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It's (nearly) 2018 And I'm Installing Arch

I've been installing Arch linux since two days ago. After an update to the kernel in my old Arch, my gnome log me out. So instinctively I should have log in but I don't know what, I reboot instead. That was a big mistake. First of many in fact.  The message I believe was "kernel panic, kernel not found" or something to that nature. I contemplated the task ahead and compared that to my blank stare and the blinking prompt of my computer.

I found my bit of hope with an old USB stick containing an Arch iso I can use to maybe repair / install a fresh linux. And the journey began...

Do I know that i can start elinks in the shell and open the wiki? Yep, I know. So I just have to follow the article with a switch of a tab. Right. Remember not to go too fast or an important point go passed you. Many things, most things hold true in these pages in the wiki. I'm grateful that people do spend time making these wiki pages for the public who needs them. It is much more practical this way than spending one on one time for customer support. If you are a company who can afford it then yes, a call center is a nice investment. But for a non-profit, start up, little budget for production let alone customer support, a wiki page goes much further.

I learned that my motherboard is an Asus Z97 but most importantly, it is strictly UEFI capable, a fact which will dictate my woes for the next 24 hours. I will need a boot loader partition for it. I was informed I need 550M or more of fat partition on the device I want to boot. I am new to these and it showed. I mixed up my choices and followed steps that i shouldn't do. I ended in a grub shell. Restart.

I learned that the efi directory cannot reside in LVM. I have to partition a 550M partition in bare metal. On second thought I decided to put root and home on bare metal SSD. No more surprises okay? I still ended in a grub shell a few times after that. Restart.

I learned that putting a password on my bios, on my motherboard settings, might be a mistake. On the pro side I now remember my bios password even in sleep. That USB stick containing the Arch iso stood its ground against my relentless booting. I am worried that the USB stick might give up the ghost.

There are many choices of bootloader apparently. I mixed up my steps of installing and configuring grub with systemd-boot. You have to forgive me, it was 1 o'clock in the morning. I was using elinks, all text, no web formatting. Each line of text flows into the next. It's hard to read text without paragraphs in the middle of the night. I end up in the grub shell a few more times.

There was that time when I was strongly tempted to look for an ubuntu usb stick somewhere in the desk drawer. I did try installing ubuntu 16.04 lts but the distro for newbies wont / can't install a bootloader on the device I want. In the final act, I ended in the grub shell too. Restart.

When i did get pass grub into a console once again, I knew I still need a graphical desktop. I picked GNOME with its 650MB download. I can do this. No Internet connection. Apparently I need to enable / start dhcpcd.service in systemd. After the download, I reboot. I am back to the console, what happened? I need to tell systemd to enable / start gdm, the gnome display manager. Voila! There was light.

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