Before I start: NO, UNLIKE EVERY OTHER ARTICLE ON THE WEB, PUBLISHED TODAY, THIS IS NOT A JOKE, K?!?

I’ve been looking for a new distro recently. I do this from time to time, principally because I get bored of what I’m currently running. Last time it was Crunchbang which I settled on. This time I wanted to go more advanced, so I started researching Arch Linux.

For those that don’t know, Arch Linux describes itself as:

…a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

I’d heard about Arch in the past from several sources and had heard that you basically have to install and configure everything yourself, but that the package manager (awesomely named Pacman!) manages software without having to compile from source (unless you want to!).

The following series of posts will be a record of my experiences installing and configuring Arch on my home desktop machine. This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive installation guide, more just a record of where I tripped up in order to aid those who come next. If you are searching for an installation guide, try the excellent article on the Arch Wiki.

I’ve separated the post out into days. Note: it didn’t actually take me a full day for each part, I work during the day and only really had a couple of hours each evening to spend on this.

Day 1: Backing Up

Before installing I wanted to make sure I didn’t trash my existing Ubuntu system and all my personal data, as I still need to do all the stuff I usually do with my machine. So I made a backup.

I’m not really going to go into how. Suffice to say I used LVM snapshots and rsync, I might write about this in a future post.

This took a while, as I have quite a lot of data. I thought it best to have a beer in the mean time, so I did.

Day 2: Making Space, Starting the Installation and Various Adventures with LVM

The next thing to do was to resize my existing LVM partition containing Ubuntu so that I had space for Arch. I couldn’t work out how to do this at first as none of the partition tools I tried (GParted and Cfdisk) could resize the partition. I eventually worked out how to do it.

First, on my running Ubuntu system I resized the physical volume with:

$ pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize 500G /dev/sda1

This shrank the space used by LVM down to 500GB (from about 1000GB on my machine).

I then rebooted into the Arch live CD (64-bit edition in my case), and ran:

$ fdisk /dev/sda

Now what you have to do next is slightly alarming. You actually have to delete the partition and recreate it in the new size. This works, without destroying your data, because fdisk only manipulates the partition table on the disk, it doesn’t do any formatting of partitions, etc.

I did this through fdisk so that the partition was 501GB (making it a little bigger than the PV just to make sure). I then rebooted back into Ubuntu and ran:

$ pvresize /dev/sda1

To allow it to use all the space. This probably isn’t necessary but I wanted to be safe.

Next, I proceeded to the installation. For some reason the Arch boot CD was really slow to boot and gave me loads of read errors, I think this might have something to do with my drive as I’ve been experiencing the same with other disks. Eventually it booted and dropped my at the default prompt.

From then I basically followed the installation guide for setting up the package source (CD) and the date and time.

I then set about partitioning the disks. The Arch installer uses Cfdisk, which is fine. I just added two partitions to my disk, a small (255Meg) one for my /boot partition and a large LVM one for the rest of the system (I like LVM and wanted to use it again on Arch).

This was fine, but I had some problems setting up the LVM through the installer, even though the user guide seems to think it can do it. Every time I tried, it would just fail on creating the Volume Group, weird.

I gave up for the evening and (you guessed it) went for a beer!

Day 3: Successful Installation

The next day I thought I’d try googling for LVM on Arch, luckily when I got in to work @duffkitty on identi.ca had seen one of my posts complaining about having problems and had given me a link to the LVM article on the Arch Wiki.

This advocated setting up the whole LVM setup manually (and guides you through it) and then just setting the partitions to use in the installer. It also gives you some important things to look out for when configuring the system. Following these instructions worked like a charm and I was able to format everything correctly and install the base system.

I then moved on to configuring the system, following the install guide and taking into account the instructions in the LVM article. Everything went pretty much fine here and I eventually got to installing the bootloader. Here I replaced the Ubuntu Grub version with the one installed by Arch. This left me having to add an entry for Ubuntu, which wasn’t difficult, I just copied the Arch one and changed the partition and file names.

Then it was time to ‘type reboot and pray’ as the Arch installation guide puts it.

So I did.

When I rebooted the bootloader came up with the Arch and Ubuntu entries. I selected Ubuntu just to check everything was OK.

It didn’t work.

Panicking and Swearing Ensued.

I rebooted and selected Arch.

That worked (thankfully).

When it had booted I logged in and opened up the Grub config file again. it turned out I mis-typed the name of the Ubuntu initrd file, that was easily fixed. Rebooting got me safely back to Ubuntu.

So now I have a functioning dual boot between my original Ubuntu install and a very basic Arch install, I think I might need some software there!

But first… beer.

So What’s Next???

Well, firstly I need to get my network connection up and running as I didn’t do that during the install. It’s a Wifi connection over WPA so that’s going to be fun. Then I can start installing software. I’ll probably follow the Beginners Guide on the Wiki (from Part 3). I was also recommended Yaourt by @duffkitty, so I’ll give that a try.

I’ll be continuing to play with Arch over the next few days and reporting my progress in follow up posts here. I’ll also be denting as I go along and you can follow all of these on my #archrob hash tag.

There’ll probably be beer too.

We’ll see how it goes, but eventually I hope to have a system I can use full time.

Bye for now! Happy Easter!

A while ago my boss came to me with an idea. He wanted to purchase a number of netbooks and install LimeSurvey on each of them to be used as a mobile survey unit, that could be taken to schools, colleges, workplaces, etc. and used to collect data for research projects. I pointed out that if we were to install LimeSurvey on all the netbooks each would need an individual webserver and MySQL server, which apart from being a lot of effort would fragment the dataset and make it much more difficult to collect the data together.

Hence, I suggested that we setup one of the machines as the server and set it’s built-in Wifi to work as an access point for the others so they could access the server. This means that no external network access is required, you carry the server with you!

