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. The chapters on keeping the system maintainable, the graphical desktop, and hardware-key sudo are not written yet.

Be aware of what “tested” means here. The commands have been run on real hardware – a Raspberry Pi 5 – but against loopback disk images rather than a machine that was then rebooted, so the install has not yet been walked end to end on a disk that had to boot afterwards. The x86_64 bootloader page is the least exercised part of the book, because I develop this on the Pi. 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.