For some reason, I’m really drawn to Arch Linux. I’ve used it in the past(probably a couple of years ago), with decent success. However, recently I’ve been wanting to try it again, but am having many issues. I won’t go in to the issues I’m having, yet, as I haven’t researched deeply in to them, and want to before I start bad-mouthing the distro.
That being said, I got a full working Arch Linux install up and running last night in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The only trick I had to do was choose the IDE-Legacy boot option during the install. After that, everything just worked. And what was amazing to me, is that networking was working from the get go on it, and I was using my laptop via wireless. So VirtualBox must pass whatever networking the host computer is using to it’s virtual adapter. Thats was cool and somewhat unexpected.
Once the base was installed, I was easily able to install gdm, gnome, xfce , and fluxbox and everything worked perfectly. I’m really liking Xfce, and Arch already has the latest(4.4) available in its repositories. So that was cool to check out. I did get an error installing xfce4-goodies though, but it wasn’t a show stopper.
Arch is fast. Even in a virtual machine, everything is very snappy. I really want to get it working on my workstation or even my laptop as the main install.