Linux is possibly the most advanced and fast binary distribution of Linux there is. It does not have releases but rather is on a constant rolling release with a steady stream of package updates. It also has a BSD ports-style system called AUR that can be used to spin up new packages quickly from source packages and repositories.

But it lacks a configuration system for the initial system set up, which has always made me reluctant to switch from Ubuntu.

Those days are no more. There is now a script available called aui which after a few fiddly commands after starting an Arch Linux live image, the rest is menu driven and thorough.

https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui

It has the general instructions but it stipulates at the head of the document you need to have a network connection. If you have an ethernet cable to an internet connected router (or further inside a LAN) you don't need to think about this.

But if you, like me, don't have such a device handy you can use USB tethering, though there is an easy program to connect to wifi, but this has the caveat that you have to reboot once you have installed NetworkManager. This can all be done after you boot first time.

The wifi program is called wifi-menu and will most likely detect your wifi adapter, scan and let you pick a hotspot and enter the password.

But in case you need to configure a network device like a USB ethernet connection such as USB tethering, here is how to do that:

Connecting through USB Tethering

First, you need to find out the kooky name that the kernel gives the USB ethernet device once you plug in an Android phone:

ip link show

Which will put something out like this:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp1s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 3c:07:71:a2:05:1b brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlp3s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether ba:8f:3e:b6:d2:36 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
4: enp0s18f2u1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 5a:9b:19:59:99:01 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

enp0s18f2u1 is the untypeable name of the one I get, probably it's the same for any android device, I couldn't be sure, they are usually a bit weird though.

Next you need to activate it:

ip link set enp0s18f2u1 up

And finally, get an IP address from the NAT router inside the phone that allows all types of tethering:

dhcpcd -h enp0s18f2u1

This puts a bunch of output on the screen talking about asking for and getting DHCP leases, and then you are online.

Running the Installer Script

Next, you want to follow the instructions here: https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui

But the quickest way is at the bottom of the options:

wget ow.ly/wnFgh -O aui.zip

then you unzip it:

unzip aui.zip

cd into the directory it makes (probably aui), and:

./fifo

This has a series of menus you need to enter various details like keymap, the partitons, setting up the base system, and installing the bootloader. After that there is a script called lilo which you start the same way, which I skipped being so overjoyed just to get a booting Arch Linux, but that will set up your GUI as well as some other things. I just did this:

pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

but then had problems with NetworkManager which I had to manually set up, and so on. It took me a while, I wish I'd paid closer attention to the information about lilo.

I also had problems booting the Arch ISO from grml-rescueboot on Ubuntu 16.04, so I had to write the standard current Arch live image to my new fast Sandisk 'ultra fit' which falsely claims 150Mb/s transfer, but in reality it runs at about 50Mb/s though I think if blocks are aligned better maybe it can do more like 75Mb/s. Suffice it to say that even at 50Mb/s it is comfortable and in fact noticably faster most of the time than the 100Mb/s that the spinning disk inside my laptop has.

After putting that on it, I boot it, press 'e' to edit the boot entry and add copytoram to it (I have 8Gb but it's only 450Mb anyway) so that I could unmount the stick, repartition it (I wiped the MBR with dd then partitioned with cfdisk with a new gpt partition table for UEFI) set 1 small partition (about 300Mb minimum) as an EFI system partition, format it with fat32, and the rest I made into an ext4 partition for the system. No swap, since I have enough memory.

Finally a way through the pain of initial setup!

The main thing is, for people like me, with not so much patience for the tedium of manually following a very long series of instructions, the question and answer format makes it so much simpler.

If you have some skills with a linux shell and have wanted to tinker with Arch Linux, the aui script gets all that tricky stuff out of the way for you so you can run it on your hardware. The base that is set up by fifo is a perfect base for a server or even a docker image.

So I now have a nice, fast Arch Linux installation with Gnome 3 installed and Terminator terminal emulator, Chromium, and a bunch of other nicknacks though I'm not going to do much on this laptop itself (mainly on the servers until I have got the Sybil Workshop running) and for that I just need python and virtualenv. By default on Arch that is Python 3.6, the nearly latest version, and as the screenie at the top shows, it is Gnome 3.22.2, which probably isn't far behind the latest of that as well.

It runs so beautifully now!

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