A gentoo guy installing archlinux off a daily Jaunty Jackalope livecd

What the title says.

I've had enough of compiling and grinding my disks and decided to jump distro today. I loved using gentoo for the last few years, but I really wanted to try something new, something exciting and I stumbled across arch. On first glance, it looked like gentoo without compiling. Well, that's what I was searching for, so I downloaded their install cd and set to work.

I first backed up my root partition. 16 gigs of programs and other junk got squeezed in a 2.7 gig tar.bz2. Pretty awsome. This of course does not include any personal data, I'll be keeping my home dirs and other partitions, it's just the system that's getting a makeover.

I booted arch. I wanted to try ext4 which has been getting so much press lately, and the default arch livecd didn't have the new e2fsprogs that supported it, but pacman (the arch package manager) was easy to bribe into updating it (on the ramdisk). Hurrah for pacman. This, of course, did not save me from the next jiffy - 2.6.25 kernel.

So, here I am, an hour later, sitting behind a Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope daily build, installing arch on an ext4 partition. Yay me.

So, how does one do that? One follows the http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_From_Existing_Linux guide, of course. Right.

First, you need a whole bunch of stuff from an arch cd, so mount your iso image to /mnt/archiso, then mount the squashfs image on it to /mnt/arch. My new system is going to be /mnt/newroot. In my case, the iso image was on my old home partition, and so I had to mount that as well, and I then find myself in the following situation:

/mnt/home (with archiso.iso) - mounted home drive

/mnt/archcd (with archlive.sqfs) - mounted iso image

/mnt/arch - mounted squashfs image

and so I come to my accessible, chrootable and fine arch livecd running on top of ubuntu jaunty.

For the people seeking help, here's the sequence of commands to accomplish this:

sudo mkdir /mnt/home /mnt/arch /mnt/archcd

sudo mount /dev/sdc4 /mnt/home

sudo mount -o loop /mnt/home/atom/archiso.iso /mnt/archcd

sudo mount -o loop /mnt/archcd/archlive.sqfs /mnt/arch

now we just mount our /dev, /proc and /sys over so that everything on the livecd can work...

sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/arch/sys
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/arch/proc
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/arch/dev
sudo chroot /mnt/arch

To tell you the truth, I didn't really know how the system would react since it has no root account, but it seemed to run well enough. My prompt was useless (bash-3.2#), but 

export PS1='\u@\h${pwd} # '

quickly fixed that. However, the resulting filesystem was still read-only and so the installer failed to run. I was left to find another way.

And so it was back to following the wiki. It was then I discovered (late, I know) that the sudo way was idiotic for any serious sysadmin work. I needed root and I needed it then. so I tried sudo bash, and it worked! I now had a root bash shell :)

And then I ran into a lot of problems and started fixing them... and never got around to writing all of it down. So, I fail. The end result was an installed arch system, together with everything I could wish for. Arch was finally installed without even touching the installer - something I was told is impossible (not to mention unsupported) on fedora I was installing on another computer at the time.

Ogre was still a bit of a pain to install until I figured out how arch does it, and pacman is a joy to use.

All in all, I've been using arch for a few weeks now, and have been pretty happy about it.