Arch Linux

fiod

Member

Registered: 2007-04-02

Posts: 205

A fresh Arch installation - from VirtualBox?

Hey,

My dad's laptop is about 2-year old LG. It runs Vista, and it runs like shit..
I wanna install Arch on the laptop for him, for a much better user experience.

Since I am only gonna see him on the weekend for only several hours,
I wanna make a fresh Arch install, tweak everything for his convenience, on a VirtualBox
enviroment, and then dd the partition to a fresh partition on his harddrive.

Can anyone think of any "show stoppers" as to why not go that way?
Can anyone offer any tips?

Thanks a lot,
fiod

savagenator

Member

Registered: 2008-03-19

Posts: 21

Re: A fresh Arch installation - from VirtualBox?

Arch is pretty complicated for new users and needs a lot of administrator maintenance when doing updates.

You are going to let them install updates right? (hint: security updates)

I would personally put on Ubuntu

EDIT:

I just realized the topic of this thread. What do you mean "from VirtualBox"?

Last edited by savagenator (2009-04-11 21:15:49)

fiod

Member

Registered: 2007-04-02

Posts: 205

Re: A fresh Arch installation - from VirtualBox?

Hey

I wanna install everything and tweak everything on a fresh VirtualBox installation (meaning, create a new VirtualBox VDI and install Arch on that), and then copy the entire partition to the LG's harddrive.

Since I will be maintaing his computer for him (my dad), I think Arch will be the easiest to maintain.

Thanks
fiod

savagenator

Member

Registered: 2008-03-19

Posts: 21

Re: A fresh Arch installation - from VirtualBox?

Sorry, I can't really help you very much. I think there is a hardware detection script/program that runs during installation. In theory it should just work if you copy it bye for byte onto a hard drive, but I am unsure. In Archlinux, you may be able to get to root (assuming you don't hit kernel panic) and use hwdetect

Last edited by savagenator (2009-04-11 23:31:08)

ao

Member

From: 青

Registered: 2008-02-02

Posts: 16

Re: A fresh Arch installation - from VirtualBox?

It should be fine, with one exception, the initial ramdisk.  You'll need to ensure that the hard drive controller's kernel modules are installed in the MODULES= section of /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

You should be able to boot the arch installer on the desktop and install the hwdetect script

~]$ hwdetect --hostcontroller
MODULES="pata_acpi ata_generic ahci ata_piix ehci-hcd ohci-hcd"

This many is probably overkill, since it should figure out dependencies, but if you don't want to think too hard about it just put them all in there.
Add those modules into /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and then run:

mkinitcpio -p kernel26

Then it should be able to boot.