Intro

Artix’s installer runs fine on my mid 2010s Macbook Air, but on my early 2020s NovaCustom the Calamares installer was hanging at ‘Gathering System Requirements’ as soon as it opened.

Rather than use the CLI installer for doing all the disk encryption and other setup, I chose to resolve these issues so that the environment is as identical as possible to my other laptop.

Here’s how I ended up getting around it.

Steps

  1. Create bootable media with a GUI installer as you normally would, such as:
    $ sudo dd if=./artix-cinnamon-runit-YYYYMMDD.iso of=/your/device bs=4M status=progress && sync
  2. Restart the system and boot the media.
  3. Key down to CD/DVD/ISO option and press e.
  4. Add nomodeset and modprobe.blacklist=wl to the kernel options.
    setparams 'From CD/DVD/ISO: artix.x86_64 ' 'x86_64 nomodeset modprobe.blacklust=wl lang=en_US keytable=us tz=UTC ...
  5. Press ctrl+x to save and launch the script.
  6. Allow the media to boot the desktop environment.
  7. Try the GUI installer and hopefully it’s ready to go.
    • If not, run calamares -d from the terminal rather than launching the desktop shortcut to see if any obvious errors appear, then troubleshoot from there.

After you get it installed, if you notice issues with programs rendering properly, especially GTK apps where Qt apps work fine, please see this article.

Bonus

Once you have Artix installed and have rebooted into it, I recommend enabling the extra repo from Arch.

# Update System
sudo pacman -Syu

# Install Package
sudo pacman -Sy artix-archlinux-support

# Add Repository
sudo echo -e "\n\n## Arch Repos (unsupported but recommended) ##\n" >> /etc/pacman.conf
sudo echo "[extra]" >> /etc/pacman.conf
sudo echo "Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist-arch" >> /etc/pacman.conf

# Ensure Success
sudo pacman -Syy

Sources

The pages I learned about these hacks from.

blog.hyperling.com/artix-new-hardware