reinstall archlinux

the long and arduous journey of reinstalling arch

why? you ask, it has gotten cluttered and full of dubious configs, and arch released the new base metapackage today, so what better time for a fresh start

clean device

make backups

• and check them, i forgot, so i have none
• the most painful bit is losing ssh keys

create install usbs

• check that they work properly

wipe device

• now is the time to make changes to bios

install

the wiki is the holy text you must read and understand

partitioning

/dev/nvme0n1p1  2G        /efi  EFI system part
/dev/nvme0n1p2  10G             alpine, todo
/dev/nvme0n1p3  rest      /     arch

pacstrap

on bare metal dell xps 13 9350 with intel 8265 wifi

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware intel-ucode wpa_supplicant git sudo neovim python-neovim

bootloader

systemd-boot

1. bootctl --path=/efi install
2. mkdir /efi/EFI/arch
3. mv /boot/* -t /efi/EFI/arch
4. mount --bind /efu/EFI/arch /boot
5. add bind mount to /etc/fstab
6. add entry to /efi/loader/entries/, paths will be like /EFI/arch/vmlinuz-linux

reboot

pray you didn't forget anything important, like me, or it's back to the install usb, mount and arch-chroot to fix stuff

user

groupadd sudo, useradd -a -G user,video,input,sudo user, passwd user, edit /etc/sudoers

networking

1. ip link set wlan0 up
2. wpa_passphrase ssid passwd > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf
3. systemctl enable --now wpa_supplicant@wlan0
4. add basic entry to /etc/systemd/network/30-any.network
5. systemctl enable --now systemd-networkd
6. edit /etc/systemd/resolved.conf for preferred dns
7. systemctl enable --now systemd-resolved

major changes

install kmscon: doesn't play nice with sway

get yay back

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git and cd yay-bin then makepkg -si

note: this probably requires the base-devel stuff

custom stuff

getting custom stuff back

git clone https://github.com/seankhliao/config .config

and then disable starting the wm in zsh/zprofile and disable enforcing ssh keys in git/config

reinstalling more stuff

or just use the xps-system, gui-env, dev-tools packages here

visual environment

• sway
• xf86-video-intel
• i3status
• bemenu
• mako
  • systemctl --user enable mako
• grim, slurp
• playerctl, alsa-utils
• brightnessctl
• kitty
• google-chrome-dev
• xorg-server-xwayland
• wl-clipboard(-x11)

tools

• reflector
• exa
• ripgrep
• tag-ag
• htop
• aria2
• neovim-plug-git
• man-db, man-pages
• openssh

editing configs

/etc/makepkg.conf

-march=native
-mtune=native
OPTIONS=(!strip !zipman)
INTEGRITY_CHECK=(sha256)
PKGEXT='.pkg.tar'
SRCEXT='.src.tar'

/etc/pacman.conf

### Misc options
UseSyslog
Color
TotalDownload
CheckSpace
VerbosePkgLists

/etc/pam.d/system-auth

auth      required  pam_unix.so     try_first_pass nullok nodelay

/etc/systemd/logind.conf

HoldoffTimeoutSec=10s

/etc/systemd/system.conf

RebootWatchdogSec=10s
ShutdownWatchdogSec=10s
DefaultTimeoutStartSec=10s
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=10s

/etc/systemd/user.conf

DefaultTimeoutStartSec=10s
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=10s

ssh keys

ssh-keygen -t ed25519