Arch Linux Installation with /home directory

Introduction

I’ve searched whole internet about installing arch with /home partition but never found a complete one which could satisfy my needs, so it was always stitching many articles and guides. Having a /home partition comes with a lot of advantages but what I like is

1. Keep your personal files in separate partition
2. If you want to switch distro you don’t need to format all your partitions, move every files instead just don’t partition the /home one and all linux can use /home partition
3. Your configuration stays the same, you are just switching distro or doing fresh installation again.

I’d skip everything unlike others and let’s dive into the content. You can always use the right side bar to jump to any section.

Booting USB

Downloading .iso file

You can download the offcial arch linux iso from this website. There you can find a lot of options to download, I will show the most popular 2 ways

Torrent link

If you head to the section BitTorrent, you can see two options magnet link and torrent file. Just copy the magnet link by right clicking on it and use any popular torrent download softwares or applications. If you are using linux aria2c is a popular one.

Direct ISO file

If you scroll down a bit you can see a list of mirror links followed by country names, click on the nearest available mirro link. You can see the list of packages but you should download the first one which will be like archlinux-202x.xx.xx-x86_64.iso

Configuring USB

Windows

• Partition your USB in the FAT32 format available in the format options
• Righ click on the arch linux iso file and select Mount
• Copy all the contents of the newly mounted drive
• Paste everything in the newly formatted USB and eject

Linux

For linux it’s pretty simple, use the dd command available in all flavors of linux.

This is my recommended way of doing in linux, If you prefer other ways you can find a lot here

dd bs=4M if=iso/path of=/dev/sdX conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

Live boot mode

After making the installation medium, find how to enter BIOS mode in your machine.

Plug in the USB and enter into BIOS mode, select your USB and place it in top of the boot order.

Power on the machine and you should be able to see arch linux booting up, leave everything as it and you will be welcomed with nothing but a terminal

Check Internet

If you are using any LAN connection, it will be automatically up and running verify that using ping command

ping google.com

Wifi

If you are using Wifi, then you have to configure it using iwctl

iwctl # enter command line mode
station device scan #scan for available networks
station device connect SSID # password will be asked to enter, you can use the TAB for autocompletion of device and SSID

Now try to ping google.com

Disk Partitioning

Once you have connected the internet and machine is able to talk to internet, now we have the final and important procedure which is partitioning the disk.

Create separate partitions using cfdisk which has friendly CLI interface compared to fdisk

once you are inside of cfdisk command, you can see a list(s) of device. If you want the installation to be standalone just wipe the whole disk and create new partition as you want and keep in mind we need at least three partitions.

1. root partition / - Linux filesystem
2. home partition /home - Linux filesystem
3. swap partition - Linux Swap

After creating the partition choose the Write option and exit out of the CLI interface

Creating filesystem

Check the partition name using

fdisk -l

• format the disks

  mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX #where X is the partition number of the root
  mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX #where x here is the partition number of the home
  mkswap /dev/sdX #where x here is the partition number of the swap
  

• mount the filesystems

  Here is the trick we do for our home partition, just simply mount into /mnt/home.

  mount /dev/sdX /mnt #where x here is the number of root partition
  mount /dev/sdX /mnt/home #where x here is the number of home partition
  swapon /dev/sdX #where x here is the number of swap partition
  

Installation

Before installing base, we need to choose the fastes mirror to do that

pacman -Syy #sync the pacman repository
pacman -S reflector #install reflector to get the fast and fresh mirrors
reflector -c "US" -f 12 -l 10 -n 12 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist #save the mirros in a file

Once you are done getting the fresh mirror list, now we are ready to install the base

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware vim nano

You can install any other packages you might need like gnome for Desktop environment.

Post Installation

Once it’s done installing we have some other things to do too.

Generate the fstab file

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Change root into the newly installed system

arch-chroot /mnt

Setup timezone

timedatectl list-timezones
timedatectl set-timezone Zone/City

Generate locale

Pick your favorite editor and open up /etc/locale.gen then uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 line

vim /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf

Network configuration

Create a hostname

echo clowns >> /etc/hostname #replace clowns with your hostname or anything

Create hosts

touch /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1   localhost
::1         localhost
127.0.0.1   hostname

Final Steps

Change the root password using passwd command

Install old fashioned Grub

pacman -S grub
grub-install /dev/sda #don't put numbers but just the disk
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

After everything is done, just reboot the machine using reboot command and customize the user, groups and install any Desktop environment you wish, I will be covering two more blog posts which having gnome and hyprland separately. Yep that’s what am using currently to write this post.

Disclaimer

I have been using linux with various flavors for years and arch linux was never my choice, but somehow got attracted to it along the path and I installed it couple of times. Which means I’m not any master in arch linux neither, I’ve used the official arch linux documentation for taking notes and other online posts to write this article.