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. I found a great tutorial that works through installing Arch from other linux installations using chroot. It was much faster than previous experiences. I had all the files in place with users etc in around 2 hours.

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.

I can strongly recommend installing arch (or other distributions) from a chroot environment. 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.