Archlinux - Installation on Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2018

• Power on the notebook.
• Press Enter and F1 to enter the BIOS configuration.
• Disable the Security -> Secure Boot.
• Enable Config -> Thunderbolt BIOS Assist Mode. This will significantly reduce the power consumption of CPU wakeups¹.
• Insert the prepared USB and press F10 to save the change and reboot the notebook.
• Press Enter and F12 to temporarily boot from the prepared USB stick.

For UEFI booting, a dedicated EFI system partition (ESP) is mandatory. EFI bootloaders, applications and drivers can be stored in an ESP and lauched by the UEFI firmware at the boot stage. It is completely independent of OS.

For my SSD, ESP can be detected by

parted /dev/nvme0n1 print

The command returns as follows.

...
Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  274MB   273MB   fat32           EFI system partition          boot, hidden, esp
...

Clearly, an ESP, i.e., /dev/nvme0n1p1 has already been created in the installation of Windows 10. Therefore, I just need to mount the existing EFI partition before the bootloader installation.

If you do not have an ESP available, you have to create a new one, e.g., creating a primary partition with partion type EFI (FAT-12/16/32) by fdisk, and format it as FAT32.

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

If following message returns,

WARNING: Not enough clusters for a 32 bit FAT!

reduce cluster size with

mkfs.fat -s2 -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

or

mkfs.fat -s1 -F32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

Otherwise, the resulted ESP may be unreadable by UEFI.

Before customization, my SSD already has several partitions.

...
Device             Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1      2048    534527    532480   260M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2    534528    567295     32768    16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/nvme0n1p3    567296  84453375  83886080    40G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p4 498069504 500117503   2048000  1000M Windows recovery environment
...

In addition, I created two ext4 partitions for / and /home respectively, as well as a swap by cfdisk.

cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1

Edit /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist as

Server = http://mirrors.163.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

Create file /etc/hostname.

notebook

Revise file /etc/hosts.

# Static table lookup for hostnames.
# See hosts(5) for details.
172.0.0.1      localhost
::1	       localhost
172.0.0.1      notebook.localdomain notebook

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment the following lines.

...
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1
...
zh_CN.GB18030 GB18030
zh_CN.GBK GBK
zh_CN.UTF-8 UTF-8
zh_CN GB2312
...

Generate and set locales.

locale-gen
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf

Install following two packages. Otherwise, the utility wifi-menu does not work.

pacman -S dialog wpa_supplicant

From version 3.3 on, the Linux kernel can be directly loaded by EFI firmware as an EFI executable, a.k.a., EFISTUB (EFI BOOT STUB). In other words, grub-like intermediate bootloaders are not necessary.