Arch Linux on Lenovo Legion 5P

In earlier posts, I documented how I solved a series of issues due to the Linux support in this laptop. Eventually, I found the lack of the nvidia-dkms package was adding unnecessary work for me. And because using packages from a different distribution is not supported or recommended, I decided to migrate my system to Arch Linux.

Before going any further prease bear in mind this post is heavily technical. It follows the official installation guide, which is a must read for installing Arch, but the purpose of this post is to act as a personal reference for the future.

Partition schema

I have used the following schema on 500Gb and 1Tb drives

device		size	format	mont point	system
nvme1n1p1 	  260 	fat 	/mnt/boot	/boot
nvme1n1p2	20480	btrfs	/mnt		/
nvme1n1p3	12288	btrfs	/mnt/var	/var
nvme1n1p4	13312	swap	swap		swap
nvme1n1p5	all	btrfs	/mnt/home	/home

Initial steps

Enable the UK keyboard layout

# loadkeys uk

Try to connect directly to Wi-Fi as follows,

# iwctl --passphrase myPassPhrase station wlan0 connect targetWiFiNetwork

If this fails, either enable the Wi-Fi devices

# rfkill unblock wifi

or try with the interactive way

# iwctl
# station wlan0 scan
# station wlan0 get-networks
# station wlan0 connect targetWifiNetwork
# exit

Once a connection is established, sync the system clock

# timedatectl set-ntp true

Then, setup the drive layout

# fdisk -l # partition the drives according to the partition scheme shown earlier
# mkfs.btrfs /dev/nvme1n1p2 -f # root
# mkfs.btrfs /dev/nvme1n1p3 -f # var
# mkswap /dev/nvme1n1p4
# swapon /dev/nvme1n1p4
# mount /dev/nvme1n1p2 /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mkdir /mnt/var
# mkdir /mnt/home
# mount /dev/nvme1n1p1 /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/nvme1n1p3 /mnt/var
# mount /dev/nvme1n1p5 /mnt/home
# reflector # choose fast servers

Proceed with the base installation

# pacstrap /mnt base linux5.8 linux-firmware amd-ucode btrfs-progs dhclient \
dhcpcd dosfstools efibootmgr iwd lynx man-db man-pages nvme-cli openssh rsync \
sudo texinfo tmux usbutils gvim vpnc zsh xf86-video-amdgpu vulkan-radeon

Configure the system

Write the current file system structure to fstab

# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
# cat /mnt/etc/fstab

Set the time zone and adjust the system clock

# arch-chroot /mnt
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime # set the timezone
# hwclock --systohc # generate /etc/adjtime

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment the locales needed,

en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

Generate the locales,

# locale-gen

And set the system locale by editing /etc/locale.conf adding:

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

Set the keyboard layout persistently

# vim /etc/vconsole.conf
KEYMAP=uk

Set the host name

# vim /etc/hostname

Note: The only content of this file should be the name for this machine

Add default addresses to hosts file

# vim /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1	localhost
::1		localhost
127.0.1.1	arch-usb.localdomain	arch-usb

Generate the initial minimal file system initramfs

# mkinitcpio -P

Set the root password

# passwd

Add a non root user

# useradd -m cmoralesmx
# passwd cmoralesmx
# usermod -aG wheel,audio,video,optical,storage cmoralesmx

Enable users in wheel group to execute anything as sudo

# EDITOR=vim visudo

Note: Search and uncomment the line about wheel users

Remove unnecessary packages from the install

# pacman -R modemmanager, mobile-broadband-provider-info

Install a bootloader Note: I was using grub but switched to systemd-boot which seems leaner.

Because I am already using systemd-boot, the loader configuration and the entries should be available and up to date in /boot

Therefore, I just need to install the actual bootloader

# bootctl install

At this point the base system is ready. For a headless computer this is enough.

Optionally, I could install a Window Manager or a full Desktop Environment. I will cover that in the next post