Arch Linux has to be installed manually since the official Arch Linux ISO doesn’t contain an installer, additionally, no packages are included in the ISO, so a working internet connection is required during installation. If you’d rather just download a pre-configured Arch Linux VM, go here.

Most of the information below can be found in the official installation guide but some other information requires some Googling and a little bit of digging around on the Arch Linux wiki and forums.

Virtual Machine Configuration

Create a new virtual machine in VirtualBox for Arch Linux (sample configuration shown below). Once the VM is created, add the Arch Linux ISO to the CD/DVD drive.

Configuration of the highlighted settings in the screenshot below are important and the rest are optional. Arch Linux can run on a pretty low memory configuration so you can set the size of the display and base memories according to your preference.

For storage, I configured a “dynamically allocated” 8.0 GB hard drive image since I wanted to upload the resulting VMs to Dropbox, but I would recommend using a “fixed size” hard drive if you have space to spare on your host machine.

Network settings are important: at a minimum, you need to bridge your host machine’s network interface (which is connected to the internet) with your VM as shown in the following image:

In case you would like any folders from your host machine to be accessible in your VM, the simplest way is to add them to the “Machine Folders” section under “Shared Folders” but do not select the “Auto-mount” option otherwise they will only be accessible as root (I’ve since moved to using sshfs for mounting my Windows host machine folders).

Installing Arch Linux

Now that the VM has been created with the ISO already inserted, start the virtual machine and login with user ID and password “root”.

You can partition the hard drive using either a single root partition or discrete partitions. I’ve chosen a mixture of the 2 partitioning schemes: 200MB as /boot for installing GRUB, 1024MB swap file and the rest allocated as a single root partition.

• Let’s use the lsblk command to take a look at all the available storage devices:
  

root@archiso ~ # lsblk
NAME             MAJ:MIN RM    SIZE  RO  TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                8:0    0      8G   0  disk
sr0               11:0    1    637M   0  rom   /run/archiso/bootmnt
loop0              7:0    0  278.2M   1  loop  /run/archiso/sfs/airootfs
loop1              7:1    0     32G   1  loop
└─arch_airootfs  254:0    0     32G   0  dm    /
loop2              7:2    0    256M   0  loop
└─arch_airootfs  254:0    0     32G   0  dm    /  

• In the example above, “sda” is the VM’s hard drive image. We can find out a bit more about “sda” using parted /dev/sda print:
  

root@archiso ~ # parted  /dev/sda  print
Error:  /dev/sda:  unrecognised  disk  label
Model:  ATA  VBOX HHRDDISK  (scsi)
Disk  /dev/sdai  8590MB
Sector  size  (logical/physical):  512B/512B
Partition  Table:  unknown
Disk Flags:

• The following set of parted commands will create the desired partitions (200MB as /boot for installing GRUB, 1024MB swap file and the rest allocated as a single root partition):

root@archiso ~ # parted  /dev/sda  
(parted)  mklabel  msdos  
(parted)  mkpart  primary  ext4  1MiB  200MiB  
(parted)  set  1  boot  on  
(parted)  mkpart  primary  linux-swap  210MiB  1177MiB  
(parted)  mkpart  primary  ext4  1024MiB  100%  
(parted)  print
Model:  ATA  VBOX  HARDDISK  (scsi)
Disk  /dev/sda:  8590MB
Sector  size  (logical/physical):  512B/512B
Partition  Table:  msdos
Disk  Flags:

Number   Start    End      Size     Type      File system   Flags
 1       1049kB   210MB    209MB    primary                 boot
 2       220MB    1234MB   1014MB   primary
 3       1234MB   8590MB   7356MB   primary

• Using lsblk again, we can see the new partition table, note that “sda” now has 3 subentries: “sda1” (/boot), “sda2” (swap) and “sda3” (root partition).

NAME            MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda               8:0    0     8G  0 disk
├─sda1            8:1    0   199M  0 part
├─sda2            8:2    0   967M  0 part
└─sda3            8:3    0   6.9G  0 part
sr0              11:0    1   637M  0 rom  /run/archiso/bootmnt
loop0             7:0    0 278.2M  1 loop /run/archiso/sfs/airootfs
loop1             7:1    0    32G  1 loop
└─arch_airootfs 254:0    0    32G  0 dm   /
loop2             7:2    0   256M  0 loop
└─arch_airootfs 254:0    0    32G  0 dm   /

• Let’s format the boot and root partitions to Ext4. For this we will use the mkfs.ext4 command:

root@archiso ~ # mkfs.ext4  /dev/sda1  
root@archiso ~ # mkfs.ext4  /dev/sda3  

• Now we’ll format and activate the swap partition. mkswap will format “/dev/sda2” as swap and swapon will tell the kernel that this is our swap partition.

root@archiso ~ # mkswap  /dev/sda2  
root@archiso ~ # swapon  /dev/sda2  

Mount the root and boot partitions:

root@archiso ~ # mount  /dev/sda3  /mnt  
root@archiso ~ # mkdir  -p  /mnt/boot  
root@archiso ~ # mount  /dev/sda1  /mnt/boot  

