The following tutorial gets you started with compiling ROS from source on Arch Linux. It combines information from http://wiki.ros.org/jade/Installation/Arch and http://wiki.ros.org/jade/Installation/Source.
I tried this on a fresh archlinux vm using vagrant
vagrant init terrywang/archlinux; vagrant up --provider virtualbox
I needed to edit the Vagrantfile to give some more memory to make roscpp compile. Uncomment the following part
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
# Customize the amount of memory on the VM: