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I've successfully burned the 32 bit ISO image to DVD but when I run it on the laptop I wish to install it on all I get is the command prompt. I tried "startx" but get nothing. How do we get the installer to run (if there is one) so that we can install from the DVD to the hard drive? Thanks!!
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Now you need to follow the installation guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation
It's a lot more involved than other linuxes you might be familiar with, but at the same time as you're figuring all this out, you're learning a lot about how linux is screwed together. The ISO is not a live ISO, and it relies on you setting your partitions up using standard linux tools. Personally I always go for a home partition, which has eased system updates in the past, and I tend also to create a var partition because I want advance notice if that's going over its budget and needs to be tidied before it fills the root partition. On my current server with an old 320GB disc in it, I've given it 8GB for /var and 16GB for root (mostly used by /usr) and everything else is /home. My home and var partitions are currently well used, but my 16GB root partition is only 36% used so next time I may not make that quite that large. On my laptop I've had to split /usr and / but in total I've allotted just short of 12GB for those, and am using about 43% of that, and that machine runs libreoffice and firefox, which I consider to be quite large packages.
Edit: Good spot, Andreas. I was thinking, 'it's not got one of those TB discs in it, so what was I using before?' and somehow managed to lose about 10 years of upgrades in the middle.
Last edited by levi (2018-07-05 20:42:02)
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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@levi: I think you meant GB, not MB. :-)
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Thanks for answering my question, @levi @andreas_baumann Now my question is whether Archlinux would be ok to run on a laptop I have from 2004 that has 1GB of RAM, 100GB HD, processor I don't remember exactly but is an AMD? I installed Puppy Linux but it still runs slow even though Puppy Linux is supposed to be for older laptops. Thanks again to both!!
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What kind of AMD, can you post the result of
grep 'model name' /proc/cpuinfoWe currently optimize for i686, this means AMD-K5 for instance doesn't work.
One GB of RAM could be a little bit tight for the default ISO. There is a i486
version and an ISO on http://archlinux32.andreasbaumann.cc/arch486isos/.
This ISO doesn't load anything into memory (not the ISO, just a minimal
initial ramdisk). But try the default Archlinux32 i686 ISO first.
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Here it is @andreas_baumann:
grep 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz
Last edited by cyberooptiq (2018-07-07 15:27:10)
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Ah. This is a 64-bit CPU, and an Intel and not an ARM, should work with standard Archlinux. :-)
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@andreas_baumann - Yes...my mistake....I have several laptops which I have been given as hand-me-downs so I forget which has what as I have ripped off the labels on them after converting them to Linux....so is this CPU ok to use for Archlinux?? Thanks so much for your time!!
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Yeah. Should work. The only worry I have is the ISO gets loaded to RAM, 1 GB could be too few memory. Worth a try. :-)
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Thanks again, @andreas_baumann my worry is not during installation of ISO but if system would run normally once installed to HD with only 1GB RAM?
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1 GB RAM is enough.
512 MB disk space is the absolute minimum to get 'base' installed, so your 100 GB is more than enough.
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@andreas_baumann - thank you for your time and patience with my questions!! Greatly appreciated. Will re-try the install since Puppy Linux does not seem to be working for me as it tends to slow. I installed Puppy Linux on it because a Google search for Linux distros for older laptops said it runs fine on older hardware.
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Yeah. Should work. The only worry I have is the ISO gets loaded to RAM, 1 GB could be too few memory. Worth a try. :-)
Does it? I'm pretty sure I installed archlinux originally back on my P3 server with around 64MB of RAM. Now that was a dual arch CD ROM so maybe the ISO was split in half somehow, but half a CDROM is still 350MB, but that was still more RAM than that machine came with. I did later upgrade it to its motherboard maximum of 512MB, but I'm 99% sure I did that after I got it working using Archlinux.
As far as I know it'll load the initrd into ram to bootstrap the system, but after that point it mounts a loop filesystem and union mounts the cd filesystem with a tmpfs ram drive. Unless you write loads of stuff into that filesystem you won't run out of RAM. Actually, thinking back I'm pretty sure most of it isn't in RAM given how often the system spins up the CDROM drive during that install phase.
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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Yes, that's why I made a i486 ISO: http://archlinux32.andreasbaumann.cc/arch486isos/.
This one runs online with a ramdisk (which can be loaded) and the main filesystem remains
on the ISO.
And in the standard ISO there is a 'non-load-to-memory' option somewhere (which I'm currently
unable to find), but you're right, you still need around 1.5 GB RAM for this to work.
I fiddled with various options in https://bbs.archlinux32.org/viewtopic.php?pid=3498 for
low-level machines, my tests show 288MB memory with the i486 ISO mentioned abive is enough.
I installed it with PXE on a machine with 196 MB RAM, but this is more for the adventurer. :-)
Now, in the case above, the machine is a 64-bit machine, so I would change /etc/pacman.conf
and /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to match the standard Archlinux upstream and install from there
(using the i486 only to boot).
Running the installed Archlinx (either 32-bit or 64-bit Archlinux) is not a problem with 1 GB RAM.
I run Archlinux32 in on a Acer Travelmate with 512 MB RAM and on an Alix 1.E with 256 MB RAM.
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