Toil Toil

I took another stab at Arch Linux today. Toil toil toil. The last time I tried to install Archlinux, I was able to install it, but I had to abandon my Ubuntu installation and go 100% Arch.

Today, with more mileage under my belt, I tried again. This relates to what I discussed in A New Milepost, where I shared my experience with the installation process. As I mentioned there, it took me a few tries before I got it right. This time, I used a great tutorial that works through installing Arch from other Linux installations using chroot. It was much faster than previous experiences. This relates to what I discussed in More For My Devops Alter Ego, where I explored how tools like Vagrant can streamline development workflow. Using chroot was a lifesaver, as I've written about in More For My Devops Alter Ego. It's amazing how it can streamline the development workflow, and it worked wonders for me during this installation process.

Then came time to boot.

Once again, I had problems with the boot. perhaps it was grub or something else. I toiled for about three hours on it. Finally, I decided to give up on ubuntu’s grub and set up the grub on arch using the archlinux instructions. It seemed fine but at the last moment, I accidentally turned on the bios secure boot.

Oops. I didn’t know how to turn it off and all of a sudden my whole computer would not boot from the hard drive. Wow. 4

Some creative googling led me to this page and this page. With these I was able to disable the secure boot. Then presto! I could boot into either arch or ubuntu.

And I stand by that recommendation. As I mentioned earlier, using a chroot environment made the installation process much smoother, similar to what I experienced in Arching Over when setting up Arch Linux on a small computer. It was fast and smooth (except the boot.).

Update on Arch Linux

It is super! There were a few funny spots, and I still can’t get the splash start up screen to work yet (plymouth not working for some reason),but everything else is GREAT! I now have dropbox installed so both my os’s can access the same disc partition (no duplicate data),and I am steadily installing all the software that I like to use (amazing how it changes over time).

Everything is going in like a charm. Inkscape, blender, filezilla, google chrome, and now steam. I can play steam games on arch now. Also minecraft (easier to start in arch than Ubuntu) and the minecraft mapper chunky.

I had a bit of trouble setting up Japanese input but got it working after a few tries. I also oddly enough had some trouble with the date and time but that seems to be in order now too. Almost everything I need is now going and it didn’t seem at all stressful.