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Arch Linux Installation - Part Two

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1 Oct 2015CPOL2 min read 4.1K  
Picking back up where part one ended. Open virutal box and select your newly partitioned virtual machine click settings and select storage.

Picking back up where part one ended. Open virutal box and select your newly partitioned virtual machine click settings and select storage. Within the Storage Tree select the Controller: IDE and replace GParted with the Arch Linux ISO you downloaded then click ok then start the virtual machine.

Selecting An Arch Linux Version

After a few seconds you'll be presented with the Arch Linux boot screen. At this point you can choose either the 64 or i686 version. It doesn't matter which version you decide to go with because this guide will work with either one.

Arch Linux Boot Screen

Press the up/down keys to highlight which version suits you then press enter to select it. Once you do this, the Arch Linux boot process will be displayed on your screen. When it's done you'll be dropped right into a command prompt.

Partition Verification

The first command we need to issue is fdisk -l. This command lists the partitions for our virtual machine. Issuing this command allows us to make sure that the list that's displayed to us is what we expected.

The items shown under the Device Boot column in the list are as follows:

Root partition:

  • /dev/sda1

Linux swap partition:

  • /dev/sda2

Home partition:

  • /dev/sda3

Mounting Drives

Now we need to create our home directory and we can do so with the following command:

  • mkdir /mnt/home

Next we need to mount our /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda3 partitions in order to modify them:

  • mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
  • mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home

Install Base Distribution

Next we need to issue the pacstrap command:

  • pacstrap -i /mnt base

What's happening at this point is that pacstrap is installing the base distribution to the /mnt directory.

pacstrap will eventually ask you to enter a selection. Just press enter when it does. Next it will ask you to proceed with installation; type Y then press enter and it will continue installing the base distribution.

Wrap Up

In the next part we will start by creating a fstab file and continue installing Arch!

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)