The Arch build has Kodi as well? What about everything that comes with the Kodi rom like the emulators.

Nitpicking here but there's no mate-tweak by default? Okay that's not a massive deal breaker, but I'm still pondering how to get the freedos stuff working as apparently it didn't pull it down from the Arch repos right and gave me a message about arming condition needs updating....after apparently installing?

Also, I swear there was a Kodi version in the AUR that has Kodi, screenreader and screenreader enabled from the get go? I thought that was a thing?

Also, hello just having a Desktop folder on my VM when I turn off hidden files. Time to go create Videos/Downloads/Documents/etc. I lways figured those were part of any install though thinking more about it, nooooope.

Lastly....how do I change the hostname? I start up the VM, it comes up as tstvm logon.

I'd like to chnge that...but.............nothing seems to work?

You know, I'm actually going to try this iso again. Something says I should give it another shot now that the server's up, things could've very easily changed and we may be in business to flash the image to the pi sd card with that method.And here we go. Iso works great, seems like the program thought my partition table was massively screwed on the sd card which it wasn't, just an inconsistency. Although, fdisk on the jenux iso was erroring out, so I had gotten hold of a Vinux live distro to use fdisk and at the time gparted to prepare the disk, and now it works. And now we're downloading. I decided to go ahead and download the full arch distro as I had wanted to before, and if kodi is not included I could easily install that.

One more

@Jack, are you doing a Mate or Everything install? For me the Mate was 945 packages all told and no errors, up and running in about 45-50 mins from firing up the VM. I just wish I could find a way to shut the speeech off in console mode since I'm installing it on a backup laptop as a test, and it reports every tiny little thing....and no, putting a brick on the control key doesn't help matters any

Also, to shut off the speech, hit caps lock+control+enter. You can still use caps lock+u and caps lock+i to review, but no new text will be presented unless you hit caps lock+control+enter again.

Ok, I think the iso should be able to perform the installation with an already-existing .tar.gz. I downloaded it on my ssd already, and have it on a flash drive. Only spare machine that is controlling the installation of this is my inspiren1545 with a shit hdd that has to take forever on the download. The bsdtar just isn't working as it should which is why I'm letting it automate, but after some time I'm getting some errors that I miss because all the status and percentages getting in the way, and then, add another network y/n. My connection going perhaps? I have a usb tether enabled on my phone that is connected to the computer, so my home wifi is being tethered to my computer through the phone. As you can see, not the best setup either.

Since the installation script partitions the disk then asks to choose an image, would it be safe to remove the card from the dell after that's done, insert it into the mac, then mount the partitions through diskutil in terminal, then:
bsdtar xz root.tar.gz

I purchased the paragon ext fs driver, which is the best low-level driver for ext4 filesystems. Now, with the actual file in hand, do I simply mount the two partitions as I would on linux, then do:
sudo bsdtar xz root.tar.gz
with or without the dash in xz?

According to the arch linux arm documentation, because of the xattrs, you cannot use sudo, you have to extract specifically as root. To extract, first become root:
sudo su
Then, cd to your root mountpoint:
cd /mnt
Ensure that the boot partition is mounted under your current directory:
mountpoint boot
finally, extract the root:
bsdtar -xf /path/to/rootfs.tar.gz
To see each file as it is being extracted, run it like this:
bsdtar -xvf /path/to/rootfs.tar.gz
Once this is finished, do:
cd
umount /mnt/boot /mnt
Unplug your card, plug it into the pi, and apply power.

Hi, on the vm with no orca, try control alt o, or double press alt super s. If your screen reader doesn't come up, hit control alt shift t to bring up a terminal, and try
killall speech-dispatcher;rm -rf ~/.local/share/orca
then hit control alt o again. If that still doesn't work, type
sudo systemctl stop speech-dispatcherd speechd-up
type your password, then hit control alt o. For the iso, make sure that you aren't using an already bootable disk image. If using virtualbox, after starting the vm, immediately after you hear starting, mash f12, and ocr the screen. If you hear something about boot select, hit c to force booting from the iso, hit enter to boot with accessibility. If that doesn't yield any fruit, ensure that you aren't using uefi in your vm settings, as vbox's uefi implementation is quite buggy and enforces secure boot, which you need a non-surgical pair of eyeballs to work around, adding the hash of loader.efi and the vmlinuz file to nvram, which will be cleared on the next boot.

No no, I mean after powering off the VM with a host+Q, it started up, got speech at the text login after a Mate install.....then nothing.

orca and orca --replace did nothing, and a sudo pacman -S orca showed it had become removed.....despite me not touching it or even running a system update?

Curiously, the steps you said showed files/folders had vanished entirely from the system?