Install the base system using pacstrap:

root@archiso ~ # pacstrap  -i  /mnt  base  base-devel  

And finally, generate “fstab”:

root@archiso ~ # genfstab  -U  -p  /mnt  >>  /mnt/etc/fstab  

Chroot into Your Newly Installed Base System

• Since our Arch Linux system is now installed, we can chroot into and configure it…

root@archiso ~ # arch-chroot  /mnt  /bin/bash  

• Set the root password…

root@archiso ~ # passwd

• If you want, you can now create a user (recommended):

root@archiso ~ # useradd  [username]  
root@archiso ~ # passwd  [username]
root@archiso ~ # mkdir /home/[username]
root@archiso ~ # chown [username] /home/[username]

• I would also recommend adding the user you created above to the SUDOers list by using the visudo command to open sudo’s configuration file. First we’ll have to install Vim using pacman -S vim. Once Vim is installed, search for “## User privilege specification” and below the configuration for root add your username: <username> ALL = (ALL) ALL

• Download, install and configure grub…

root@archiso ~ # pacman  -S  grub  os-prober  
root@archiso ~ # grub-install  --recheck  /dev/sda  
root@archiso ~ # grub-mkconfig  -o  /boot/grub/grub.cfg  

• Almost, done — exit from chroot, unmount the mounted partitions and reboot (or shutdown). You can also remove the Arch Linux ISO from the VM’s CD/DVD drive…

root@archiso ~ # exit  
root@archiso ~ # umount  -R  /mnt  
root@archiso ~ # reboot  

Network Configuration

After you restart your VM (you can now login as the new user you created above) and boot into your shiny new Arch Linux installation, you’ll realize that the network doesn’t work. Even though the network worked out-of-the-box in the ISO, for some reason, it has to be configured from scratch now . I find this feature very strange extremely annoying. I’ve seen this in other distros as well, even in some with fancy Live CDs. I wonder why the network configuration is not copied during installation (did I miss something during installation?).

• The following network configuration is based on the VM’s network configuration shown above. enp0s3 is the bridged network adapter and ensp0s8 is the host only network. You need to create network files for both interfaces, e.g. sudo nano /etc/systemd/network/enp0s3.network and sudo nano /etc/systemd/network/enp0s8.network. The contents of these files for my installation are shown below:

$ cat  /etc/systemd/network/enp0s3.network  
[Match]
Name = enp0s3

[Network]
DHCP = ipv4
DNS = 8.8.8.8
DNS = 8.8.4.4
DNS = 123.241.172.101
DNS = 23.126.223.57
DNS = 210.57.226.138

[DHCP]
RouteMetric = 10

$ cat  /etc/systemd/network/enp0s8.network

[Match]
Name = enp0s8

[Network]
DHCP = ipv4

[DHCP]
RouteMetric = 20

• I manually specified public DNS for the interface which connects to the internet, you only need to do this if you have internet connectivity but are unable to resolve host names. In case you add public DNS to your network configuration, you might still need to update resolv.conf. The contents of my resolv.conf:

$ cat  /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4
nameserver 123.241.172.101
nameserver 23.126.223.57
nameserver 210.57.226.138

• Now enable DHCP for both network configurations and restart your network service.

$ sudo  systemctl  enable  dhcpcd@enp0s3.service  
$ sudo  systemctl  enable  dhcpcd@enp0s8.service  
$ sudo  systemctl  restart  systemd-networkd  
$ networkctl  
IDX LINK             TYPE               OPERATIONAL SETUP
  1 lo               loopback           carrier     unmanaged
  2 enp0s3           ether              routable    configured
  3 enp0s8           ether              routable    configuring

• Now that our network is all configured, lets update the system:

$ sudo  pacman  -Syu

Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions

This is required if you want to auto-resize the guest display, mount shared folders using vboxsf or would like to share your VM’s clipboard with your host machine or vice-versa.

$ sudo  pacman  -S  virtualbox-guest-modules  virtualbox-guest-utils  
$ sudo  modprobe  -a  vboxguest  vboxsf  vboxvideo  

Installing LXQT

This step is only required if you want to install LXQT (which I prefer over XFCE). In case you would like to use XFCE, you can move on to the next section which lists the steps for installing XFCE.

• Let’s download and install the LXQT program group, OpenBox (LXQT’s default window manager), OpenBox Configuration Utility and SDDM (LXQT’s preferred display manager)

$ pacman  -S  lxqt  openbox  obconf  sddm  

• We still need to install a couple of more packages before we can start LXQT. XFCE4 terminal and LXTerminal are optional (you can install another terminal of your choice).

$ sudo  pacman  -S  xorg-server-utils  xorg-xinit  gnome-themes-standard  xfce4-terminal  lxterminal

• Now add exec startlxqt to the start of /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~./xinitrc.

• Generate the configuration for the display manager (we need root to do this) and enable the display manager service.

$ su
$ sddm  --example-config  >  /etc/sddm.conf  
$ systemctl  enable  sddm.service  

• Now you can start LXQT by executing startx. Next time you restart your VM, you should see a graphical login manager and once you log in, LXQT should start automatically.

Installing XFCE

Since Arch Linux’s preferred desktop manager is XFCE, it is really easy to install. Just install the XFCE program group, XORG and LXDM (Arch Linux’s recommend display manager for XFCE). Afterwards, enable the display manager service and then you can start XFCE. Next time you restart your VM, you should see a graphical login manager and once you log in, XFCE should start automatically.

$ sudo  pacman  -S  xfce4  xorg  lxdm  
$ sudo  systemctl  enable  lxdm.service  
$ startxfce