Download the ISO
Apparently, only the 2013.10 version is working for 64bit installations. Other versions will reboot instead of boot. This bug was reported here. Since most C720 versions only have 2GB, one might ask why should they use the 64bit version. I’m in no way an expert in this area, but my recollection is that x86_64 enables the use of an extra set of general purpose registers in the CPU. On the flipside, the use of 64bit pointers causes the memory usage to go up a little (which can be remedied with the use of x32-ABI, but it seems like distributors didn’t have much interest in it). I don’t have numbers to compare and don’t want to create any flamewars in my blog. To be fully honest, I think the differences are probably insignificant.
After downloading, you should extract the contents of the ISO to a USB drive. For UEFI boot you’d need to rename the drive to ARCH_201310, but thankfully BIOS boots are a little more forgiving.
Booting into Arch
If you set the boot flags, you should be good to go. If you didn’t, you’ll have to press Ctrl+L to boot (L for “legacy boot”). Once in the menu, press Tab to edit the entry and add mem=1536m to the line, this forces the live-USB to use 1536MiB of RAM, since the autodetection seems not to be working for the C720.
Now, you should be able to boot into Arch. First thing I’ve done was partitioning the SSD using:
cgdisk /dev/sda
I’ve created a bios_grub partition (about 1MiB) in the beginning of the drive, so I could do bios boot on this GPT-partitioned drive (you could potentially create a MBR partition table, but I haven’t tried this possibility). The rest of the SSD was made into my main partition.
I’ve made the btrfs partition using:
mkfs.btrfs -l 16k /dev/sda2
And mounted it with
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt -o rw,noatime,compress=lzo,ssd,discard,space_cache,autodefrag,ssd_spread
I’ve chosen btrfs because of the transparent compression, which increases the space I have available (not by much, since lzo’s compression rate is only about 2 or less) and because it increases the I/O performance (again, only by a little). Some might prefer ext4, and I don’t blame them, it’s very stable and the default filesystem in most distributions for a reason. I also wanted to try something a little bit more cutting-edge.
Connect to your WiFi router with:
wifi-menu
Before you can pacstrap the system, you have to upgrade the keyring (since the 2013-10 iso is pretty old and it’s keys have expired), the command is:
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring
(I haven’t tested this myself, but was suggested in the bbs here)
Now you can proceed to install the system to the SSD:
pacstrap /mnt base
Generate your filesystem table:
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Chroot into the system:
arch-chroot /mnt
Add a hostname to your computer:
echo mynewhostname > /etc/hostname
Adjust the timezone information:
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Detroit /etc/localtime
Create the ramdisk:
mkinitcpio -p linux
Set a root password:
passwd
Install GRUB:
pacman -S grub grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
You can should install “dialog” so that you can use wifi-menu next time you boot:
pacman -S dialog
Now you can exit the chroot, unmount the disk and reboot:
exit umount -R /mnt reboot
That’s it (sort of), the C720 should reboot into Arch. After this, the configuration will vary greatly between the different purposes you have your machine (DE, services/daemons, users, etc). On the next (and last) post about the C720, I’ll add some tweaks that I’ve used in my install.
GL;HF