Virtualising Arch the easy way
When developing and testing software, it helps to have a stable base platform on which to test it. This is particularly true when doing anything low level that would otherwise involve rebooting to test. For this type of testing environment a virtual machine is often the best option. It boots quickly, it doesn’t interfere with your normal system and if it goes wrong, you can easily delete it and start over.
In this article we’ll see how you can create a virtual machine image based on Arch Linux, a distro popular among those who like to get involved with the nuts and bolts of Linux (but may not have the patience to install Gentoo). One of the useful side effects of the way in which Arch Linux (and Gentoo) are installed is that it’s a largely manual process, which can be time-consuming when setting up a full distro, but can be very efficient for setting up a virtual machine.
Because the Arch Linux installer disc is just a live version of Arch, you can just as easily install from an existing Arch system, and that’s what we’ll cover here. Although this requires Arch Linux on the host computer, it’s also possible to follow this when booted from an Arch live disc, or you could boot the emulator from the live disc.
Avoiding confusion
Because we’re working with virtual machines, there are often two systems running at the
