Skip to content

Installer issues in Parallels (MacBook Pro, M1 Pro)

Hi,

back in May I was able to use your ISO to install Arch Linux in Parallels without any issues. I recently wanted to repeat the process to create a fresh VM and noticed that the installer seems partly broken.

Steps taken

  1. Created a new VM in Parallels
  2. Selected the ISO
  3. Selected "Other Linux" as the operating system
  4. Changed the memory amount to 4096MB
  5. After the ISO boots, picked the "Archboot Arch Linux AA64" option
  6. Pressed ENTER to continue to the shell
  7. Tried to set the keymap to "de". This fails with "An error occured, your current keymap was not changed."
  8. Set up the network to use DHCP, this succeeded.
  9. Picked the mirror "http://mirror.archlinuxarm.org"
  10. Allowed the system to get the latest packages.
  11. After the setup returned to the main menu, tried to select the option "Set Time And Date". This fails and keeps returning to the main menu immediately.
  12. Decided to go on to "Prepare Storage Drive" and let the installer erase the entire storage device. The partitioning failed.

After this, I decided to reboot and retry the entire process. This time, I did not allow the installer to get the latest packages and afterwards setting a time and date worked.

Continuing from that point:

  1. Prepared the storage device using the first available options (Auto-erase, BTRFS, PARTUUID)
  2. Went on to "Install packages", where I selected "Yes" for the minimal system packages.
  3. After the installation of those packages completed, picked "Yes" for pacman's GPG files.
  4. In "Configure System" I only changed the root password, not touching any of the other options.
  5. Selected "Yes" to install an AA64 UEFI bootloader.
  6. Selected "EFISTUB"
  7. Selected "No" to the question to install another bootloader
  8. Rebooted the system

After this, I was now able to successfully boot into Arch Linux and login using the root password I set.

Additional Information

  • I found this issue on UTM's GitHub which might be related: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/4326
  • After installing plasma there were additional problems with the mouse and keyboard not being connected properly. These were partly resolved by setting "Don't optimize for games" in Parallels. Maybe the original keymap issue could be related to this?
  • I asked some friends to try going through the installation process in parallels as well, the result was the same.
  • Parallels version: Desktop 18.1.0
  • Archboot ISO version: archboot-archlinuxarm-2022.10.13-09.18-aarch64.iso
Edited by Dimitri Lesy
To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information