We left the first installment at the Arch installation menu:

Menu navigation is by arrow and enter keys–no mouse driver is loaded at this point.

Clicking Step 1 takes you to a dialog to select whether you wish to install over the network or from a CD. I chose the CD:

Arch displayed a message that the CD had been mounted to a RAM disk directory. Okaying out of that took me back to Step 2 on the main menu: “Set Clock.” Hitting enter took me to the “Date/Time Configuration” submenu:

Hitting enter brought up a screen for selecting my region:

Hitting “Okay” displayed a similar screen for selecting my time zone (“New York”–most Linux distributions I’ve installed identify time zones by listing a major city within that time zone, not by asking you to calculate where you are in relationship to Greenwich, England).

Okaying my selection took me back to the Date/Time Configuration menu with Step 2, “Set Time and Date,” highlighted. This led to a screen allowing me to choose between “UTC” and “localtime,” which was my choice. I then got a chance to set the time . . .

. . . but, since the time was correct (remember I’m installing this inside a VM in a running computer with an accurate clock), I okayed my way back to the main, where the next item, “Prepare Hard Drive,” was highlighted. When I hit enter, Arch displayed a screen allowing me to choose how I wish to proceed:

I selected the “Auto Prepare” option. Arch presented a series of screens describing how much space it was allocating to the boot partition, the primary partition, and the swap partition; I okayed the default for each. It then asked me to pick the file system for the primary partition; the default was ext2, but I selected ext4 for no particularly good reason other than that it is newer and seems to work just fine:

Then it told me that my entire hard drive was to be erased and reformatted. As this was a non-existent virtual hard drive, I told it to go ahead. It displayed a progress dialog and, when it was done, notified me that the “Auto-Prepare was successful.” Okaying that brought the “Prepare Hard Drive” menu back with “Return to Main Menu” highlighted, so I returned to the main menu.

Next: Installing software and configuring the system.