Installing arch on Dell XPS 13 9350

This recipe describes how to install Arch onto a Dell XPS 13 9350 machine. It destroys all previous installed OS's and boots Linux only. This is as it should be.

First get a iso that you'll use to burn to a USB stick and boot the XPS. The Arch wiki's install section will have a link.

Write iso to USB flash drive:

Be sure to use dmesg or similar to determine target drive

$ sudo dd if=archlinux-2017.01.01-dual.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M

Disable secure boot in bios, change boot sequence to boot of USB drive first.

Boot of USB disk

Now boot of the USB stick, it will drop you into a root terminal, you will now:

make sure you have coms, wifi or ethernet using a USB dongle
make some partitions, typically / and swap
format the partitions
mount the / partition somwhere convenient in the live bootimage
install arch base into / of the internet
chroot into the base image
do some system setup
reboot into your new arch system
continue with typical userland setup like a display manger, window manager and apps

Internet

Arch installs of the internets so be sure you can get to it. I swapped out the accursed good for fuckall broadcom card and put in a sweet intel job.

Use # wifi_menu and connect to your wifi network. Alternatively plug in your USB ethernet adaptor you stole from your previous job.

Make partitions

So, you are a security nut with bones to hide ? Of course you are, they have made perps of us all so use this guide to exersise the little power you assume you have left, you poor deluded 21'th century peasant. Use that guide if you're the type.

Here is where you destroy the data on your M.2 disk and build a new Arch distro on top of its smoking ruin. Did you know that you could take the M.2 out, store it somewhere save, and stick a new one in, maybe even say, a 1TB one ? Now you do. However, they do cost about AU$450 at the time of writing, so fuck that.

You are shooting for a layout like so:

Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 238.5 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 7681BE40-8D8B-4428-9765-14054A6FB0D3

Device            Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1     2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2  1050624  16777215  15726592   7.5G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p3 16777216 500117503 483340288 230.5G Linux filesystem

A small EFI boot disk
A larger swap disk, ~8G seems fine.
The rest of the space

Some peasants like to have a /home partition, those types of people usually do a lot of other stupid shit too, so do according to your type, a single / on a M.2 tiny laptop is fine for me.

Use cfdisk a nice curses clownsuit for fdisk, or just use fdisk. I use cfdisk, gparted is also a good choice, just get your partitions made and be happy.

For cfdisk

Select label as dos
Use the TUI and create boot, swap and root partition using the buttons. I first make the boot, which is 512M, then the swap which is 2x the RAM size, and then the / partition, which is the rest of the physical disk.
use fat for the ESP partition
use swap type for the swap partition
ext4 for the / partition
make / bootable
write changes and quit

For gparted note that the partition size is specified nose tot tail, like a train of horny Echidnas:

# parted /dev/nvme0n1
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart ESP fat32 1MiB 513MiB
(parted) set 1 boot on
(parted) mkpart primary linux-swap 513MiB 8.5GiB
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 8.5GiB 100%
(parted) quit

Format partitions

The EFI boot disk is FAT 32, as you would expect from a bulshit spec from Microsoft. Fortunately this allows the TSA and ASIO to install their shit without destroying your pr0n. Please think of everybody elses children. The ones whose parents get all the tax bennefits you pay for.

# mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

Now for swap:

# mkswap /dev/nvme0n1p2
# swapon /dev/nvme0n1p2

Here goes the /

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p3

Mount and install Arch base

The partitions are prepped and ready to go. Now mount the / partition and /boot partitions and install Arch base on the / partition.

# mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt/
# mkdir -p /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot
# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

That will take a while. Enjoy some unsavory br0wsing.

System setup

Generate the fstab file from the mounts:

# genfstab /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Verify /etc/fstab/ is good: cat /mnt/etc/fstab.

Now chroot to the newly installed Arch system:

# arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Fucking immediately install vim how in the fucking fuck can't that be part of the base install ? no. NO !

pacman -S vim

Set and generate the locale

# vim /etc/locale.gen # en.US_UTF-8 UTF-8
# locale-gen

Timezone

Find your timezone in /usr/share/timezone and link it to /etc/localtime

# rm /etc/localtime
# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Perth /etc/localtime

Set system and harware clock to UTC.

# hwclock --systohc --utc

Hostname

Set hostname in /etc/hosts as well as /etc/hostname.

