Well, it wasn't bad at all. After using Mint for a couple years I started to get frustrated with the outdated packages in APT (to name a few: scilab, hplip, freemind, bluez). I liked Mint just fine, and keeping the system up to date is quite painless, which is a lot more than I can say for the several years I spent with Gentoo.
That being said, as I Googled for problems I was having with my Bluetooth setup, I noted that most of the hits were generated by archlinux.org. I read a little about the distro and I decided to try it out.
For installers, there is so much information available on the Arch wiki it isn't even funny. There's the 30,000 foot installation guide, which for experts is more of a checklist if you've done it a lot. For everyone else but the sysadmins and hard-core experts, I recommend their beginner's guide. This will have you going in no time.
The first thing I noticed was how small the LiveCD was -- it's only 500MB or so. This is because Arch gives you a bare, and I mean BARE bones setup. You won't find photo managers, a word processor, solitaire, and mine sweeper. You won't find ANYTHING except the bare basics to boot the system and get you going. Everything after that is what YOU add, and this can sometimes be shocking. For example, if you think you might connect to a secure wifi network with your laptop, you might want to install wpa_supplicant.
Before installing Arch, I spent some time cleaning out my Mint system. Not unlike moving day, you've got to pack your crap and move out. This takes some time.
Once I thought I was ready to go, I knew I wasn't going to follow the beginner's guide to a T. All I really needed to do was wipe my root partition, install the new kernel, set up the new environment, and reboot.
So, I didn't need to know about partitioning or formatting. I knew I needed to start somewhere in that area of the guide.
After booting the LiveCD I quickly realized I needed to have some knowledge about the existing partitions. I used lsblk:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTsda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part
|-sda2 8:2 0 40M 0 part
|-sda3 8:3 0 128M 0 part
|-sda4 8:4 0 500M 0 part
|-sda5 8:5 0 232G 0 part
|-sda6 8:6 0 7.2G 0 part
|-sda7 8:7 0 190.8M 0 part
|-sda8 8:8 0 220.3G 0 part
`-sda9 8:9 0 4.9G 0 part
Well, I know the 200+ GB partitions are my Windows 8 drive and my Linux drive, but I wasn't sure which. I just had to mount them and take a look around to figure out what was what.
I ended up scribbling the following down on a scrap of nearby paper:
/sda8 --> data/root
/sda9 --> swap
/sda7 --> boot/grub
I think it is obvious, but I want to note, that if you follow any instructions here you'd better be damn sure you know what you're doing. Computer configuration can be UNFORGIVING. If you are attached to any data on your hard drive, you'd better back everything up right now. The computer doesn't particularly care if it blows all of your wedding pictures away. You have been warned.
Now then -- I formatted /sda8 as ext4 (it already was formatted ext4, but I basically wanted to wipe it). I did a "swapon /sda9", I mounted sda7 as /boot, and I chrooted into sda8. (Okay, there was a little more to it than that but I basically followed the beginner's guide after the part about partitioning your system.)
Boom, I was in my new Linux system. Now the tricky part was setting up GRUB. There is a lot of info about GPT, UEFI, etc all over the Arch Wiki. In particular see the excellent grub guide. Most of the guides are taking you from ground zero, where you're starting with a blank drive. In my case, I had a drive that was already populated.
In particular there are some warnings about checking for a GPT and an ESP here.
I didn't see a GPT when I tried using parted as described above. In fact this is what I've got:
[root@marquette /]# parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA ST500LM012 HN-M5 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 525MB 524MB fat32 EFI system partition boot
2 525MB 567MB 41.9MB fat32 Basic data partition hidden
3 567MB 701MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres
4 701MB 1226MB 524MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag
5 1226MB 250GB 249GB ntfs Basic data partition
7 250GB 251GB 200MB ext4
8 251GB 487GB 237GB ext4
9 487GB 492GB 5264MB linux-swap(v1)
6 492GB 500GB 7765MB ntfs Microsoft recovery partition hidden, diag
Okay then, I don't think I have it, and I'm not messing around with these existing partitions lest I break my Windows 8 installation.
Check out the UEFI Alternative Method. Here we are getting into some interesting commands. What I noticed while I was poking around on /boot is that I already have a directory called /boot/efi. FURTHER, I noticed while poking around the EFI parition (sda1 for me), that there was /Boot, /EFI, /Microsoft, /linuxmint directories. Inside these I would drill down and eventually find some *.efi files. Presumably this is where the booting magic happens.
I ended up mounting /dev/sda1 at /boot/efi:
[root@marquette /]# mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi
Check out the UEFI Alternative Method. Here we are getting into some interesting commands. What I noticed while I was poking around on /boot is that I already have a directory called /boot/efi. FURTHER, I noticed while poking around the EFI parition (sda1 for me), that there was /Boot, /EFI, /Microsoft, /linuxmint directories. Inside these I would drill down and eventually find some *.efi files. Presumably this is where the booting magic happens.
I ended up mounting /dev/sda1 at /boot/efi:
[root@marquette /]# mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi
Following the alternative instructions on the Arch grub wiki, I did this (modified what was on the wikipage and copied below):
# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=arch --boot-directory=/boot --recheck --debug
Don't forget the equal signs after the command line arguments! You might get errors without some of them. If all was successful, you'll see some stuff like this at the end:
grub-install: info: executing efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -w -L arch -l \EFI\arch\grubx64.efi.
BootCurrent: 0008
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0008,0001,0002,0003,0000,0004,0005,0006,0007
Boot0000* mint
Boot0001* Realtek PXE B09 D00
Boot0002* P4: HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GT80N
Boot0003* P0: ST500LM012 HN-M500MBB
Boot0004* Windows Boot Manager
Boot0005* UEFI: IP4 Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller
Boot0006* UEFI: IP6 Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller
Boot0007* linuxmint
Boot0008* arch
Installation finished. No error reported.
It turns out all of the crap above will be visible by the BIOS -- these *are* your UEFI boot options. You'll want "arch" to be your main entry point. (I still have to figure out how to get rid of some the old mint stuff.)
Next do:
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
[root@marquette boot]# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-linux
Found initramfs image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img
Found fallback initramfs image: /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-linux
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.12.7-031207-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.12.7-031207-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.12.6-031206-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.12.6-031206-generic
/dev/cdrom: open failed: No medium found
Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/sda1@/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
done
Now, reboot and see if it worked. If all went well you should see the grub boot screen.
If you get a grub command line, something went wrong. You can try following these instructions to see if you can get up and running again.
Good luck.
If you get a grub command line, something went wrong. You can try following these instructions to see if you can get up and running again.
Good luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment