I want to try out wardriving so I’m setting up my old eeePC for the task. Puppee linux was on my eee and that just didn’t seem right for wardriving. When talking about distros on my youtube vlog, my friend uberscientist recommended I try Arch linux. I thought it’d be no problem installing because there’s an Arch wiki entry for my exact eee model!
Well, I ran into some issues. The first was
@todo insert error message
I fixed that from info on a forum thread.
With that problem out of the way, I came across another problem:
Guide
- put arch iso on usb drive with dd command
- boot to usb
- get internet connection
- format disk
- allocate 1007 KiB of free space at start for proper alignment (done automatically in cgdisk.)
- create 1024 KiB partition for bios boot (BIOS boot partition, bios_grub flag, 0xef02)
- create partitions for home, root, etc. (I just created one partition for everything)
Your partition should look like this:
Part. # Size Partition Type Partition Name
----------------------------------------------------------------
1007.0 KiB free space
1 1024.0 KiB BIOS boot partition bios boot
2 3.7 GiB Linux filesystem root
q quits cgdisk
create a filesystem on the second partition (don’t partition the BIOS boot partition!)
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mount the root partition to /mnt
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
Install the base system. This will take awhile
# pacstrap -i /mnt base
generate fstab
# genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab # nano /mnt/etc/fstab
check fstab (f fake it, we’re just testing. a all entries in fstab. v verbose!)
# mount -fav
chroot into new installation
# arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
uncomment your UTF-8 locale code in /etc/locale.gen then run:
# locale-gen # echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
Set timezone. Find your zone:
ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/
Create a symbolic link /etc/localtime to your zone file /usr/share/zoneinfo/<Zone>/<SubZone> using this command:
# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/<Zone>/<SubZone> /etc/localtime
set hardware clock
# hwclock --systohc --utc
Get the eee package repo. add the following to /etc/pacman.conf
[eee] Server =
http://code.toofishes.net/packages/eee S
igLevel = Optional
Then synchronize packages -S and force refresh -yy of all packages
# pacman -Syy
Set a hostname
# echo myhostname > /etc/hostname
install & configure grub
# pacman -S grub-bios # grub-install --recheck /dev/sda # cp /usr/share/locale/en\@quot/LC_MESSAGES/grub.mo /boot/grub/locale/en.mo # grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
exit chroot environment
# exit
umount & reboot
# umount -a # reboot
if your system is affected by a bug which causes the network interface name to change upon reboot, you will need to re-configure your network interfaces. Ping www.google.com to see if you are online. Run ip link to see if your interfaces have a different name.