Get IP from DHCP server

# systemctl enable dhcpcd

Boot

Now you need to enable booting the bootable partition we prepared earlier. Blessed Grub is not working for this model (aur grub-git supposedly does) so you will be using using systemd-boot in UEFI mode. It sound worse than it is.

Install the bootloader:

# bootctl --path=/boot install

Edi loader.conf file:

# vim /boot/loader/loader.conf

And make sure only these lines are there:

default arch
timeout 1 
editor 0

Take note of the long UUID number, and create arch.conf file:

# blkid -s PARTUUID -o value /dev/nvme0n1p3 >>  /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf

Take note of the long UUID number you just append to the end of arch.conf file and edit the thing to look like so:

(Change the PARTUUID number with the UUID number on your machine):

title Lollicon Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=PARTUUID=66e3f67d-f59a-4086-acdd-a6e248a3ee80 rw

It’s now time to update the bootloader # bootctl update

Dell XPS 13 uses PCIe for storage, you need to add the nvme module. Edit the mkinitcpio configuration file:

vim /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

And add nvme in the MODULES line:

MODULES="nvme"

Now update the bootloader:

# mkinitcpio -p linux

User

Now add a priveledged user (thys) and give it sudo rights.

useradd -m -G users,wheel,adm -s /bin/bash thys
passwd thys
visudo # uncomment #%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

journalctrl -p 3 -xb now shows all logs for thys

Use the nomal user for day to day things and escalate to sudo when needed. Now is a good time to give the root user a passwd, as arch does not set one

Reboot

Now exit the chroot, unmout the partitions and reboot.

# exit
# umount /mnt
# reboot

Post Install

Install some things we know we want right now

# pacman -S zsh tree docker git ttf-hack

Gnome

This machine will run i3 predominantly but Gnome is nice so install it:

# pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

As well as some other usefull things

# pacman -S iw wpa_supplicant dialog network-manager-applet networkmanager

Gnome comes with gdm, but you can use any display manager, or none at at all, just .xinitrc, gdm is nice so I roll with that.

Bootup

Tell systemd to start GNOME Display Manager and networking at boot time:

# systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
# systemctl enable gdm.service

The touchpad:

Gnome handles the touhpad just fine, for 'i3' setup like below. Maybe I'll learn how to tell all window managers to honour this one config someday.

# pacman -S xf86-input-libinput

In /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf config the touchpad like so

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "MyTouchpad"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "Tapping" "on"
        Option "Natural Scrolling" "on"
EndSection

vim

Welcome to the world of vim and neovim and the everlasting clusterfuck wrought by multiple clipboards.

Once you accept the reality of the fifty fucking shades of clipboards floating arround in your otherwise sane system, you deal with it like so:

$ sudo pacman -S neovim gvim xsel xclicp

gvim enables vim's clipboard, neovim uses the external tools. When installing gvim its OK to let pacman uninstall vim.

'Clipboard' is available from the '+' register, '*' maps to the system clipboard that usually gets things from auto-higlight select. Fot this to work you need to have a vim with clipboard capability, gvim does, stock vim does not, neovim uses external tools.

Insync

Insync syncs google drive.

Install insync from the AUR

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/insync.git
$ cd insync
$ makepkg -is

Add to i3 config

exec --no-startup-id insync start

Retart i3 for insync icon to appear in statsbar. Click on the icon to select accounts and what folders not to sync. By defailt insync syncs the whole thing, maybe you don't want your whole photo archive on your dev laptop.

The insync cli tools are also usefull.

Powerline

Install powerline

$ pacman -S powerline

Old And busted way, don't do this see next section

Powerline fonts. There are a few ways of going about this. In the spirit of Arch use the AUR:

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/powerline-fonts-git.git
$ powerline-fonts-git/
$ less PKGBUILD # does this look OK to you, fuck yea whatever
$ less powerline-fonts-git.install # ditto
$ makepkg -si

New hotness

Following along the hack ttf should already be intalled, here it is again because you are a non-contributing nobody.

# pacman -Su ttf-hack

Add powerline things to shells that need to know

In .bashrc

# powerline things 
POWERLINE_BASH=/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh
if [[ -f ${POWERLINE_BASH} ]]
then
  powerline-daemon -q
  POWERLINE_BASH_CONTINUATION=1
  POWERLINE_BASH_SELECT=1
  . ${POWERLINE_BASH}
fi

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