The following walks through my installation setup of Omarchy onto my new Beelink SER5.

I loaded the ISO onto a USB using my Mac, so this is a specific recount with these items in case it clarifies anything for others configuring their setup.

I will reference any point where it is best to refer back to DHH's video or the archlinux docs.

The following is best done alongside the archlinux installation documentation.

First, download the Arch Linux ISO from the official website. The official docs recommend using a BitTorrent download, however (due to work restrictions) it was required for me to make a HTTP direct download.

For myself in Australia, I found a mirror website to download the ISO directly, and then made use of the b2sum CLI utility in order to verify the BLAKE2b checksums.

To do this, download the b2sum.txt file from the downloads section into the same folder that you downloaded the ISO and run b2sum -c b2sums.txt in order to validate the ISO checksum.

On macOS, you can use tools like dd or graphical utilities like Balena Etcher to create a bootable USB drive.

# Example using dd (replace /dev/diskX with your USB device)
sudo dd if=archlinux.iso of=/dev/diskX bs=4M status=progress
copy

This is also listed on the archlinux USB flash installation guide under 1.3 In macOS:

dd if=path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso of=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m
copy

dd (data duplicator) is a low-level copying utility that reads from an input file and writes to an output file. The options used are:

The command provided by archlinux will run silently. You can press Ctrl + t to get updates.

Once the USB is loaded, you can dismount the disk and we can plug it into our Beelink SER 5.

Since I pulled out my Beelink SER 5 fresh from the box, so it came preloaded with Windows 11.

We don't care about that preloaded OS, so we need to boot into UEFI.

You may be more familiar with BIOS. They are different technologies that do the same job.

To enter UEFI on the Beelink SER 5:

At this point, the system will boot into a very basic terminal UI. For most of this section, I followed along with DHH's setup tutorial.

We want to run archinstall to open the Arch installer and setup our configurations.

I won't go too deep into this section since you can follow along with the video, but the general overview is this:

At this point, the installer will take over and it can take a few minutes for everything to e configured.

Once you've configured archinstall and run the installer, it will prompt you to restart the system.

The following sub-headings are some details that I thought I would callout which goes a little bit deeper than the video:

archinstall

archinstall is Arch Linux's official guided installer that provides a text-based interface for installing Arch Linux. It simplifies the traditionally manual installation process by offering:

bootloader

A bootloader is a small program that loads the operating system kernel into memory during startup. Common Linux bootloaders include GRUB and systemd-boot. The bootloader handles the transition from firmware (BIOS/UEFI) to the operating system, and can manage multiple OS installations on the same machine.

btrfs

Btrfs (B-tree file system) is a modern copy-on-write filesystem for Linux that supports advanced features like snapshots, checksums, and built-in RAID. It's designed for fault tolerance, repair, and easy administration.

zstd

Zstd (Zstandard) is a fast compression algorithm developed by Facebook that provides excellent compression ratios with high speed. It's commonly used for filesystem compression and package compression in Linux distributions.

wget

wget (web get) is a command-line utility for downloading files from web servers using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. It supports recursive downloads, resuming interrupted transfers, and can follow redirects. The -qO- options make it run quietly (-q) and output to stdout (-O-) instead of saving to a file.

Once the system reboots, you'll be prompted to unlock your encrypted disk and then log in with the configurations that you setup before.

In the previous section, we preemptively configured wget. We can now use it to install Omarchy.

wget -qO- https://omarchy.org/install | bash
copy

At my time of installation, this will prompt you for your password a few times and request some configurations for Git.

Afterwards, it will just do it's thing and install DHH's opinionated setup.

Once completed, you will be prompted to restart the system to apply the changes.

Congratulations, you have now configured Omarchy!

In this recount, we walked through how I configured my new Beelink SER5 for Omarchy with boot loading. This made use of my Mac for downloading, validating and configuring my USB drive for the Arch Linux ISO.

Hopefully this comes in handy for anyone else who may be keen to make the jump but wants to understand a little bit more about the configuration.

At this point, it's worth restarting DHH's video for the basics on how to work with Omarchy.

Photo credit: johnnyb803