Arch Linux

PXE

If you already have a PXE server, create a new entry that boots their iPXE kernel:

cd /tftpboot/images/ArchLinux/
wget https://releng.archlinux.org/pxeboot/ipxe.lkrn

The default config (or the config your computer boots off of) should contain:

LABEL ArchLinux
	MENU LABEL ArchLinux
        kernel /images/ArchLinux/ipxe.lkrn

You can customize the kernel to automate installs.

Installation

The PXE rom that you can download from ArchLinux's website points iPXE to fetch PXE data from a remote HTTP server, http://releng.archlinux.org/pxeboot/boot/cfg/. The PXE configs will then boot the live image from one of the many available mirrors that is selected in the boot menu.

Remastering

Side Note: You may alter the iPXE script to use a different server by recompiling the iPXE kernel and automate the install process by appending to the airoot customize script.

pacman -S archiso
cp -r /usr/share/archiso/configs/releng /root
# edit relang/airootfs/root/custom*
./build.sh -v

mkarchiso -w work/x86_64 -C work/pacman.conf -D arch init
arch-chroot work/x86_64/airootfs mkinitcpio -c /etc/mkinitcpio-archiso.conf -k /boot/vmlinuz-linux -g /boot/archiso.img
mksquashfs work/airootfs.img work/iso/arch/x86_64/airootfs.sfs -noappend -comp xz -no-progress

Steps

After booting into the live image, you need to:

1. Read the install.txt file
2. Create a file system
3. Mount the file system to /mnt
4. Run pacstrap /mnt/base
5. Generate fstab genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
6. Chroot into the new system arch-chroot /mnt
7. Set the hostname echo "hostname" >> /etc/hostname
8. Set the timezone ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Edmonton /etc/localtime
9. Locales
   • Comment out any locales you want in /etc/locale.gen
   • Run locale-gen
10. Set the default locale echo LANG=\"en_US.UTF-8\" > /etc/locale.conf
11. Set up networking configs ??
12. Console font /etc/vconsole.conf
    • echo KEYMAP=\"us\" > /etc/vconsole.conf
    • echo FONT=\"latarcyrheb-sun16\" >> /etc/vconsole.conf
13. Rebuild ram disk mkinitcpio -p linux
14. Set the root password passwd
15. Install a bootloader
    • pacman -Sy grub
    • grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
    • grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot and hope it works.

Networking

You may use systemd to configure the network

/etc/systemd/network

Create a file named wired.network with:

[Match]
Name=eno1

[Network]
DHCP=v4

You may need to get a list of all network interfaces using:

networkctl list | tail -n+2 | head -n+2 | grep -v loopback | awk '{print $2}'

Building Packages

Install the base-devel package group.

To build packages, create a PKGBUILD script. Run this as a non-root user.

makepkg -p buildscript.pkgbuild

'Converting' RPM to an ArchLinux package

Install the rpmextract package.

Use the spec to pkgbuild script to convert the RPM SPEC files to a packagebuild script.

Creating a repository

Creating a repository is very simple and comprises of making a directory which contains a database file with a bunch of packages.

1. Create a new directory
2. Copy all packages to the directory
3. Run: repo-add reponame.db.tar.gz *.xz

Use the URL to the directory as the repository location. Make sure that the reponame matches that of the database.

Package List

gnome-desktop nvidia-304xx-libgl 
lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter 

qt

dmidecode

accountsservices

salt-zmq

Mirroring

rsync -rtlH --delete-after --exclude='*i686*' --delay-updates --copy-links --safe-links --max-delete=1000 --progress rsync://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/archlinux/community .

• https://www.archlinux.org/mirrors/status/