Arch Linux on OSX

I’ve wanted to take a look at Arch Linux for a while now, and when a student got me to connect her inherited Arch laptop to the University Wi-Fi network last week, I was reminded that this lightweight distribution is attractive to the increasingly paranoid control freak that I am becoming. Having toyed with the idea of spending money on an XPS or some other super-cool hacker machine, and having been defeated by prudence, here’s how I got it running as a first-time-out instance on my University MacBook Air¹.

The Host

Like I said, I really can’t justify a separate development machine, especially as I have use of a decent spec laptop. The Arch download page includes a number of different ways of acquiring the distro, including using Vagrant with VirtualBox, which I had intended to plug an Arch ISO disk into.

The Virtual Machine

I downloaded and installed Vagrant and gave it a spin with the example Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Installation, running and logging in to the instance takes three commands…

$ vagrant init hashicorp/precise64
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

Arch

Firing up Arch itself could be done the same way, but the Vagrant site hints that once Vagrant is installed on your dev machine, all you need is a Vagrantfile with the right info in it. Here’s the MWE² I started with. It uses ruby syntax, and was simply a new directory containing a single file called Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "archlinux/archlinux"
end

This is a super quick and easy way to get Arch up and running. Now, you just type the command:

$ vagrant up

This will download and install a fresh instance of Arch and fire it up, ready for you to ssh into.