Installing Arch on Dell Inspiron 15-5000

I have been wanting to try arch for a long time but I haven’t had a personal laptop for a long time. So here’s what I went through to get Arch Linux up and running in my new Dell Inspiron 15-5000.

Installation

1. Download arch
2. Make a live USB by
   cat path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso > /dev/sdx
   (Make sure to do /dev/sdx not including the number like /dev/sdx1 )
3. Go through the installation guide
   • Use windows EFI partition if one exists (mount in /mnt/boot)
   • In arch-chroot or using pacstrap, make sure to download package iwd so that when you boot into the OS, you can connect to the internet

Trouble with booting

Now that the OS was installed, I tried to boot into it and this error appeared. I checked if the UUID was correct and it was. So found multiple posts with the same problem and this one finally helped. Followed the exact steps mentioned in the last message of the thread.

Connecting to the internet

After getting into the OS, now I had just a terminal and no internet despite of having iwd installed. So found this thread and did as instructed.

1. systemctl enable --now systemd-networkd systemd-resolved iwd
2. networkctl status -a
3. To enable iwd’s DHCP client, add the following to /etc/iwd/main.conf
[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true

Then rebooted and iwctl was working which I used to then connect to the WiFi

Desktop environment

Then I needed to add a regular user and add a desktop environment. Followed this article and I installed KDE Plasma which looks great IMO.

Sound

Everything was now setup and working beautifully, except there was no sound. So I tried solutions in the internet and finally had to open a thread here. Stupid me skipped over a small part of the installation guide and hadn’t installed the package sof-firmware.

NVIDIA drivers

My laptop has a Nvidia MX330 GPU. So here’s how you go about installing Nvidia drivers for this laptop. Having no previous experience with packages on arch, I had to do some digging. So the package I need to install is in AUR (Arch User Repository). Which apparently means you need to clone, build and install yourself. I needed to install linux headers with pacman -S linux-headers which is a requirement for the driver package

1. Clone the package using the URL given in the package page, cd into the folder
2. Do makepkg --install
3. For cuda and cudnn, simply install them with pacman -S cuda cudnn

Other little details

1. To support mounting NTFS drives, do pacman -S ntfs-3g
2. For pip and ipython which I often use, pacman -S python-pip ipython

Well, that’s it! Everything works like a charm. Fast and ~800mb RAM usage when idle.