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So it’s actually been a couple weeks, but my new laptop came in. I’ve been saving and got an older model Lenovo Thinkpad.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/thinkpad-t14-amd-g1/20uds17y00

I have never had a computer this good even when I spent more money on a MacBook back in college. It was nice, but this thing hauls ice uphill.

So anywho, of course the first thing I wanted to do was put Arch Linux on there. I tell windows to shrink the partition and that worked well. I boot up a live USB of arch and install that into a new partition I created which went about as good as usual (I always forget to install something I need and have to boot the live USB over and over). Then comes bootloader…

I didn’t want grub. I’m trying to move towards booting purely with EFI but that would be a little beyond me just yet (future post to come on recompiling kernels with efistub). This time I was going to stretch myself and use systemd-boot.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot

I get my EPS mounted and was working through something when I got the up arrow key to many times and accidently wiped everything off the EPS. After I stared at the results for a little bit I proceeded to go ahead with installing systemd-boot and got the Arch loader configuration put where it needed to be to boot.

Yay, could turn on my fancy new laptop and get a blinking line on my basic new Arch install. But I’d borked my windows boot manager. I had to download an installer for windows 10 and boot from that and then run some commands to get it to reinstall the windows boot manager into the EPS.

I’ve forgotten what I did. I’ll try to look around and find that site again. Good news though is I got everything working again!

Next project was virtual machines and that will probably be the next post.