Arch Linux

likpok

Member

Registered: 2007-09-08

Posts: 18

Some questions about Arch and installation thereof

Is there any way to install Arch through a chroot?

I currently have an ubuntu install, and was thinking of changing that to something with rolling updates. I have a few stipulations, however. These things are pretty much deal-breakers.

One is that I have several svn packages that I will install. Is there any facility like paludis for Arch, where it will handle those nicely? (If not, it is not such a big deal.)
Related, is there a mechanism like checkinstall that will let me build stuff not in the repos, and then use pacman to install it?

How easy is it to do the same with a kernel?

How easy is it to set up wine (or other multilib stuff) on amd64?

Finally, is it possible to do an install like gentoo's with a chroot? I have an existing system, and would much prefer installing from it than from a cd.

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Some questions about Arch and installation thereof

If you want to install from an existing system, there's archbootstrap, but I haven't used it in two years, so I'm not sure whether it'd still work as expected. There are some other instructions regarding what you want in the wiki too.

I'm not quite sure what kind of paludis' functionality you're referring to, but nevertheless building svn/cvs/whatelse packages doesn't pose any problem.

Creating PKGBUILDs for packages that aren't available in any repo nor AUR is usually a trivial task, their syntax is surely more user-friendly than ebuilds'. You use a PKGBUILD to build a package and then install it with pacman. Same with kernel, no problem here.

I'm not sure about x64_84, all I know is that multilib isn"t _officially_ supported, you have to install some packages from AUR.

Generally, wiki holds lots of helpful information. Have a peek. Sorry for not linking anywhere there, I'm sure you'll be able to find what interests you yourself.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Some questions about Arch and installation thereof

How easy is it to set up wine (or other multilib stuff) on amd64?

Very easy. All required libraries for Wine, Skype, stuff for Flash (through nspluginwrapper), are either in community or AUR.

Last edited by skottish (2007-09-09 00:24:02)

klixon

Member

From: Nederland

Registered: 2007-01-17

Posts: 525

Re: Some questions about Arch and installation thereof

installing from chroot is actually quite easy:

- Get a pacman-package from somewhere and install it in the host system (packages are basically just tarballs with the precompiled binaries, so just untar it to root... )
  wget ftp://ftp.gigabit.nu/current/os/${ARCH} … pkg.tar.gz (just replace ${ARCH} with i686 or x86_64 as you see fit (check the frontpage for the exact version-number)
- mkfs a partition with your preferred filesystem and mount it
- wget ftp://ftp.gigabit.nu/current/os/i686/setup/packages.txt (here the arch doesn't matter as we're only after the package-names...
- sudo pacman.static -S -r ${CHROOT} $( grep ^base packages.txt | cut -d/ -f2 | sed "s/-[^-]*-[^-]*.pkg.tar.gz//" )
- bind-mount proc, dev and sys (and boot if you have it seperately
- copy /etc/resolv.conf to ${CHROOT}/etc
- grep -v rootfs > ${CHROOT}/etc/mtab
- chroot ${CHROOT} /bin/bash

adjust settings as you like, install a kernel, add a boot-loader entry et voila

Last edited by klixon (2007-09-09 13:45:51)

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