Installing linux

Last week, Asena and I wanted to play with linux. She wanted to play flash games she couldn't play anymore and I wanted a test environment for web stuff.

Being familiar with Archlinux, I recommended her to use the same so that we could have an easier time fixing and setting up. So we go to the arch linux website and follow the installation guide. From setting up the environment to work on, fixing the time, partitioning and formatting the drives, installing the packages, and setting up GRUB we were ready to boot our freshly installed OS.

The boot froze. Maybe we set-up something wrong on the boot loader so we keep rechecking and redoing some parts of the install. Looking back, we should've realized that it was booting up to the point we set it up and that something else was messing with it. I check the forums for people possibly encountering the same problem and they have pinpointed it to an update in the kernel for the spectre vulerability. So we just wait for the fix.

But we learned a lot in reviewing and repeating the install process so many times in trying to make it boot.

First, before installing remember to update the keyring this can be done by first synchronizing the computer time using timedatectl set-ntp true and then pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring. This would enable us to smoothly install the packages that we're going to use later.

Next, there's this handy archlinux installer that someone made. It has most of the flexibility that you have when doing the steps manually and it comes with presets for graphics, sounds, and networking so it should be good for the usual uses. The version that comes with the official image is utdated though to we have to get the repositories up to date first then install the package. Running archinstall after updating will give you a simple graphical interface.