Archinstall 2.3 Released For Easily Installing Arch Linux

[itoffshore]

btrfs subvolumes are possible using archinstall

archinstall creates a separate /boot partition when selecting a btrfs subvol scheme - running btrfs on a single partition is better for snapshotting

[lumks]

From a corporate POV, yes. But Valve is contributing to Arch, so technically speaking, there *is* a company behind.

From that POV there are many companies behind Arch. But it's not that easy. When it comes to certification, you can't go in as contributor and contribute a cert/key to someones project. there are a lot of requirements and things you need to have control over.

[Torxed]

"Selecting mirrors requires at least one region to be given as an option" right at the beginning of the installation.

Ah right, that was the issue we had with the 32bit version of Arch.
I knew there was some issue. Should be an easy fix, but a PR would be welcome : )

[sinepgib]

So, downloaded the 32-bit Arch version in a VM and archinstall is already on the install medium. It seemed to produce some weird errors for me I didn't see on the 64-bit version. For instance, "Selecting mirrors requires at least one region to be given as an option" right at the beginning of the installation. If we can make ArchInstall work on 32-bit easily enough, I think Torxed and I would gladly accept patches to make it function so long as it's not touching a lot of code with 32-bit specific paths.

I might take a shot in the future, but don't hold your breath, I tend to procrastinate a lot. I do have a few spare netbooks from a different project that I may exploit for testing this.

EDIT: or I could be more practical about it and just use a VM

[dylanmtaylor]

So, downloaded the 32-bit Arch version in a VM and archinstall is already on the install medium. It seemed to produce some weird errors for me I didn't see on the 64-bit version. For instance, "Selecting mirrors requires at least one region to be given as an option" right at the beginning of the installation. If we can make ArchInstall work on 32-bit easily enough, I think Torxed and I would gladly accept patches to make it function so long as it's not touching a lot of code with 32-bit specific paths.

[dylanmtaylor]

Thanks for that work! Sadly I found out it existed a few days too late. It would have been very useful to not go through all the manual install again when I formatted my old netbook. I don't know if it supports archlinux32 tho, does it?[/QUOTE]

Not officially, but it might work, I haven't tried it. Assuming all the packages are present, I don't think there would be anything specific to running on a 64-bit system that ArchInstall does. Although you'd probably want to stick with GRUB and MBR as I doubt UEFI support is great on a system not old enough to support 64 bit operation.

[sinepgib]

The idea was to have it support headless boxes too yes.

Very cool!

But archinstall on its own does a better job at headless bootstrapping machines using mac-based profiles, located on any webserver or share. So I discontinued the project a bit waiting for archinstall to settle down with the features and bugs.

Makes sense.

(creator of both archinstall and archinstall_gui here).

Thanks for that work! Sadly I found out it existed a few days too late. It would have been very useful to not go through all the manual install again when I formatted my old netbook. I don't know if it supports archlinux32 tho, does it?

I love these kinds of challenges and it's a hobby of mine, maybe one day I'll get around to making that code actually usable and readable hehe.

Yeah, those are interesting and fun. I generally only contribute here and there in existing projects because I'm kind of a serial quitter, so making something from scratch and maintaining it if it gets users is something that's just not viable for me.

[Torxed]

I don't know, should we count buildroot? (?)



Let me know if I got it straight. The idea of doing it web based is to enable the tool to be used for headless boxes too, right? That sounds damned cool.

The idea was to have it support headless boxes too yes.
But archinstall on its own does a better job at headless bootstrapping machines using mac-based profiles, located on any webserver or share. So I discontinued the project a bit waiting for archinstall to settle down with the features and bugs. (creator of both archinstall and archinstall_gui here).

I love these kinds of challenges and it's a hobby of mine, maybe one day I'll get around to making that code actually usable and readable hehe.

[Torxed]

Arch needs to support secure boot like Fedora/Ubuntu/openSUSE does with the signed shim, disabling secure boot can be problematic and unwanted, I don't get why they don't support it.

It's something that I and others have tried.
But because the process of securing the boot process is undone by system updates unless correctly put into place, it's a bit of a nightmare.

If another tool or systemd can incorporate the setup, update and configuration of it in a more stream lined fashion I'd welcome the addition!
I think we had/have a PR or a discord conversation with the seutp-steps, but that's about it.

Edit: Saw that Dylan found it: (upstream) https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlin...so/-/issues/69 & (archinstall) https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/102

[Torxed]

if GUI installer could be implemented as a plugin to archinstall IMO that would be nice and welcome thing.

What if I told you, it has already been done.
(Before anyone roast me, yea I know it's not usable anymore)

It started out as a concept, just to see how well Archinstall could be integrated with a webgui and as a library.
So I haven't maintained it for little over a year now, but I'd like to re-do that project with proper code styling and stuff. For fun and to reminisce, here it is: https://github.com/Torxed/archinstall_gui