I’ve been using Arch Linux for the better part of a decade now. As a result, I am so used to it that I’ll choose it for nearly any task at hand. Although Arch might not be a traditional distribution for persistent live systems, there’s really no reason to not use it to this purpose.
What follows is a list of steps to install and set up a minimal Arch Linux live USB system. In the spirit of KISS, we will go with a single-partition layout:
- Create a single
Linux
type partition withfdisk
or the tool of your choice on your USB device (e.g./dev/sdc
) - Execute
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1
to create an ext4 file system on the created partition - Mount the resulting file system:
# mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbarch
- Use
pacstrap
from thearch-install-scripts
package to install thebase
package group:# pacstrap /mnt/usbarch base
- Auto-generate an fstab file:
# genfstab -U /mnt/usbarch >> /mnt/usbarch/etc/fstab
- Take a look at the generated
/etc/fstab
file and adapt if necessary - Change root into the new system:
# arch-chroot /mnt/usbarch
- Configure the time zone:
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Region/City /etc/localtime
&&# hwclock --systohc
- Uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other required locales in
/etc/locale.gen
, and generate them with:# locale-gen
- Set the
LANG
variable in/etc/locale.conf
, for example:LANG=en_US.UTF-8
- Set a default keymap in
/etc/vconsole.conf
, for instance:KEYMAP=de-latin1
- Define a hostname in
/etc/hostname
, for example:usbarch
- Set a super-secure root password:
# passwd
- Install GRUB to your USB device:
pacman -Sy grub
&&grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sdc
- Finally, use the
grub-mkconfig
tool to auto-generate agrub.cfg
file:grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
The system should now be bootable and can be further adapted to your liking.