JamesOakes01

Arch Linux Project Documentation / Write-up

This is my documentation / write-up for the Arch Linux Project for
CYB-3353-02
University of Tulsa
Fall 2024
James Oakes

Challenges, advise, and my choices

As directed in the instructions, I will start with some challenges/choices and advise I would give to others.

• Challenges: I only encountered one show stopping issue very breifly. It was when I forgot to install a network manager before exiting the live installation. Thankfully I had been taking snapshots regularly and it was easy to revert to the last snapshot and add the network manager and contine.
• Advise: Take snapshots early and often. It happened only once where I needed to revert to a previous snapshot but it could have happened a lot more. It basically costs you nothing other than a small amount of time to wait for the snapshot to finish and it is basically a save point so you don’t have to worry about messing up.
• Advise: Document well. I think I may have documented a bit excessively but it definitely helped when I needed to go back and retrace what I had already done.
• My Choices: I made several choices here: using GNOME & GDM, installing zsh as my alternative shell, installing firefox after the DE install, etc.

Step 1: Read The F*cking Manual (RTFM)

1. I started with reading the Arch Linux Installation Guide which immediately brought be to the FAQ page. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
2. The FAQ brought me to an Arch Linux terminology page where common terms are highlighted

Now that I have read the manual i’m ready to continue.

Step 2: Downloading an install image

1. Go to https://archlinux.org/download/
2. Scroll down to United States section if doing a direct download and not a torrent/magnet
3. Choose a site to download from. I chose mit.edu as an educational institution, it seemed like a good choice.
4. As requested in the instrucitons, I pinged mit.edu and all packets arrived thus I had a 0% packet loss.
5. Choose a specific file to download. I choose the regular .iso file. There were other options with .sig, .torrent, .tar.zst, .sig, etc. I’m not familiar with all of these file types so I chose the one I knew. Also several of them were compressed types and I didn’t want a compressed one.

Step 3: Verify ISO image

Verify the signature of the iso downloaded to ensure it is correct and is not a malicious download.

1. Check the https://archlinux.org/download/ page to find the Checksums and Signatures. I used the SHA256 signature. Mark this down for later.
2. Open a windows terminal and use the command: CertUtil -hashfile [filepath] [type] so my exact command was: CertUtil -hashfile C:\Users\James\Downloads\iso\archlinux-2024.12.01-x86_64.iso sha256
3. I then compared this hash to the one provided by ArchLinux.org to verify its authenticity.
4. My signatures matched so I was ready to move on.

Step 4: Open the ISO in VMware Workstation

1. Open VMware Workstation
2. Click “Create a New Virtual Machine”
3. Choose the ISO option
4. select the iso file. VMware said it couldn’t detect which operating system was in the disc image and that I would need to specify later.
5. On the next page there is a few options for the guest operating system. I left both on the default which was: Linux and Other Linux 5.x kernel 64-bit
6. On the Next page, I gave the VM the name ArchLinux1 anticipating that this would not be the last one I have to make. I also choose a location for the VM. I leave this on the default which is C:\Users\[user]\Documents\Virtual Machines\[VM Name]
7. Specify Disk Capacity: I allocated 20GB of disk space. I also opted to Store virtual disk as a single file instead of Split virtual disk into multiple files which was NOT the default. I chose this because it seemed more simple to me.
8. Customize Hardware: I went to customize the hardware to increase the amount of RAM available to 2GB (2048 MB). [See customize hardware screenshot] and [see hardware screenshot]
   
9. Choose finish.
10. Power on VM.

Step 5: Turning on the VM

1. Just in case, take a snapshot of the VM before you power it on. I’m actually not sure if that does anything but I did it just in case.
2. Choose Power on this virual machine
3. I closed a popup from VMware informing me that I had side channel mitigations enabled for enhanced security
4. I see the install screen for Arch Linux. I am presented with several options [see arch-boot screenshot]. I didn’t choose an option quick enough and automatic boot began.
5. After a few seconds of booting, I am now at a root command line. [see root-cli]
   

Step 6: Change to UEFI

• I noticed that I was in BIOS mode and not UEFI or EFI. As noted in the harvey instructions, I edited the .vmx file to add firmware="efi" as line 2. As noted in the documentation, I verified my boot mode with cat /sys/firmware/efi/fw_platform_size and since the file didn’t exist, it meant I was in BIOS boot mode.
• After I changed the boot mode, I had to choose to boot again from the install page. After getting back into arch, I checked the boot mode and it was now in UEFI mode.

Change Terminal Font

• I ran /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ to list all of the fonts.
• I ran setfont ter-132b as shown in the Arch documentation. this changed my font and increased its size.

