Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

lucacerone · 2012-10-27 13:59:41

Dear all,
I'd like to give Arch a try installing it on a VirtualBox Machine in Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit)

I followed the instructions in the Beginners Guide
but my installation failed (after rebooting you can't go past grub).

I would like to make a second attempt, but this time I would like to have a clarification first (just to be sure)
In section 2.3 it is shown how to configure VirtualBox and certain packages to install are listed.
I figured that since the instructions used pacman, I had to install these packages during the installation, i.e. they have to be installed
IN VirtualBox, rather than in the system on which VirtualBox is installed (in my case Ubuntu). Is this correct?

I hope I will manage to get through the installation this time (it doesn't seem too complicated, but I can't understand why my installation failed).

Thanks in advance for your help,

Cheers, Luca

DSpider · 2012-10-27 14:20:10

It doesn't matter what your host OS is (Ubuntu, Windows 98, etc). If you follow the Beginners' Guide, the instructions are for installing Arch Linux. It doesn't matter if you're installing on a real machine or on a virtual machine. The process is the same. For VirtualBox in particular (doesn't apply to WMware or QEMU), there's the Guest Additions package, which will get you shared clipboard among other goodies. But that comes in much later. Like I said, the installation is exactly the same - appart maybe from establishing an internet connection, because dhcpcd is ran automatically.

It doesn't go passed GRUB probably because you forgot to generate a grub.cfg, or you used "/dev/sda1" instead of "/dev/sda". Or you used GPT instead of MBR and didn't create an empty 2 MiB partition (Syslinux doesn't need one).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … bootloader

lucacerone · 2012-10-27 14:28:29

Thanks DSpider,
so you suggest to skip the installation of kernel modules for virtualbox for the moment?

Also, I definitely installed grub since the menu appeared after the reboot.
It mentioned some error I asked about here .
Anyway I deleted the old harddisk, so now it is just a curiosity to understand what I did wrong.

Thanks for the link and advices!

lucacerone · 2012-10-27 16:34:10

I managed to install Arch in the next few days I will go through the configuration, installing a Desktop environment and playing a little bit with it
The only thing I did differently this time is that I used Gparted to create the partitions (booting from ultimate boot cd)!

ataraxia · 2012-10-27 21:55:50

lucacerone wrote:

I managed to install Arch in the next few days I will go through the configuration, installing a Desktop environment and playing a little bit with it
The only thing I did differently this time is that I used Gparted to create the partitions (booting from ultimate boot cd)!

Since you're using a virtual machine, and you had a hard time installing, it would probably be smart for you to clone your now-working VM as a backup in case your next steps break it again.

lucacerone · 2012-10-28 15:19:02

Thanks Ataraxia, thanks for the advice, I'll definitively do that!

Arch Linux

#1 2012-10-27 13:59:41

Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

#2 2012-10-27 14:20:10

Re: Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

#3 2012-10-27 14:28:29

Re: Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

#4 2012-10-27 16:34:10

Re: Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

#5 2012-10-27 21:55:50

Re: Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

#6 2012-10-28 15:19:02

Re: Installing Arch in a VirtualBox Machine

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