Arch in a VBox

BigAl-sa

BigAl-sa

Executive Member
Joined
Dec 26, 2006
Messages
6,756
Reaction score
316
Location
Pretoria
As I have quite a bit of bandwidth to get through before Sat, I thought I'd have a look at Arch. I downloaded the netinstall iso and set it running this morning. It went pretty well for about 20mins (just finished d/l the kernel) when it hung. Anyone know of any way to get the script to resume where it broke? The only option I can find is to restart the install (with all the downloading).

Second Q, if there is no way to continue the install, should I rather d/l the core iso, or just let the netinstall try again?
 
If you have problems with things hanging, the core iso is usually a better way to go. At least 1st get a working OS before trying to resume anything.
 
On a side note I must say shame as I suspect you might get hooked :D
 
Thanks guys! I've set a torrent going downloading the core iso, so I'll be able to try both tomorrow.
 
Well I now have a command line machine running in Vbox. I tried again with the netinstall, but what appears to happen is that the network link gets lost and the install just hangs. The core install worked fine - though I don't think someone without some Linux experience should try this.

pacman is also a bit of a pain as I really battled to get it to update it's repository list from tenet. Anyway, I now have an updated core system, so tomorrow I'll try and find out how to get gnome running.
 
@BigAl-sa
If you follow the Installation Guide and Beginners Guide it's really quite simple. Normally you would need a second PC with internet access, but if you are going the Vbox route then it's not a problem. You probably already know this, I'm just saying that there is not much (initially) to try and find out. :)

The biggest mistake I made with Arch was that I didn't allocate enough space to it and didn't bother making separate partitions. I never thought it would become my main distro. Anyway, that's fixed now, I wiped a partition that had an unused distro (that I won't mention) on it and moved /home to it.
 
Last edited:
So far, I'm rather unimpressed by Arch. I'm going to be doing my fourth attempt at installing it tomorrow (maybe - I may rather look at Lynx if the Tukkies mirror gets it). I can't understand why make and gcc aren't include in the base install. Took me a while to figure that they weren't.
 
ponder said:
Why, what went wrong the two previous times?
Click to expand...

Failed netinstalls. 3rd time couldn't get X working (errors in trying to get the Guest Additions for VBox compiled), so will start over :(

@Shaun: plenty of space allocated, RAM and disk.
 
BigAl-sa said:
Failed netinstalls. 3rd time couldn't get X working (errors in trying to get the Guest Additions for VBox compiled), so will start over :(
Click to expand...

Don't you have a spare partition you can install it too, might be easier?
 
You do not need the guest additions to get X working. The guest additions are additional drivers to boost performance a bit (like better 3D etc.) but are not essential to get a working system.

If you ran the configuration script for X then you should have been set to go.

Oh, and remember, just because Gnome is installed does not mean that Xorg is automatically installed, double check to see if it is installed. Last time I did an Arch install Xorg was not a dependency that got pulled in automatically with either KDE or Gnome. Strange but true.
 
ponder said:
Don't you have a spare partition you can install it too, might be easier?
Click to expand...

I agree it will be easier, but I've reached the point where I want to get it working in the VBox, so as soon as I've finished playing with Lucid, I'll give it another go.

MyWorld said:
You do not need the guest additions to get X working. The guest additions are additional drivers to boost performance a bit (like better 3D etc.) but are not essential to get a working system.

If you ran the configuration script for X then you should have been set to go.

Oh, and remember, just because Gnome is installed does not mean that Xorg is automatically installed, double check to see if it is installed. Last time I did an Arch install Xorg was not a dependency that got pulled in automatically with either KDE or Gnome. Strange but true.
Click to expand...

I think it was probably the upside down way I installed stuff (including the Guest Additions), which is why I want to start over. I did explicitly install Xorg and didn't actually get to Gnome.
 
I've finally got Arch in a Vbox working, with a working GUI. VBox guest additions are definitely needed, otherwise Xorg does give errors with the video drivers. What is necessary to get the guest additions to compile and link into the kernel are the kernel headers:

Code: 
sudo pacman -S kernel26-headers

(if you have sudo installed and set up properly). Then install the guest additions and reboot the system. It may be sufficient just to restart HAL, but I think it's safer to reboot.

For fun, I've installed xfce as a GUI, and that has its own hassles ;)

I'll blog this sometime as it's not trivial to get it working, and the arch wikis are not written for normal people. Maybe one day when I'm bored, I'll have a go at editing some of those wikis.
 
BigAl-sa said:
I'll blog this sometime as it's not trivial to get it working, and the arch wikis are not written for normal people. Maybe one day when I'm bored, I'll have a go at editing some of those wikis.
Click to expand...

They are generally very good. I think the VB wiki is outdated though, especially wrt installing guest additions, I sukkeled my gat af a few months ago to install guest additions and to share folders between guest & host. The wiki page was definitely not up to normal Arch standards.
 
Can anyone tell me if Arch has a decent GUI package manager such as synaptic? I'm looking for something where I can see at a glance what is installed, and what can be installed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X