Set up partitions:

• use fdisk -l to view current partitions. Disregard any labeled loop0 as stated in the documentation.
• I took a snapshot here to go back to.
• ran ls/sys/firmware/efi to confirm we are in UEFI mode.
  1. lsblk to list available disks.
  2. use cfdisk to partition. run cfdisk /dev/sda
  3. choose GPT as partition table type
  4. Create a partition (sda1) for EFI with 500MB. Make sure to modify the partition type to EFI
  5. Create another partition (sda2) with the remaining space and ensure its type is linux filesystem. [see partition-table screenshot]
     
  6. Write partition table.
  7. Format each parition with different filesystems: run mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1 to format the sda1 with FAT32 and mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2 with ext4
  8. Mount the root partition by running mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Installation

1. install essentail packages. run pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware
2. generate fstab file with genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
3. Change root into the new system with arch-chroot /mnt
4. Set the timezone ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime
5. hwclock --systohc
6. Install nano with pacman -S nano
7. nano /etc/locale.gen uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
8. Generate locales by running: locale-gen
9. nano /etc/locale.conf add LANG=en_US.UTF-8
10. Set root password with passwd I set mine to 12345678

Install Bootloader

I am going to choose GRUB as my bootloader

1. pacman -S grub efibootmgr
2. Install GRUB for UEFI with grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB
3. generate the GRUB config file with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Install NetworkManager

I originally missed this and had to go back to the live installation to fix it.

1. pacman -S NetworkManager
2. systemctl enable NetworkManager

I was taking snapshots in VMware which allowed me to go back easily. By the time I finished, my snapshot tree looked like this: [see vmware-snapshots screenshot]

Installation Continued

1. exit
2. umount -R /mnt
3. reboot
4. Choose Arch Linux in GNU GRUB screen [see boot-arch screenshot]
   

[see arch-first-boot screenshot]

Configure Networking

1. created the hostname file with nano /etc/hostname I entered JoArch in the file and save+closed it. I got stuck here because I had no internet. I didn’t have a network manager and couldn’t connect to the internet.
   I eventually got it worked out. The network adapter ens33 is up with an ip address. [see ip-address]
   

Install zsh

As directed in the assignment, I will be installing a different shell other than bash. I will be installing zsh.

1. I originally got stuck here because I didn’t install a network manger during the live installation.
2. pacman -S zsh
3. install which with pacman -S which
4. To make zsh the default shell run chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh [see changed-shell screenshot]
   
5. nano /etc/default/useradd modify the SHELL variable. Change it from bash to zsh

zsh is now successfully installed and is the default shell

User Accounts and groups

Set up groups

1. cat /etc/group to list all the current groups
2. Create a new group for the instructor users groupadd instructors
3. Install sudo with pacman -S sudo
4. Add instructor accounts and assign them to the instructor group useradd -m -G instructors,wheel justin and useradd -m -G instructors,wheel codi
5. Set password for the instructor accounts passwd codi and passwd justin. Set both to be GraceHopper1906 as a temporary password
6. Make the instructor accounts change their password at next login by running sudo chage -d 0 justin and sudo chage -d 0 codi
7. Edit sudoers file to allow wheel group to use sudo. first switch to root user. then run EDITOR=nano visudo then uncomment the line for the wheel group. [see sudoers-file screenshot]
8. also add a user account for myself useradd -m -G wheel james
9. set my own password with passwd james

I modified the sudoers file to allow the wheel group to use sudo. I set all three of the new user accounts I made to be in the wheel group.

I tested the required password change on my own user account to ensure it worked. It worked great. [see password-change screenshot]

Step 6: Installing Desktop Environment GNOME

1. install GNOME with sudo pacman -S gnome
2. install GNOME extras with sudo pacman -S gnome-extra
3. Install display server with sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-apps
4. Install display manager GDM with sudo pacman -S gdm then sudo systemctl enable gdm.service
5. reboot

Enjoy a desktop environment! [see desktop-environment screenshot]

Install ssh

1. Install OpenSSH by running sudo pacman -S openssh
2. enable the ssh system service by running sudo systemctl enable sshd. On thing I want to note here is that the d on the end of sshd is for daemon. It is starting the daemon for openssh. Similar to systemd, networkd, etc.
3. Start the ssh system service by running sudo systemctl start sshd

SSH is now working! [see ssh-arch screenshot]

Add color coding to terminal

• I installed firefox with pacman -S firefox
  1. edit the .zshrc file with nano ~/.zshrc add:

autoload -U colors && colors PS1=”%{$fg[red]%}%n%{$reset_color%}@%{$fg[blue]%}%m %{$fg[yellow]%}%~ %{$reset_color%}%% “

1. run autoload -U promptinit && promptinit
2. run prompt -s fire
3. reboot

Enjoy the new colors! [see terminal-color screenshot]

Add aliases

1. Add one for ls so that is shows color by default. run alias ls='ls --color=auto' [see ls-alias]
   
2. Add an alias to mkdir command so that it automatically creates parent directory when needed. run alias mkdir='mkdir -pv'
3. Add one to the ping command to default the number of packets to 5. run alias ping='ping -c 5' [see ping-alias screenshot]
   

AUR Packages

I want to install Google Chrome from the AUR. I also want to install something to make it easier - yay. yay is one of the most popular packages on the AUR.

1. Install git with sudo pacman -S git
2. To be able to run makepkg we need some dependencies. Get them with sudo pacman -S base-devel
3. clone the yay repo with git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git then run cd yay then makepkg -si
4. install chrome using yay with yay -S google-chrome

Arch Linux Project complete!

You’re all done! Time to celebrate and enjoy your Arch VM.