what I want to install and what not.
I use KDE Plasma, is light and I enjoy my UX. I don't like Gnome.
It's so easy to create, and install your own packages using pacman (or aurman, yay, etc.) like your own widgets/plasmoids.
Or even, I fixed an annoying bug in the built-in Konsole package, including a fix in my package build process using the patch command, building it from source, and is so easy. Because I based all of this in the PKGBUILD of the offical repositories and AUR.
Also I can switch between the latest commit in Konsole and the latest stable version with a low effort.

Patryk Gronkiewicz • Jul 11 '20 • Edited

Why Arch Linux ?

AUR, EOT

David T. Harris • Jul 12 '20

I've been using Arch for years and am not familiar with EOT. The only thing I could find when searching for this was
aur.archlinux.org/packages/eot-uti...
and as something you use in a heredoc instead of EOF ( end of file ) which I also don't understand. End of ___ ?

What is EOT?

Patryk Gronkiewicz • Jul 12 '20

End of thread

David T. Harris • Jul 12 '20

Ah gotcha. Thanks!

Mirko Vukušić • Jul 12 '20

Ah, so long on my list to do this. But time is a luxury, and I'm also scared to fall into that rabbithole of endless tweaking (mental issue as someone said, not Arch problem). Mint serves me so well for years, it's hard to leave.

Mirko Vukušić • Jul 19 '20

Update... Thank you for "wasting" last two days for me :) Accidentally I deleted my Mint root partition so it seemed a perfect timing to install Arch. Actually installation was a breeze. Configuring it (still) as much fun as I thought it will be. Installed both Cinnamon and i3, side by side, to test tiling WMs (really like i3 so far).

Only problem I see right now are AURs. Some stuff I'm used to is not available for pacman. And manual AUR installs for many is a nightmare with huge dependency trees. So far I'm avoiding those, but am afraid if I will be forced to do it in the future. AUR helpers seem great but not sure that's the point of Arch. I need to carefully check what I'm installing anyway, then upgrade process is different. Not sure. Still keeping Mint partition for emmergencies :)

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Jul 19 '20

"Yay" is a great package manager !

Tomas Fernandez • Jul 12 '20

I love Arch, I went the full custom DE route some years ago, I loved i3 to death. But in the end, it just took too much time to maintain and switched to KDE, and now everything works out of the box.

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Jul 12 '20

I don't understand what there is to maintain, actually ? Once my configuration was done I never needed to touch it again ?

Saša Zejnilović • Jul 12 '20

I think I can answer from my experience. It isn't that there is something to maintain, it is a mindset (mental illness) that you are never done, you always have to tinker, etc.

I had this problem with my Linux installations. Always thinking about ways to upgrade /update something that has no need for them.

Tomas Fernandez • Jul 12 '20

Software is never still. Things change. One day, PulseAudio stops working. Another, the automount/udev script doesn't pick up a flashdrive any longer. There's always some little thing that needs attention, and attention is a scarse resource this these days.

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Jul 12 '20

This is true, but I noticed those issues :

1/ can happen on just any system;
2/ have been dramatically decreasing the longer I use Arch

I remember a lot of issues like this happening in my first 6 months of Arch, but today I'm unable to remember when or what was my last problem !

ScardracS • Jul 12 '20

Actually, if someone wants to try arch so bad but feared about commands line, he can zen installer. It's a graphical installer for arch Linux

Romain • Jul 11 '20

Great article, I love so much Arch !
Do you have any example of configuration for Ansible ? I'm very curious of this tech !

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Jul 12 '20 • Edited

Sure ! Here's an example from my actual config. What it does is simply :

deletes a list of configuration files on my system (if they exist) with a loop (the list itself is on another file)
Creates the config folders I'll need to copy my configuration
Symlink the configuration files from my playbook to the system (so we replace the files we deleted before with the proper version, that is the version saved on the playbook)

---
- name: Delete existing Dotfiles
  file:
    path: '~/{{ item }}'
    state: absent
  loop: "{{ Dotfiles }}"

- name: Create .config folder
  file:
    path: '~/.config'
    state: directory

- name: Create .config/Code - OSS folder
  file:
    path: '~/.config/Code - OSS'
    state: directory

- name: Link Dotfiles into home
  file:
    src: "{{ playbook_dir }}/roles/dotfiles/files/{{ item }}"
    dest: '~/.{{ item }}'
    state: link
    force: yes
  loop: "{{ Dotfiles }}"

Note this is all done with the same ansible module, "file". Here's another task somewhere else that uses the module "package", which is used to install my list of packages :

- name: Install packages with pacman
  become_user: root
  package:
    state: present
    name: "{{ item }}"
  loop: "{{ packages }}"
  tags: packages-list

vinksz • Oct 30 '21

A lot of text, but not actually how to build your own.

I recommend this -> linuxfromscratch.org
will learn on the way as well how internals work. Or if it's too much reading and want to take the easy route...

On an existing arch system

Prepare ->

su && pacman -S devtools git make --needed
mkarchroot /tmp/chroot base (Create a chroot with base-packages)
git clone git://projects.archlinux.org/archiso.git
make -C archiso/archiso DESTDIR=/tmp/chroot install
mkarchroot -r bash /tmp/chroot

Customize the ISO & Packages ->

mknod /dev/loop0 b 7 0 (Create a loopback interface)
echo 'Server = ftp.osuosl.org/pub/archlinux/$repo...' >> /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
pacman -S devtools libisoburn squashfs-tools (required pkgs)
xorg , firefox , neovim perhaps? the rest is up to you...
Next, we can create our user and change any configuration files that we want. /boot/grub/menu.lst , .bashrc , /etc/rc.conf , /etc/hosts/allow ... etc

Build the iso ->

cp -r /usr/share/archiso/configs/baseline /tmp
cd /tmp/baseline
./build.sh
exit

Now, you will be out of your chroot... with the built ISO at the file path ->

/tmp/chroot/tmp/baseline/out/

gz , you now have your custom arch iso

Sajjad Heydari • Jul 12 '20

A good post, might I suggest a small modification? It should be desktop environment and tiling window manager.

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Jul 12 '20

Indeed ! Ill correct ASAP

johnea • Sep 3 '21

Hi, I did enjoy the post. I've run arch for about 20 years and have customized it for many embedded projects.

I'm not sure what was in the post prior to "desktop environment" and "tiling window manager", but I would suggest that "desktop environment" and "window manager" are not exactly comparable things.

The desktop environment is much more than a window manager, providing automount and other user services.

The window managers may also be "floating" as well as "tiling". The "floating window manager" is much like what most desktop environments provide, but it's only the window manager, none of that automount, or other stuff.

Personally I've been using fluxbox for many years, and love it.

In keeping with the "build your own" nature of this post, all of the config files are in the home directory in .fluxbox/. So everytime I upgrade, or move to a new machine, by copying my home directory I'm presented with the exact same desktop. No modifications to my workflow!

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Sep 4 '21

Thanks for this interesting addition

ismail0852 • Aug 11 '21

Hi, actually I'm a newbie. Well I've been a project in school to build a custom arch linux based system but I don't know how to start with it. So could you please recommend me something maybe like a video or text to get on with it

Samuel-Zacharie FAURE • Aug 11 '21

This article is supposed to be exactly what you want.

For an easy installer try Anarchy

José Angel Leyva Portilla • Oct 15 '20

Thanks, I chose to dual boot with a KDE neon as a working fallback, I'm trying to setup my workflow with openbox, I'm not in a hurry and I'm learning stuff, hopefully my distrohopping will end