Installation
The Arch Linux website supplies ISO images that can be run from CD or USB. They included the Arch Installation Framework (AIF) (until the 2011.08.19 release) providing a dialog based interactive installation script. The default install was minimalist. Further system customization and expansion (adding a window manager, desktop environment, etc.) had to be be done manually, installing packages downloaded from online repositories. However, AIF has been removed since the 2012.07.15 release due to lack of maintainers, and instead has been replaced by a simple command line script (pacstrap).
An alternative to using CD or USB images for installation is to use the static version of the package manager Pacman, from within another Linux based operating system. The user can mount his or her newly formatted drive partition, and use Pacman with the appropriate command-line switch to have it use the mountpoint of the device as root for its operations. This way the base package group and any additional packages can be installed on the newly formatted partition by having Pacman retrieve them from its mirrors. However, there are further actions that need to be taken before the system is ready for use after this process, most notably installing a bootloader, and making various configurations to the new system.
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