(en) Re;INSTALL
I use Arch, by the way.
After switching jobs, I find myself dealing with embedded Linux now. I’m no stranger to Linux; all the web development I’ve done has been one that runs on Linux webservers. I mainly develop them in WSL, too. But touching embedded systems and their kernel modules and libraries is far different… It feels like I’m navigating a dark sea since I have no idea how Linux works.
So I got an idea: let’s try installing Arch Linux. They say it’s hard, so maybe I’ll learn a thing or two.
~~~
It wasn’t hard. Their documentation is very helpful, and doing it by-the-books got me through just fine. Rather than hard, it was just… manual. Things that would take a single “next” button press in an installer now had me read instructions, pick my own software, and configure it piece by piece.
For one, I learned how my laptop’s UEFI discovery system works. I’ve installed Linux multiple times in the past, but beach time, it’s always on an external storage. I don’t like it living in the same space as my Windows OS, because if I configured it wrong, the bootloader takes over Window’s as the main bootloader. I know I’ll be erasing this Linux and installing some other distribution in the future, so I don’t want it “dirtying” my main OS.
So I installed it on my external SSD. Because it’s always what I had, I steered away from GRUB and picked Refind instead. It shows up on my BIOS’s device list… until I boot with the SSD unplugged.
My computer just forgot that Refind exists. I have to plug in the installation media, reinstall the bootloader, and then it shows in the devices list and I can boot into it. But why? This doesn’t happen with my previous Linux installations. But encountering this problem led me to learn more. One of them is the fact that my PC has a flash memory for storing UEFI data called the NVRAM. It’s what remembers Refind’s existence whenever I boot to it. Yet one question remains: why can’t my PC find it?
Turns out it’s because the bootloader files (the EFI file) isn’t named in a “standard” way. My PC can only find the bootloader if it is named this way: `/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI’. Moving the bootloader to that path and name fixes it. I even found out that on the BIOS boot device selection list, if I plug/unplug the external storage, the entry shows up and disappears (since it’s BIOS, I was under the impression that the list is static). Now I feel like I can install anything!! Well, I have always been able to, but this is the first time I feel like I have control of the boot process.
Next up is the desktop. Or more like, the compositor. I opted to pick something new: Hyprland.
~~ to be continued ~~