I was going to review sidux next, but Arch has really been tempting me.  In the last week or so I had tried to install Arch a couple of times in a Virtualbox instance on my desktop (running Ubuntu) –however this did not yield positive results.

Or more descriptively,  the live cd would boot, and the install process would proceed normally and then stall once completed.  After a little searching, I realized this was due to an incompatibility between the 2.6.30 kernel and Virtualbox.  So naturally, I decided the only way to proceed was an actual install.

Firstly, I most definitely recommend making good use of the extraordinary ArchWiki, especially the Beginners Guide, Beginners Guide Appendix, and the Official Install Guide.  There is a ton of information in the wiki, and also in the forums.  following the beginners guide (and occasionally referencing other wikis…ie xorg, and the arch wireless guide), I was able to successfully set up the Arch system that I am using right now.

If I can do it, almost anyone can.  I have used Linux on/off since about 2001, and the last 2 or 3 years have used it exclusively.  At the same time,  I have not been very involved or too in-depth until the last year or so as most of that time I have used Ubuntu (and I’m talking relative to gentoo or some other more  “difficult” distro), not that there is anything wrong with Ubuntu.

When I first booted with the Arch livecd version 2009.02 (which is really just a snapshot of Arch since it uses a rolling release cycle), the main menu came up, which gave me some options to boot hard disk, some tools, and install Arch.  I chose install.
This brought up a command prompt where you can either login as arch (user) or root, neither of which have a password.  You can also switch between the virtual consoles by pressing Alt+F1 through Alt+F7. This would allow you to open the text official install guide from the cd using a “less” command which is supplied in the prompt (“# less /arch/arch-linux-official-guide.txt”).  I had my laptop beside my desktop, so I had the wikis open there so I could view them easily.

Another option I also used was the links browser, opening the wikis with it after I had my internet connected.

Onward! I logged in as root on virtual console 1 (the default), and ran cfdisk to partition my hard drive.  This laptop has 1 sata drive ~60Gb, and at the time had Sabayon 4.2 dual-booting with sidux.  cfdisk came up with an error with my extended partition, and said I needed to fsck.  Did that , still had error…so to make the story short I decided to wipe my drive entirely clean.  To do this I used parted magic boot disc and used gparted to just delete all of the partitions.

So now booting the Arch disc again, logged in as root, and ran “/arch/setup” to start the install process.  I selected FTP/HTTP as source (instead of the core cd I was using, as on one of the previous installs I had ran into problems upgrading to the latest kernel and libraries…easier to use FTP than figure out what was causing the problem).
The next step is prepare hard drive…where I had ran into trouble earlier. Although now I had a clean disk so  I was able to proceed normally– using auto prepare which splits the drive into 3 sections:  /boot, /, and /home.  I changed the default values to use 150mb, 15gb, and whatever was left went t o /home.
After assigning mount points,  package group and package selection.  base and base-devel are the two groups–I only selected base.  base-devel also is recommended for beginners.  The Next step was package selection within the groups, I left all of base selected, and grabbed a handful out of the base-devel group (and if I recall correctly there may have been a few from “other”…but I may be wrong).  All of the packages were installed next.
Then came the configuration.  This is where it gets even more important to follow the beginners (or the official install) guide…or both.  It is imperitive that you open to at least look at all of the files listed, to ensure that they are created.

/etc/rc.conf — this is the main centralized configuration file for Arch.  You will need to know all about this file, and if you’re like me you will learn to love it.
Most of the other files I only opened to ensure the variables were all correct, maybe changing a thing or two but nothing of note.
In the configuration you also set the root password, and then it is done!  The Arch base system is installed.  I was very glad to finally have a successful Arch install after the reboot.

Now…there is a command prompt, and only a command prompt.
And right  about now it is a good idea to do

pacman -Syy
and then
pacman -Syu

This will sync the pacman db and then upgrade the entire system.

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