larch – a do-it-yourself live Arch Linux system
Quick Start
The gui should make exploration of the possibilities offered by larch
quite straightforward. The documentation should provide enough information to
understand how a larch live system works, so that further customizations
can be performed beyond those directly supported.
The general sequence of events starts with creating a 'project', which will
determine certain aspects of the build environment (such as where to place the
installation files), and select a profile. The profile describes the system to be
installed (primarily which packages, but also various other aspects). All this
configuration information is stored in the user's home directory (~/.config/larch),
so that it is retained from one larch run to the next.
- At present I only maintain a repository for 'i686', as I don't run a 64-bit
Arch machine, but as all the current larch packages
have architecture 'any', both architectures should be supported.
- Download the latest larch package from
here
and unpack it somewhere convenient. It can also be installed as a normal
Arch package (you can put the larch repository in
pacman.conf if you like).
- If you install it as a package it should be available via the desktop application
list, or just by running 'larch' (after logging out and in, to update the search path).
If you haven't installed it run the 'larch' script in the 'run' directory. There is,
however, one small catch: larch must be run with root privileges.
If you are running as root (not generally recommended!), or you have
gksu or kdesu installed, this should be no problem - the
start script will manage these situations automatically.
Otherwise you can start it from a terminal with su (but don't use the
'-' / '-l' / '-login' option, or else you will probably have problems with X-authentication)
or sudo. As it is a gui program, you must of course be running xorg (see
Command-Line Interface for use
from the command line).
- To build a larch live system you basically just have to go through
the first four pages one after the other.
- The first page allows you to create a project and select a profile. The 'mini'
(no xorg) and 'xmini' (a fairly minimal xfce desktop) examples (from the supplied
'profiles' folder) might be good places to start. The default installation path should
be alright for most purposes, but you might need to move it if you don't have
enough space on that partition. Be careful! If you put a silly path in here you might
overwrite your system.
- The 'Installation' page performs the installation of the system to be squashed,
by downloading and installing all the requested packages to the installation path
set for the project. You can adjust a few aspects of this process, for example
to use a local package mirror, or to add repositories to pacman.conf. The default
is to use the mirror set on the host system and also to use the host's package
cache, so that repeated builds don't need to download the packages all over
again.
- The 'Larchify' page compresses the installation using squashfs, also building
a squashed overlay containing all the customizations necessary for the
live system and those specified in the profile.
- Finally the 'Medium' page writes the prepared larch files to an
iso file (for CD or DVD), or to the partition of your choice (be careful!),
so that you end up with a bootable larch system.
- Particular things that you might want to customize even in a first test run might
be the supported locales and rc.conf.
- Further details of the customization process are in the section
Profiles.
- Share and Enjoy!