Arch Workstation

This book is unfinished and under active development. Chapters will move, commands will change, and pages may contradict each other while I am still working through them.

What is written takes a machine from an unplugged box to one that boots on its own and accepts an SSH login – the disk, the base system, the bootloader, networking and accounts, all done by setup – and then keeps it in step with its host repo with admin, and adds a sway desktop to it. The chapter on hardware-key sudo is not written yet.

Be aware of what “tested” means here. BOOMSTICK’s just test-vm installs an x86_64 PC in a QEMU virtual machine with every prompt answered, reboots it, logs in, and checks the result, including that admin diff finds no drift and that pacman transactions are snapshotted. ENCRYPT=yes does the same onto LUKS, answering the passphrase prompt at boot. A Raspberry Pi 5 has been installed on real hardware, start to finish.

Not tested yet: admin upgrade, rolling back a snapshot, and logging in to the desktop – the test VM installs it and checks the login screen, Nix and sway-home, but nobody has sat in front of it. Hardware-key sudo is unwritten. Specific caveats are flagged in place.

Read it as notes becoming a book rather than as a recipe that is known to work start to finish.