I bought a cheap laptop from china: Ezbook 3S.

It features a nice 14” display, a slow but usable Intel Apollo Lake N3450, 6Gb of ram and a 256Gb SSD.

I want to try Arch Linux on an external usb drive, just to make a few test before committing to the full wipe of Windows 10 Home. Reports from other users says that wifi is working with an alternate driver but no bluetooth. Other periferals should work just fine.

I also tried to install on a SD card but rEFInd is not able to detect the card controller.

Preparation

Windows reset

I made a full reset from the control panel.

To prevent filesystem corruption disable fast shutdown. Open and administrative cmd.

powercfg /h off

rEFInd

Download rEFInd Extract the zip

Follow the manual installation guide

Open and administrative cmd.

mountvol S: /S

Change into the main rEFInd package directory

xcopy /E refind S:\EFI\refind\
S:
cd EFI\refind
rename refind.conf-sample refind.conf
bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path \EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi
bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" description "rEFInd"

Arch

Wifi connection

The network driver is bugged. To make it work it is necessary to unload and reload after every connection. Sometimes it’s necessary to unload and load a few times.

rmmod rtl8xxxu
modprobe rtl8xxxu

Connection with wifi-menu

wifi-menu
# Select a network, insert a password and create a profile
# A profile file will be created in /etc/netctl/profilename
netctl start profilename

Connection with wpa_supplicant

Find an access point

ip link set wlp0s21f0u7i2 up
iw dev wlp0s21f0u7i2 scan | less

Test configuration generation for wpa

wpa_passphrase MYSSID passphrase

Connect

wpa_supplicant -B -i wlp0s21f0u7i2 -c <(wpa_passphrase MYSSID passphrase)

Ip and test

Obtain a new address and test the connection

dhcpcd wlp0s21f0u7i2
ping www.archlinux.org

Partitioning

Find the block device to use

lsblk

Create an EFI partition of 550Mb and ext partition

gdisk /dev/sdc
n 550M ef00
n all space 8300
w
# format
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc2
# view the result
lsblk -f

mount

mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/boot

Mirror list

Use Alt+arrow to switch to a new console

elinks https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/

Check the country and select generate list

Alt-f -> Save as -> ./mirrorlist

Update the mirror list

# Make a backup of the original file
mv /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.old
# Move the new mirrror list
mv ./mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
# Edit the file and uncomment the preferred mirror
nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Setup base packages

This is a bit long, about 20 minutes

pacstrap /mnt base

Configure the system

Generate a new fstab

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

Chroot in the new environment

arch-chroot /mnt

Change timezione

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Rome /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc

Uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

nano /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen

Create a new configuration file and set the LANG variable

nano /etc/locale.conf
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The keyboard layout is ok with the default.

Create a hostname file

echo sunzi > /etc/hostname

Add the hostname “sunzi” to hosts

nano /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1	localhost
::1		localhost
127.0.1.1	sunzi.localdomain	sunzi

Network configuration

Install the packages for wireless configuration

pacman -S iw
pacman -S wpa_supplicant
# needed for wifi-menu
pacman -S dialog

Final steps

Set the root password

passwd

Boot loader

We install GRUB on the Usb drive instead of the SSD. rEFInd will automatically add GRUB to the boot menu.

pacman -S grub
pacman -S efibootmgr
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=arch_grub
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot

umount /dev/sdc1
umount /dev/sdc2
reboot

Say thanks

Make a donation to rodsmith for the work done on rEFInd.