Arch Linux

archIbald

Member

Registered: 2008-08-29

Posts: 8

First Install Attempt Failed due to Missing DM Support

Hi arch Users,

on the last FrOsCon almost a week ago I discovered a booth by some arch community advocaters
and asked them what kind of distro this was.
From their description that seemed exactly the kind of distro I have been looking for.
Also their mentioning that arch was originally derived from Slackware,
which I can remember from my Linux beginnings when each software package group still had a
maximal size to fit on a floppy disk, rose my interest.
So I grabbed one of their special FrOsCon 2008 CDs and gave it a try yesterday evening.
I booted from it, plugged in the USB stick where I wanted arch to be installed on (for first testing).
Then I partitioned the USB stick (eradicated the vfat partition it was shipped with)
so that I created one 128 MB primary type 0x83 (to hold /boot),
and a second 2 GB primary partition type 0x8e (LVM) (hope this would suffice for a basic install).
I then mkfs.ext3-ed /dev/sdb1, pvcreated /dev/sdb2, and vgcreated vgarch /dev/sdb2.
But then when I wanted to lvcreate LVs for / and /var I got a message similar to, "that the device mapper module"
hasn't been loaded (sorry, can't recap the exact phrase).
Ugh, I tried modprobe the dm* modules that I knew from my CentOS installations
but that didn't work.
Then I ran /arch/setup and flipped through the various menues
but haven't found any to either load device mapper support, nor to execute my wanted LVM layout from
the disk partitioner (n.b. this meanwhile works in RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu (others I don't know).
So can anyone tell me how one gets full MD (SW RAID) and LVM Support during the install when booting from
an arch image?
I don't need some wizzard that will guide me through it because I know the CLI of mdadm, pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate,
mkfs, tune2fs, mkswap etc. I only require that the kernel supports it to let me create the stuff during installation.
I also would like to know, if I select the FTP Install to obtain the packages,
how do I tell the installer to use our WWW HTTP/FTP proxy?
Is it simply by setting env vars like http_proxy, proxy_user, proxy_pass as you would in LWP (i.e. CPAN), or wget, curl etc?
Thanks for your attention.

archIbald

Member

Registered: 2008-08-29

Posts: 8

Re: First Install Attempt Failed due to Missing DM Support

I wonder, should I have posted this in the Installation section of the forum instead?

tigrmesh

IRC Op

From: Florida, US

Registered: 2007-12-11

Posts: 794

Re: First Install Attempt Failed due to Missing DM Support

I wonder, should I have posted this in the Installation section of the forum instead?

Maybe.  Ask a forum moderator to move the thread.

iirc, the installer can configure RAID and LVM.  I've never needed to, but the installer asks about them.  Also, Arch is not *derived* from Slackware;  it was created from LFS.

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: First Install Attempt Failed due to Missing DM Support

Check into this post..................http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=413356#p413356

EDIT: Also:http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=413356#p413356

Last edited by lilsirecho (2008-08-29 19:08:39)

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