To be able to install Arch on your disk, you need to mount the created partitions to appropriate directories. Mount the root partition ( /dev/sda3 ) to the /mnt directory:

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

The next step is installing the base Linux packages to the mounted root partition:

pacstrap /mnt base linux linux-firmware

This will take some time depending on your network connection. Once done, generate a file system table using the genfstab command:

genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

The Arch Linux system is up and running on the /mnt directory. You can change root to access the system by typing:

arch-chroot /mnt

The change in the bash prompt denotes that you’ve now logged in to the newly installed Arch Linux system. Before you can proceed further, you’ll have to configure some settings and install the necessary packages for the system to work properly.

Set the local timezone by creating a symlink between the “/usr/share/zoneinfo” and “/etc/localtime” directories:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime

Replace the “Region” and “City” in the above command with the appropriate timezone. You can refer to this timezone database to check the region and city you need to input.

Then, sync the hardware clock with the system time by running:

hwclock –systohc

Before moving on, install Vim (or another text editor of your choice) and the “networkmanager” package:

pacman -S vim networkmanager

Next, edit the “/etc/locale.gen” file using your text editor and uncomment the locale statement that suits your needs. For the purpose of this guide, we will uncomment the en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 line in the file using Vim

vim /etc/locale.gen

After editing the file, type locale-gen in the terminal to generate the locale configuration.

Next, create a new hostname file inside /etc and add the hostname you want for your computer in the file. This can be anything you want, and you don’t need to enter anything but the name. When you’re done, don’t forget to save the file.

vim /etc/hostname

Create another text file with the name hosts under the /etc directory:

vim /etc/hosts

You’ll notice that the file already contains some comments. Leave the comments as is and append the following text to the file. Remember to replace hostname in the command with the system hostname you set in the previous step.

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
127.0.1.1 hostname.localdomain hostname