Minimal installation of Manjaro

For Manjaro 20.0.3

This is how to do a minimal installation of Manjaro. This a simple installation guide which uses the entire disk.

Grab the Manjaro Architect ISO from https://manjaro.org/downloads/official/architect/
Choose your desired layout and keyboard
Boot Manjaro Architect
Login as user manjaro password manjaro
Run setup
It now takes a while because Manjaro updates the installer program and databases
Select Language
Select 1 Prepare Installation
Select 3 Partition Disk
Choose the correct disk
Select Automatic Partitioning BIOS & UEFI
Select Mount Partitions
Select the correct ROOT partition
Select ext4 mkfs.ext4 -q
Confirm the mount options
Select 13 Back
Select 3 Install CLI System
Select Install Base Packages
At Install Base dialogue choose linux-lts
At Additional kernel modules dialogue choose none
The installation begins now and will take a while
At Install Network Drivers select 1 Auto-install free drivers
Select 2 Install Bootloader
Choose grub
Select the correct device for Bootloader installation. Grub will now be installer
Select 3 Configure Base
Select 1 Generate FSTAB
Select fstabgen -U -p
Select 2 Set Hostname - choose a hostname
Select 4 Set Timezone and Clock, select the correct time zone, then choose UTC
Select 5 Set Root Password set a root password
Select 6 Add new user(s)
Select a name, select default shell (bash will do it), set a password
Select 7 Back
Select 8 Back
Select 6 Done
Confirm Close installer
reboot

When the machine is rebooted, login as root and execute the following commands

pacman -Rsc lvm2
systemctl enable dhclient@$(grep ^en /proc/net/dev|cut -d: -f1).service

Reboot again. Congratulation, you have now the smallest Manjaro system possible.

A minimal X environment

In this example we use bspwm.

As user execute the following commands

pacman -S xorg # choose default=all
pacman -S bspwm sxhkd xorg-init xterm rofi
 
install -Dm644 /usr/share/doc/bspwm/examples/sxhkdrc ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc
install -Dm755 /usr/share/doc/bspwm/examples/bspwmrc ~/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc
 
sed -ie s/dmenu_run/'rofi -show run'/g  ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc
sed -ie s/urxvt/xterm/g  ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc
 
echo "exec bspwm" >~/.xinitrc

Then reboot, login as user and execute startx. Once X has launched press Super (or Windows key) + Return to launch xterm