Quickly Install an ArchLinux VM in 15 minutes

Today we’ll be looking at getting ArchLinux up and running in VirtualBox as rapidly as possible.

Prerequisites:

1. You have download the latest ArchLinux image from the downloads page.
2. You have VirtualBox installed and up to date.
3. You have some basic Linux hacking skills.
4. You’re fine with US English and keymap. The installation guide and beginner’s guide are great references if you need to change them.

Let’s do it!

• Make a new VM; select “Linux” and “Arch Linux” and a sane amount of RAM (we’ll be going with no swap space) and disk space. Start it up and select the Arch Linux image you downloaded. Boot into the appropriate kernel depending if you want 64- or 32-bit.
• Now the fun begins - we’re doing the rest in the shell with comments as commentary. You can download this directly by doing curl -L http://bit.ly/archlinux-install >install.sh

• Login as root with password root and begin customizing your system. I plan on making a script for this as well, but for now, the basics are:

  • Change your root password with passwd.
  • Add a user using useradd
  • Install packages with pacman -S, search with pacman -Ss. Here’s some suggestions on what to install and more about pacman.
  • Tell daemons to run at bootup by doing systemctl enable, start them once using systemctl start. Learn more about systemctl and systemd.
  • Get VirtualBox support for resizing etc by following the VirtualBox article.
  • Things that would work out of the box in Ubuntu often require software installation and a bit of configuration. This is usually straightforward, but requires a bit of reading on the ArchLinux wiki.