Arch Linux Installation Script

These scripts use QEMU to install Arch Linux on a physical disk.
Edit launch_iso and install_script_settings to use them.

Summary

• Two target physical storage devices are required:
  • A boot disk, typically a small USB flash drive
  • A main drive onto which everything else will be installed, typically an SSD or hard disk
• Boot the Arch Linux installation ISO in a QEMU virtual machine
• Give the VM access to the two physical drives
• Format the drives:
  • Boot disk:
    • MBR partition table
    • Single partition
    • Ext4 filesystem
    • Contents of /boot are placed here
  • Main disk:
    • GPT partition table
    • BIOS boot partition
    • Remaining space in a second partition:
      • LUKS encrypted
      • LVM physical volume
      • 50 GB logical volume for /
• The encryption key for the LUKS partition is written to the USB drive
• Grub and initramfs are configured to supply the key from the USB for unattended boot
• Unmount and remove the USB drive after booting for security, if desired, but remember that the USB drive is needed for rebooting
• Users are created
  • Added to sudoers
  • SSH public keys added
• All password login is disabled, that is, SSH login with public key is the only login method allowed
• Bare-bones set of packages are installed
• Locale and timezone are configured
• Hostname and network are configured

Recommendations

• Make a backup of the contents of the USB drive---without the encryption.txt file on that drive, the contents of the main drive are unrecoverable
• Keep the package list for pacstrap minimal, and do other package installation later with Ansible