When you download Manjaro, you can choose from quite a few different desktop environments, such as XFCE, KDE, GNOME, etc. But it’s also possible to forego a desktop environment altogether and install to disk from the command line version of Manjaro, which is known as the Architect edition. This will give the operating system a much closer feel to its ancestor, Arch Linux, which only has a command line installer available. You’ll still get to choose a GUI during the installation, if you’d like.
The main advantage of the Architect edition of Manjaro is that it gives users a lot more control over the installation process. You get to choose the best download mirrors, which drivers to install (free or proprietary), a desktop environment, shell, and more granular control over other options not normally available in the typical installers of some Linux distributions. It’s also a much smaller ISO file, since packages are downloaded from the internet during installation rather than being extracted from the ISO file as they are on GUI editions of Manjaro. This also means you get the latest packages available and your ISO file never becomes outdated.
In this tutorial, we’ll guide you through the process of installing Manjaro Architect edition. This guide assumes that you’ve already obtained the Architect ISO file and created a bootable USB drive or other form of installation media.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install Manjaro Architect edition
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Manjaro Linux |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Install Manjaro Architect Edition
Once you have inserted the boot media into your PC or selected the ISO file from your hypervisor (if installing on a virtual machine), boot into the installer and follow along with the steps below.
- Highlight the boot option with your arrow keys and press enter on your keyboard.
Configure these settings if necessary and then boot into the installer - You’ll need to login to the installer with a username and password of
manjaro. Then, typesetupand press enter.
Log in and launch setup - Manjaro will begin downloading the necessary packages to update the installer. When that’s done, select your system language and then hit OK.
Select language - Let’s start configuring our installation by heading into the “prepare installation” menu. In here, you’ll be able to configure your keyboard layout (inside of “set virtual console”), partition the hard drive(s), and mount partitions. Everything else is optional, but you can configure encryption, RAID, LVM, and other settings in this menu if you’d like.
Prepare Installation menu - Open the partitioning menu and configure your disk partitions as needed. It’s hard to give instructions for this part since everyone’s configuration will depend on their hardware setup. But if you’re installing the Architect edition of Manjaro, it’s assumed that you’re experienced enough to breeze through this part. There’s always an automatic partitioning option if you’d like to select that.
Select partitioning method or stick with automatic partitioning - Mount the partition(s) when you’re done with the previous step. You’ll need to choose where to install Manjaro.
Select which partition to install Manjaro to - Select the file system you’d like to use. Ext4 is recommended and used as the default on most every Linux system. You can go through the rest of the prompts selecting the default values, or configure the settings as you see fit.
Select which file system to use - Back on the main menu, enter into the “install desktop system” section. You’ll need to enter the first three menus listed here, select your kernel(s) and desktop environment(s) and other settings. This part could take a while because it has a lot of packages to download from the internet.
Choose a desktop environment to install - You’ll be asked whether you want to install free drivers or proprietary “nonfree” ones. Nvidia users may need to select nonfree, otherwise you should be able to stick with free.
Select which display drivers to install - Install the bootloader. Select normal old “grub” unless you already have some other operating system installed (Windows 10, Ubuntu, etc) on your system.
Install a BIOS bootloader - Go into the “configure base” menu and go through each of these options to setup FSTAB, hostname, locale, shell, username and password, etc. When you’re done, head back to the main menu.
You must go through each option in the Base Configuration menu - On the main menu, we can finally click “done.” Remove the installation media and then reboot your system to load into your new Manjaro installation.
Hit done and then reboot your system to start using Manjaro
Congratulations, you’ve just installed Manjaro Architect Edition. It may have taken some extra time compared to installing an edition preloaded with a GUI, but it saves time getting all this initial configuration out of the way during installation and not later on.
Closing Thoughts
In this guide, we saw how to install Manjaro Architect. There are a lot of steps due to all the configuration options available. It’s definitely a lot more involved than using a GUI installer, but the amount of customization it allows us is staggering. In the end, the extra steps are worth it for many users because of all the granular control.
