On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:57:12PM -0400, ProfJCNash wrote:
> The Beginners Guide "sort of" worked, but left me with a
> system that still came up with a terminal.
You need to enable a graphical display manager for login, or otherwise
didn't start X11 on boot. That or you have something that starts X when
you login.
~/.profile, ~/.zlogin, or ~/.bash_profile (or ~/.bash_login if you want later):
if [ "$(tty)" = /dev/tty1 ]; then
exec startx
fi
If you don't, it's not broken. It just wasn't asked for, which is quite
reasonable for a large amount of users.
> I tried to install openbox but was told I had no link to repositories.
Either you need to uncomment the package mirror for your region upon
installation, which is a step in the guide, or you need to just refresh
the package database because it's the first time you run.
Most generic package managers have a similar operation. pacman makes no
assumptions about being smarter than the user.
> Another posting on the net said try 'pacman -Syu' which proceeded to
> upgrade a whole lot of things, then ran out of space.
Uuuum, is your filesystem big enough? This doesn't sound like it has
anything to do with Arch.
> I suspect I need to manually mount a disk, but haven't found that in a
> tutorial yet.
Don't search for Arch then. Have you ever used mount directly? You just
need to know the path to the device,
$ lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT
sda
├─sda1 vfat SYSTEM CENS-ORED /media/esp
├─sda2
├─sda3 ntfs Windows CENSOREDCENSORED
├─sda4 ntfs WinRE_DRV CENSOREDCENSORED
└─sda5 crypto_LUKS CENSORED-CENS-ORED-CENS-OREDCENSORED
└─cryptroot ext4 CENSORED-CENS-ORED-CENS-OREDCENSORED /
$ sudo mkdir -p /media/windows-10
$ sudo mount /dev/sda3 /media/windows-10
That's the utmost manual way.
> Can anyone point to a properly tied together recipe that goes from Vbox
> boot to a working windowed system?
With what parameters? Everybody wants a different window manager or
desktop environment. Everybody wants a different display manager (gdm,
slim, etc). Everybody wants a different editor.
To heck. Let them choose.
If you want a recipe for bootstrapping, it's the beginner's guide, and
the rest of the wiki, though I can't attest to the quality since I
haven't used it in three or four years, and I already know what I'm
doing.
> Or -- since we are dealing with Linux here -- a script that I can
> simply edit and let run.
We used to have that. The Arch Install Framework, which was
fundamentally broken anyway, because everybody had different needs.
> Someone needs to point out the the Arch developers
There aren't that many developers. There's not that much in a distro
except packagers. If you don't agree with building up, don't use Arch.
If you have a problem with a package in particular, unless it's how it
was packaged, go talk to upstream.
> that typing in a screen image is a very error-prone process.
What do you mean by a “typing in a screen image”?
> The concept of Arch seems right, but the implementation seems intended
> to annoy.
I'm sorry, but that's a bit of an extreme statement.
The only thing that has ever annoyed me was the hardware and firmware I
was installing on, or the original software itself.
Could you provide details please? I'm curious now.
Regards,
Alex Pilon