I had some time to try Arch Linux on my Tuxedo Computers InfinityBook Pro 15. It was a bit of a hassle but I managed to get it working. For most of the installation, I followed the Arch Linux installation guide. Fortunately, Arch Linux has a very helpful up-to-date documentation so you will not have much trouble following the guide. However, there were some additional hassle that were not super explicit in the documentation. In this blog, I will try to write them down just for reference.

Before and during installtion

Creating a bootable USB drive

In order to install Arch Linux, you need to create a bootable USB drive. There are many options to do this. I used Ventoy which was very intuitive.

Setting up wifi

Before installing Arch Linux, you need to set up wifi first. If you have a wired connection, you can skip this section.

# type iwctl to get into the interactive prompt given by iwd (wireless daemon)
iwctl

# list device names for wireless network connection
station list # probably you will see something like wlan0

# scan and get networks available
station wlan0 scan
station wlan0 get-networks

# enter name for the network
station wlan0 connect <network-name>

# enter password for the network when prompted

# exit the iwctl prompt
exit

# check if the connection is successful
ping -c 4 google.com

Enabling wifi connection after installation

During the installtion, I installed networkmanager to manage wifi connections. You can do this by additionaly installing networkmanager package when you are following the installation guide on pacstrap. Also, make sure to enable the service by running systemctl enable NetworkManager.

However, unlike other installation guide, I found out that the wifi connection was not automatically connected after installation. In order to fix this, you need to run the following command after you boot into the new system:

# this command will get you into a GUI-like wifi connection system. 
# You can use it to connect to your wifi.
nmtui

Adding a user and giving them sudo permission

When you are using the computer, it is very likely that you will be login yourself as some user. During the installtion, make sure you create a user using this command:

# add user
useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash [USERNAME]

# create password for the user
passwd [USERNAME]

# give sudo permission to the user. 
# To do this, use the command below to go into the script and uncomment the section where it says "uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command."
EDITOR=vim visudo

Installing GRUB

After you have installed the system, you need to install GRUB to the disk. This is done by running the following command:¹

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB

You also need to generate a configuration file for GRUB. To do that use the following command:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Unmounting all the drives

After following all the installation steps, you need to unmount all the drives. This is done by running the following command:

# unmount all the drives
umount -a

Rebooting the system

After you have unmounted all the drives, you can reboot the system by running the following command:

# reboot the system
reboot

Post-installation

Using audio and bluetooth

You need to install some packages to use the audio of the computer. I used pulseaudio but heard pipewire is something people use more nowadays.

To use bluetooth, you need to type following commands:

# install packages necessary to use bluetooth
sudo pacman -S bluez bluez-utils

# enable the bluetooth system
sudo systemctl enable bluetooth.service

# start bluetooth interactive prompt to starting connecting your device
bluetoothctl

# turn on the power and do necessary steps before connecting
power on
agent on
default-agent

# turn on the scan to get the bluetooth ID for your device
scan on

# finish connecting the device
# for some devices, you might have to enter password shown in the terminal
trust [BLUETOOTH ID]
pair [BLUETOOTH ID]
connect [BLUETOOTH ID]

# After that, make sure you auto enable the bluetooth my going into the `/etc/bluetooth/main.conf` and uncomment the line that says `AutoEnable=true`.

Footnotes

I am using UEFI boot mode. If you are using BIOS boot mode, you need to use different command. Also, make sure to use the correct target and efi-directory that is specific to your system. It seems that sometimes this command works even if you don’t specify the target and efi-directory. But for me, I had to specify them.↩︎