Arch Linux

KayDav

Member

Registered: 2023-02-26

Posts: 1

New & trouble with a new installation

Hello,
I apologise if this is posted in the wrong place. I'm fairly new to Arch Linux and newly registered here. I am having trouble getting from the installation steps to Arch working as expected immediately post-installation.

I am installing the most recent version of Arch as a guest in VMWare on my Windows 10 host system. It's with a view to possibly ditching Windows when I get my next PC, but trying everything out virtually first. I had previously installed an earlier version of Arch (in 2015) in VirtualBox but that's a long time ago now so I decided fresh install rather than attempt an upgrade.

I followed these guides:
1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
2. https://www.howtogeek.com/766168/how-to … x-on-a-pc/

The first guide appeared to work, but I hit problems after a reboot while trying to install the KDE environment. None of the mirrors worked, and ping didn't work. I thought I'd made a mistake somewhere and missed out the network support, so I backtracked to the live ISO and used the second guide to redo everything. The second guide is slightly different and installs vim, edits in the hostname to /etc/hosts where the first guide doesn't. It also enables SDDM and NetworkManager where the first guide didn't, so I made sure I did those.

This got me with network and mirrors and pacman downloaded several packages perfectly. I rebooted into the KDE-Plasma environment and checked in Discover to see if there were any updates and it said I was fully up to date. Then I rebooted and suddenly Discover had no backend apps. I went into the terminal to use pacman to (re)install them, but it said that the sudo command is not found.

Next I tried booting into recovery mode so that I could log on as root and fix things. Again, pacman is unable to connect with any of the mirrors, so it can't install any packages. When I boot into the KDE, my browser has no trouble accessing the internet. The mirrors in the second install are the UK ones from the Pacman Mirrorlist Generator. In the first install I ran reflector at step 2.1 in the guide.

I still think I may have done something wrong or missed a vital step. I will most likely try another reinstall, from scratch this time. I've seen that I should have done pacman -Syu quite early on (I didn't try it until after experiencing the pacman/mirror issues), and I can also try giving my user sudo privileges before booting into the KDE.

If anyone can help with what I could do differently or what I did wrong in the first place, I'd appreciate it very much. Thank you.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,653

Re: New & trouble with a new installation

You lost me toward the end there.   I don't know if your host is using wireless or not, but understand that the emulated machine will be using a virtual *wired* connection.   How are you trying to control your internet connection inside the guest?  dhcpcd? NetworkManager?

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,471

Website

Re: New & trouble with a new installation

The first guide appeared to work, but I hit problems after a reboot while trying to install the KDE environment. None of the mirrors worked, and ping didn't work.

No networking service is installed or enabled by default which is why the installation guide directs you to chose and install some:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … figuration

so I backtracked to the live ISO and used the second guide to redo everything.

We can't support installations based off of third party guides.  You'll have to ask the author of that guide for any help resulting from that installation.

I went into the terminal to use pacman to (re)install them, but it said that the sudo command is not found.

Likely because you didn't install sudo.  So no surprise there.

Next I tried booting into recovery mode so that I could log on as root and fix things. Again, pacman is unable to connect with any of the mirrors, so it can't install any packages.

Post actual error messages.  Are you connecting to a network?  How?

If anyone can help with what I could do differently or what I did wrong in the first place, I'd appreciate it very much. Thank you.

Slow down.  Read instructions carefully.  Don't guess and flail away with third party guides.  Post actual error messages if / when you get stuck, and we can help, but paraphrasing things that were done wrong previously leaves us no way to guide you to do any better.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman