Here are some brief notes about a basic archlinux installation. These notes are to be read together with the installation guide, and they reflect my personal preferences.

To disable the annoying beeping sound in TTY, run

echo "setterm -blength 0" >> /etc/profile.d/disable-beep.sh

I create 4 partitions:

• root partition (about 25G),
• boot partition (200M),
• swap partition (about twice the ram), and
• home partition (rest of memory).

Caution! Use primary partition for 4th partition, not extended which is default in fdisc.

After that, format and mount the partitions:

mkswap /dev/sda3
swapon /dev/sda3
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2 
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4 
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/home
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/home

Choose a couple close mirrors and pacstrap only base to save time. After change root, install reflector, generate mirrorlist by

reflector --verbose --latest 20 --protocol https --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

and install base-devel, gvim, git, networkmanager, dialog, grub and efibootmgr.

Change kernel to lts (keep the linux kernel as a backup) and install headers:

pacman -S linux-headers linux-lts linux-lts-headers 
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
reboot

To avoid manually configurating networks after reboot, install networkmanager:

pacman -S networkmanager

and enable it:

systemctl enable NetworkManager

After reboot internet works out of the box.

Add a new user

useradd -m -g wheel myname

and give him root privileges by running visudo and uncommenting wheel group (optionally pass the NOPASSWD option).

Install terminus fonts:

pacman -S terminus-font

To use terminus fonts in console do:

echo "FONT=ter-114n" >> /etc/vconsole.conf

zsh is a much more powerful shell than bash. To list all installed shells, run:

$ chsh -l

and to set one as default for your user do:

$ chsh -s full-path-to-shell

where full-path-to-shell is the full path as given by chsh -l.

If you now log out and log in again, you will be greeted by the new shell.

After having installed the packages android-file-transfer andandroid-udev, uncomment user_allow_other in /etc/fuse.conf and mount your android device with

$ mkdir ~/my-device
$ sudo aft-mtp-mount -o allow_other ~/my-device

so that a non-root user can access it.