Virtual Box: Installing Arch Linux, Final Notes
Read Part One.
Read Part Two.
Read Part Three.
Once Arch is installed, you have a bare-bones Linux installation that boots to the command line.
At this point, you can configure the system you want using “pacman,” the Arch software package manager, which gets excellent reviews even from folks who don’t use Arch regularly..
Most persons will want to install X (the package of software that allows graphical interfaces to run on Linux, ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) for running their sound card, and a GUI of some sort. X comes with Tom’s Window Manager (TWM), which is quite primitive; you start applications by opening a command or terminal window and typing the command to start the program.
Arch’s Unofficial Beginner’s Guide includes very good instructions for building your new system from the ground up. I pretty much copied commands from the Beginner’s Guide to build the rest of the system.
You can watch a short video summing up what I’ve covered in these four posts about Arch here. (I couldn’t get the embed to work.)