IF YOU ARE IN A HURRY ===================== From a directory that contains a PKGBUILD, run: arch.build i686 This will build the package for the given architecture. You may also append a list of repositories to use on top of [core], [extra], and [community], for instance: arch.build x86_64 testing multilib-testing multilib FOR BETTER PERFORMANCE ====================== Enable hardware virtualization. Make /tmp a tmpfs. (This is where the copy-on-write drive is stored.) Make the host and guest share their pacman package cache using the proxy.cgi script: - install any HTTP server on the host - make this sript run as CGI when called as http://10.0.2.2/proxy.cgi - make /var/cache/pacman/pkg writeable by this CGI instance REQUIREMENTS FOR ARCH.INSTALL ============================= The arch.install script creates an Arch Linux disk image which: - has [base] and [base-devel] installed - has a "user" user able to sudo at will - boots unattended with networking enabled - runs an SSH daemon accepting the host user's keys Once created, this disk image is read-only most of the time: the virtual machines created in arch.build use copy-on-write on top of it.