dhcpcd Didn’t make things work. Had to go at it again with the network.
The error message was something about no carriers and sending the dhcpcd-process to the background.
Solution:
ps -A | grep dhcpcd
kill <process id>
cp /etc/network.d/examples/wireless-wpa /etc/examples/mynetwork
nano /etc/examples/mynetwork
edit the file, insert your SSHID and KEY.
netcfg mynetwork
When exiting the installer, I got a message that pacman had failed.
This being my second time installing arch, I got the hint. Network DOWN.
ipconfig
No! That’s windows!
ifconfig
better. It shows there is no IP-adress.. Only 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 That’s localhost. A very small network. I will be lonely without the internets.
dhcpcd
I remember this one from last time in arch.lets try
/arch/setup
again.
Nope!
Booting from the SD-card didn’t work.
Looking through the devices in BIOS, I assumed it to be CARDBUS NIC. But maybe that is something more “network”. Plugged the card into a usb card reader instead. Booting from USB Storage Device? Better luck?
YES.
I choose to boot arch linux in the minimal GUI there was and am now in the arch console. First things first. Change keyboard
km
I found my jp106 keyboard map in the GUI without any trouble. Knowing what keyboard layout you use does save lives after all.
Next to select a console font. This makes me clueless however. Looking at the names Lat must be latin characters. I think I want that. But there is also iso ones and I’m a man of standards. After all that reasoning I chose default 8×16. I’m brave like that.
Nothing changed.
/arch/setup
This however, feels like it might change the looks of things.I went with auto preparing of a disk. Was easy enough unti you need to select a filesystem for / and /home . I went with Ext3, because I think that is something of a linux standard. Maybe.
ext2 on sda1
swap on sda2
ext3 on sda3
ext3 on sda4
Normal I think.
Next step Select packages failed. And I don’t know why. Check dev/tty7 for errors.
I’m such
Step 2 is to copy files to the sd card, and somehow make it bootable. I’m sitting on OSX so I plug in my sd-card (in a external USB-card reader, I might add).
First I want to figure out what the device is called. Let’s see what devices we have.
ls /dev/
Oh, that gave lots of output. But I expected to find sda, sdb and similar that I know so well from centOS. Let’s see what’s mounted instead
mount
That was more reasonable. It told me that I have /dev/disk3s1 mounted on /Volumes/SDCARD . For once it payed off to have a descriptive label on my volumes.
ls /dev/disk*
Aha. Knowing that linux harddrives are named sda sdb sdc ,and partitions are sda1 sda2, I can assume OSX hdds are called disk1, disk2, disk3 and partions are disk1s1 disk1s2. OSX will refuse to make changes to a disk if a partition is in use, so let’s unmount it.
umount /dev/disk3s1
Oh, I know this…
sudo umount /dev/disk3s1
I guess not. Let’s try that mentioned diskutil tool then
diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1
Yay. progress. Next, after some reading, I figure I need to do a copy from archlinux iso to the /dev/disk3. I think what we need to do is write to the first sector of the sdcard. Which is where the master boot records are held. Also called MBR. That’s why a standard cp won’t work. We need the low-level tool dd.
dd if=archlinux-2011.08.19-core-i686.iso of=/dev/disk3 bs=8192
Woah. It’s a copy command, so I can figure out that it’ll copy from if= to of=. But bs=8192? How does anyone come up with a number like that?
Because the guys on arch tells you to use this number, that’s why. And this was my main gripe with anything linux. Who wants to become a living reference of linux commands? Do I have to google everything, as soon as I want to do something simple?
No, I don’t need to know all the commands. I do need to know a solid subset of the most used once to become a effective linux user. And after that I learn the ones that I need to complete whatever my objective is. Also. This command is not that simple, and I’ll probably not use it ever again. So it’s fine.
man dd
Shows that the bs option decides block size. I choose to not ponder over it more this day, but maybe that’ll come back and haunt me.
There! we are done. Eject the device with
diskutil eject /dev/disk3
I have two things I plan to do today.
1) I plan on installing arch linux on an old Dell Latitude D420.
2) I want to start a project (that I’ve had in mind for a long time) in cocos2d for iphone.
Let’s begin with arch.
Goals:
I want it to be able to run the usual video formats, so the kids still can use their favorite computer. I want to install sublime text editor, and some web browser of course. And I want to be able to be able to compile and run Haskell source. I’ve tried and failed this process once before (on VMWare), but I learned about a X window manager called xmonad, so that is also part of the plan.
Yeah, that’s it. Let’s get started.
Starting out with:
Old dell laptop that runs Fedora 16. (I didn’t learn anything at all from that automated installation.) I have no cd’s left, but I do have a 4gb SD card, and I hope I’ll be able to install from that. Maybe.
Step 1: Download arch. http://www.archlinux.org/download/
I choose the i686 core version.
http://www.archlinux.org/iso/2011.08.19/archlinux-2011.08.19-core-i686.iso.torrent
Internet speed is limited here, so let’s continue when the download is complete.
