# [Part 2] My Arch Linux Journey - The Struggle => /thyrium/gemlog/linux/20260828.gmi See Part 1 here Preface: I was a Windows 11 refugee who switched to Linux because Windows 11 sucked ass. But then I heard the calling from the Arch God telling me not to be a Windows 11 victim, but to fully commit to a life of Linuxhood instead. So one random night I had my Asus T100a 2-in-1 laptop/tablet with 32-bit UEFI yet capable to run a 64-bit OS ready to installing Arch, meanwhile I have another laptop with the Arch Wiki opened for reference. I did heard about archinstall before, but I chose not to use it because archinstall was either for Arch larpers who wanted to say "I use Arch btw" but didn't bother to spend times understanding how Linux worked, or for the sysadmin who was too familiar with Linux and would like to save some time for his Nth Arch installation. Since I was neither of them, I opted for the manual installation insteadAKA the intended way. So I inserted my Arch image flashdrive into my Asus T100 and was ready to go. The first few steps were straightfoward. Disabled the secure boot, selected my flashdrive to boot from in the UEFI menu, and entered the tty install environment. I'd done similar installations in other devices with other distros so no big deal. Then it came to the connecting to the internet step. I'd heard people suggesting using an Ethernet connection since this part could be tricky when using Wi-Fi. The installation guide on the Wiki didn't tell me how to connect to the Wi-Fi step-by-step, but it did linked to other pages for Wi-Fi connection instruction. I followed it and connected to my Wi-Fi without any issue. After connecting to the internet came the disk partition section. I typed lsblk and press RETURN. ``` NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE sda 8:0 1 3.7G 0 disk sda1 8:1 1 1.2G 0 part sda2 8:2 1 258M 0 part ``` Hmmm where is my internal disk? I only saw my live USB partitions. So I quickly checked the Arch Wiki and a line in the note section that read: ``` Note If the disk does not show up, make sure the disk controller is not in RAID mode. ``` What on earth was a RAID mode? The only other raid-related stuff that I knew of was a mediocre mobile game that sponsored some of your favorite YouTubers. The installation guide then suggested me to change from RAID to AHCI, which I had no idea what any of these meant. I rebooted into the UEFI settings and there were no setting related to AHCI. That section wasn't helpful at all. So I did some diggings and found an old Arch forum thread that mentioned I need to manually load the kernel modules by using the following: ``` modprobe mmc_block sdhci sdhci_acpi ``` So I typed the command and pressed return. Guess what, it worked. My disk finally appeared. That was my first time encoutering the concept of a kernel module. Then it was time to partition my disk. I opted to use cfdisk because that was the tool used in the tutorial that I was following along, and also it at least has a basic TUI. For some reason I chose not to follow any full Arch installation tutorial on YouTube, rather I limit myself to mainly written guides, or at most a partial Arch installation video guide. Why was I this stubborn I wasn't sure. Perhaps I thought I was too good for a hand-holding YouTube tutorial that taught your from start to finish. While following the Arch Wiki guide, I quickly realized this wasn't the the Linux tutorials where I could just copy and paste the command lines that I was so used to. Take this line as an example: ``` # fdisk /dev/the_disk_to_be_partitioned ``` There is no disk named "the_disk_to_be_partitioned" on my drive, nor anyone's drive. It expected you know how to locate the correct directory and change the placeholder text on your own. For seasoned Linux user this couldn't be more obvious enough, but as a new Linux user I still had to get used to. Then there were steps in the guide that didn't show any command lines at all. For instance in the Arch installation guide step 3.8 Boot loader, it just linked you to a page in the Ach Wiki explaining what a bootloader does and a list of all the available boot loaders that I could choose from. If I wanted to install a particular bootloaders, I then had to click on the bootloader that I wanted to install for more instruction, while would just lead me to more confusion. Even if I choose a bootloader of my liking, I couldn't guarantee if the bootloader would work for me or not. With every page I clicked on, I was bombarded with more and more foreign concepts. Anyway I chose the good ol' GRUB because that was the only bootloader I'd ever used before. After few more steps, I finally made it to the last step in the tutorial. I was confident that I'd installed everything needed correctly. It was time to reboot into my freshely-installed Arch Linux and see my result. ``` Loading Linux linux ... Loading initial ramdisk ... ``` It got stuck here for a few minutes. I thought my barebone Arch installation would have a blazingly fast boot time. So I waited... ``` Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked See sulogin(8) man page for more details. ``` I didn't where my initial confidence came but I should had expected something might get wrong in the first try. It was already late at night and I just wanted to be done with installing Arch. I had overestimated myself. Then I recalled there was a thing called archinstall. But archinstall was for noobs. Real Arch users install their Arch the manual way (AKA the correct way). There would be no bragging right if I tell other people I use Arch btw meanwhile being an archinstall pleb. But the temptation was too strong and I was too tired at that point. Eventually I gave in and ran archinstall. Forgive me Arch God for I have sinned. I navigated in the archinstall TUI and applied the settings to my liking, though I did have to look things up just to make sure I didn't mess up. It felt so much better to see what I was doing in the TUI rather than second-guessing myself with every command I typed in the CLI. Before applying my configuration, it gave me a final confirmation: ``` The specified configuration will be applied. Would you like to continue? No Yes ``` I hovered over Yes and pressed RETURN to continue. I took a big sigh of relief, yet felt bad for using archinstall. While my T100 was archinstalling, I went for a bathroom break as I was sitting for way too long. When I came back after a long bathroom break, I was greeted with the Arch installation fail message. I didn't write down what the exact message was, but I remembered it just gave me a somewhat generic notice that the installation had failed. It was so vague that it didn't even tell me what went wrong. "Maybe second time's the charm" I thought. So I archinstalled again without changing much, and unsurprisingly, failed again. Perhaps this was a sign that the Arch God was telling me to install Arch the intended way. However the time had already passed my usual sleep hour so I went to sleep that night and decided to continue the next night. The next evening I put my ego down and simply followed an Arch installation YouTube tutorial by tony (manual install btw). The video was very straightforward and easy to follow and I was wondering why didn't I just simply follow a YouTube tutorial in the first place.. I only had to changed few steps in the tutorial, such as creating a swapfile instead of a swap partition, and changed the grub-install flag from --target=i386-efi to --target=x86_64-efi. Now everything configured and I just needed to reboot into my newly-installed Arch Linux and hope everthing worked. ``` Loading Linux linux ... Loading initial ramdisk ... ``` It got stuck here for a few minutes. ``` Arch 7.1.8.arch1-3 tty login: ``` I was greeted by the tty login. Finally I had earned my Arch bragging right. Finally I had received the ticket to the Arch Heaven where Arch Peter would be greeting me at the Arch Pearly Gates... Then I realized a problem. Why is tty not taking any of my keystrokes? TO BE CONTINUED... 2026/09/22; last edited 2026/10/10 => /thyrium/index.gmi Go back