[arch-general] Booting archlinux .iso to take a look

[Chris Jones]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 04:07:34AM EDT, Jelle van der Waa wrote:

[..]

> > Bit of a shame Archlinux does not provide a live environment that lets
> > you verify you can run X11.. connect to the network.. etc.

> You can connect to the network with the live-cd, since the netinstall
> uses the internet to download the packages.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I only have access to a wireless
connection at this point. With current ubuntu-based liveCD's¹ that are
designed to demo the product, my wireless connection is available as
soon as I'm presented with the desktop. When you boot the Archlinux
.iso, once you're at the root prompt, you would need to extract the
relevant packages such as wicd or network-manager et al. manually from
the .iso before you can contemplate bringing up a wireless connection². 

Nothing wrong with that, mind you³.. The .iso is simply not designed to
work that way.  

> Btw checkout the testiso's for more recent kernels, worked fine for me
> in a VM.

Because the network connection from your VM to the host system is not
a wireless connection. It emulates a standard wired connection that
requires no exotic firmware or additional packages: aeverything you need
to access the network is ‘in the kernel’.

I am not being critical of Archlinux from a general standpoint.. it's
just that my circumstances are what they are and as such the .iso does
not currently meet my requirements.

CJ

¹ .. which means that these liveCD's ship some non-free firmware to keep
  my wifi NIC satisfied.. 

² .. and copy over the iwlwifi-*-ucode blobs from a /lib/firmware/ that
  lives in another partition..

³ .. I have the same wifi firmware problem with debian as with Archlinux
  for instance..

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