Introduction

In this post I assume you have successfully set up an Arch VM, e.g. like in my last post.

The following is based on “General Recommendations” and various forum threads … 😀

In order to get a pretty GUI to interact with we will 1) set up the networking config for the VM and 2) select and install graphics drivers, display server, a desktop environment and a display manager. An outline of the second can also be found here with a range of options for common desktop environments and display managers to choose from.

Let’s dive in!

Setting up the network

Start up VirtualBox, select your VM and click “Start”.

Once Arch is booted up enter root and your password (you have one if you actively set one with passwd previously).

Once logged in as root, let’s test if we have internet acccess, before we can start installing our GUI tools by running

ping archlinux.org

Dang! DNS resolution error. Bummer! Let’s fix that! We need to configure our network and enable / start the relevant services. If you don’t have that error feel free to skip to the next section Graphics things below.

Let’s check the available devices using

ip link

I assume you have a loop and an ethernet device. The ethernet device should be something that starts with “en”, here enp0s3. If you don’t see the “UP” bits run as above run

ip link set enp0s3 up

(you may want to replace enp0s3 with whatever device name you see).

Now let’s enable required services. First get systemd-networkd.service going

systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service

systemctl start systemd-networkd.service

verify that it appears in the list list using

systemctl --type=service

Now let’s do the same for systemd-resolved.service

systemctl enable systemd-resolved.service

systemctl start systemd-resolved.service

verify again

systemctl --type=service

The next service we’d want to activate is systemd-networkd-wait-online.service. But this should fail immediately because nothing is configured yet, praise arch. For documentation on the relevant configuration pieces please see the docs.

For the VM let’s create a ethernet.network file (crash course on vim)

vim /etc/systemd/network/20-ethernet.network

and sneakily copy the config from the iso that had a working internet connection. The config:

[Match]
Name=en*

[Link]
RequiredForOnline=routable

[Network]
DHCP=yes
MulticastDNS=yes

[DHCPv4]
RouteMetric=100

[IPv6AcceptRA]
RouteMetric=100

Now let’s get systemd-networkd-wait-online.service going using

systemctl enable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

systemctl start systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

and again checking via systemctl --type=service.

Since we added / edited a config let’s restart systemd-networkd.service

systemctl restart systemd-networkd.service

Alright, let’s see what our ip route looks like

ip route

Good! And ping archlinux.org should show something like

The above setup should also be persistent. If you run reboot and log in again ping archlinux.org should still work. Now to what we actually wanted to have, pretty graphics!

Graphics things

For a guide with a range of graphic tool options check out this page.

Okay let’s go. First update pacman

pacman -Syyu

Graphics drivers

According to the docs we want to install virtualbox-guest-utils and activate vboxservice.service. So let’s run

pacman -S virtualbox-guest-utils

systemctl enable vboxservice.service

systemctl start vboxservice.service

Display server

To install the display server run

pacman -S xorg xterm xorg-xinit

To test xorg run

startx

you should see something like

To leave this GUI run

exit

Desktop environment & manager

To install the gnome desktop environment run

pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

and for the gnome desktop manager

pacman -S gdm

systemctl enable gdm

systemctl start gdm

Now some sudden activity should be noticable and the view below should materialize in front of your very eyes

Here enter “root” and the password you’ve set before. Nice! Well done! 🙂

If you want to add another user, e.g. bob, press “opt” / “windows” / “start” key and enter “terminal” in the search. In the terminal run

useradd -m bob

Logging out of the root user you should now be able to log into the user bob, without using any password. If you do want to set a password run passwd in the terminal. 🙂

Conclusion

As Carl Sagan said, if you want pretty graphics you first have to configure networking.