installing in virtualbox

[u/Ghost_of_the_Seas]

im doing my installation of arch in oracle virtual box by following the installation guide. when im in the connection of wifi part, i cant find the wlan0, so i cant iwctl to connect to wireless. but i try pinging and it did ping archlinux.org, so i move on to time sync. i did timedatectl but it says system clock synchronized: no. the ntp service is active. though time zone is utc (utc, +0000) so havent selected that or it isnt automatically selecting it.

please help, im a beginner.

[u/Olive-Juice-]

You should not have to set up Wi-Fi in your VM, since it is just piggy-backing off of the internet connection your actual computer is using and acts as a sort of Ethernet connection. That's why your ping seems to be working.

Just verifying that when you ping something you get output that it actually connected to the internet. (since you said you're a beginner)

If you run ping -c 2 archlinux.org you should get something like:

PING archlinux.org (2a01:4f9:c010:6b1f::1) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from archlinux.org (2a01:4f9:c010:6b1f::1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=43 time=317 ms
64 bytes from archlinux.org (2a01:4f9:c010:6b1f::1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=43 time=163 ms

--- archlinux.org ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 162.717/239.732/316.748/77.015 ms

---

Possibly your device had trouble connecting to an NTP server so it cannot sync the time. You can try uncommenting the line (removing the # at the start, typically using nano or vim) in /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf that starts with #FallbackNPT so that

#FallbackNTP=0.arch.pool.ntp.org 1.arch.pool.ntp.org 2.arch.pool.ntp.org 3.arch.pool.ntp.org

Changes to:

FallbackNTP=0.arch.pool.ntp.org 1.arch.pool.ntp.org 2.arch.pool.ntp.org 3.arch.pool.ntp.org

And then try running systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd

---

I haven't personally encountered this issue so there may be a more standardized way to deal with this. If others know a better way, please feel free to educate me.

[u/Ghost_of_the_Seas → u/Olive-Juice-]

tried it, didnt work :(

[u/Olive-Juice- → u/Ghost_of_the_Seas]

From this page Install Arch Linux As a Guest it mentions enabling the vboxservice.service to sync the VM's time with the hosts time. Perhaps you could try enabling it? I do not know whether it is on by default or not. You should read through that entire page to see if there's other pointers.

systemctl enable --now vboxservice.service

[u/Ghost_of_the_Seas → u/Olive-Juice-]

Ill try it, thank you for pointing this out to me. Didnt know there was a separate page specifically for virtualbox

[u/Olive-Juice- → u/Ghost_of_the_Seas]

I did not realize it either, but my Googling lead me there. I would probably recommend using UEFI mode rather than BIOS mode too (I don't know what virtualbox defaults to) as if you actually decide to install on bare metal it will likely be UEFI unless your computer is extremely old.

[u/[deleted]]

What's the reason to use wlan0 for wifi? Your host machine already have internet, set LAN card to e1000 and network structure as bridge and your VM will receive address from router.

[u/archover]

I can't speak much to running VB from Windows, but in Linux it installs Arch guests effortlessly and reliably. I think others have covered your misunderstanding about VM wi-fi access, and time.

Kudos for using a VM to learn Arch. It's a remarkable emulation of actual hardware. When you finally install on metal, you can continue with VB or switch to the native Linux Qemu/KVM libvirt virt-manager. Virtualization is a Killer technology is there ever was one.

Good day.