Well, today the netbooks arrived (we ended up with Acer Aspire Ones in the end). So I set about configuring one to be our server. This model came with Windows XP pre-installed (not sure if you can get a Linux version), but also had a 160GB hard drive. My instinct was to install Ubuntu Server as it has an option to deploy a LAMP server out of the box (which is awesome and would have saved me loads of time). So I downloaded it from our local mirror and flashed the iso to my usbstick with Unetbootin, which I hadn’t used before. I booted from the usbstick and everything went well until I got to the ‘detect CDROM drives’ bit – which usually detects the usbstick as containing the files from the iso. Not so here, no matter what I tried it wouldn’t be convinced that the usbstick was a CDROM!

So, I fell back to what I have previously used, Isotostick, a nice little shell script thats always done this well for me. Same problem.

Turns out the problem is with the server and alternate isos of Ubuntu, which don’t contain the correct FAT driver for loading the installation packages from a usbstick. There is a workaround for this, here, but I couldn’t get it to work. So, I decided to use the Ubuntu Desktop version (thank God our mirror is internal to the university!). I realised later that this had the advantage that the server could also be used as a client and the server software would be invisible to the user.

So I installed that. Which went fine as you’d expect. When I rebooted after the install I found that the wifi didn’t work. A quick google turned up a page which gave instructions on how to install the latest madwifi driver from source, which I did, though I had to manually dig up build-essential (and dependancies) from the /pool folder on my usbstick and install them with dpkg as I couldn’t get it to recognise the usbstick as an apt repository. I wouldn’t have had this problem if I’d have had a wired connection on the machine though.

Then I set about installing the packages required to turn it into a server:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 phpmyadmin mysql-server dhcp3-server bridge-utils

I’m not sure whether the bridge-utils package is strictly required, but I installed it anyway. It doesn’t do any harm as it’s only a few kB to download. If you are following this as a howto and are only using the Wifi as your net connection (as I was), make sure you install all of this now as later on you’ll lose your connection when we setup the Wifi to be an access point. If you’re on ethernet, you’ll be able to keep your connection (but see later).

Installing those packages took a while over the Wifi, so while it was going on I downloaded and installed LimeSurvey. I don’t really need to say how to do that as it’s all documented on their site. I unpacked it to /var/www/survey on the server and configured it as per the instructions. Once I had all the packages above installed I was able to create a database and user through phpmyadmin and run the LimeSurvey installation script. Pretty much the same as installing any other PHP app.

Next came the wifi setup, I played around for a while trying to get this working, but I think the following is probably the best course to take in setting this up. You need to start by putting the wireless adapter into access point/master mode, you do this (for the atheros card used in the Aspire One) by editing/creating the /etc/modprobe.d/madwifi file (documented here):

$ sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/madwifi

The file contents should be:

options ath_pci autocreate=ap

Then reload the kernel module:

$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

You’re then ready to reconfigure the network interfaces, if you type iwconfig, you should see that the ath0 device now has the capability to act as an access point. To setup the access point you need to edit the network interfaces file:

$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

The contents of my file were as follows:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

# uncomment the following two lines if you’re on ethernet and you want to still have a connection once you restart the networking!

#auto eth0

#iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto ath0

iface ath0 inet static

wireless-mode master

wireless-essid my-access-point

address 192.168.1.1

network 192.168.1.0

netmask 255.255.255.0

broadcast 192.168.1.255

This sets up the network interface acting as an access point with name ‘my-access-point’ and assigns the local machine a static address of 192.168.1.1 on the network. To reload the configuration, do this:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Note: at this point you will lose ‘outgoing’ wifi connectivity as your adapter is now acting as an access point!

Now, if you boot up another machine with Wifi, you should be able to see the ‘my-access-point’ network in the list of available networks. However, connecting to it won’t currently work as you won’t be able to get an IP address, this is where the DHCP server, which we installed earlier, comes in.

In order to set this up we first need to tell it to listen for DHCP requests on the correct interface, in our case ath0. We do this by editing the /etc/default/dhcp3-server file to look like this:

# Defaults for dhcp initscript

# sourced by /etc/init.d/dhcp

# installed at /etc/default/dhcp3-server by the maintainer scripts

#

# This is a POSIX shell fragment

#

# On what interfaces should the DHCP server (dhcpd) serve DHCP requests?

# Separate multiple interfaces with spaces, e.g. “eth0 eth1″.

INTERFACES=”ath0″

Next we setup the DHCP server to dish out addresses to the clients on out network, edit the file /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf to have an entry like the following:

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.200;

option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.1;

option domain-name “mynetwork.local”;

option routers 192.168.1.1;

option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;

default-lease-time 600;

max-lease-time 7200;

}

I don’t know whether all those options are definitely needed, but this configuration works. I think you could probably get away without the routers and name servers, as these won’t exist on this small standalone network.

OK, now start up the DHCP server and you should be in business:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3 start

Assuming that works OK, try connecting to the ‘my-access-point’ network from another machine, it should work (if it doesn’t or you can’t see the network, try rebooting the server machine).

Once you’ve successfully connected you should be able to browse pages hosted on the server at http://192.168.1.1, so my LimeSurvey install would be at http://192.168.1.1/survey. Now you have a portable server that you can take round to serve web apps to machines in the vicinity! Awesome!

That just covers the server part of what I have planned for these small netbooks, my ultimate aim is to set them all up running Ubuntu with a lightweight desktop and Firefox started automatically in Kiosk mode (thanks to the R-Kiosk addon). This will give us ten little survey machines which will just ‘boot’ into Firefox and go to the LimeSurvey page. I’ll post details of that setup once I’ve done it, but for now that’s all! Bye!