larch – a do-it-yourself live Arch Linux CD

Quick Start

A quick run through of the steps necessary to build your own larch CD. This should provide you with a working live CD, but to take full advantage of the flexibility offered by the larch build system you will probably need to consult the rest of the documentation.

• At present there is only a repository for 'i686', as I don't have a 64-bit machine (but testers are welcome to build their own repository from svn - a simple script is provided).
• Download larch-setup to an empty working directory and run it (it is a shell script). This will in turn download and unpack the current larch package, setting up symlinks so that the build scripts can be run from this working directory.
• Run './mklarch -h' to get a usage description.
• From now on you must be running as root, i.e. it's potentially dangerous stuff!
• You can then try building one of the example profiles, for example:

  ./mklarch -p larch/profiles/xmini

  You can also adapt one of the example profiles to your own needs.
• If you chose a delivered profile, the build should just run, apart from asking for confirmation a few times.
• For a custom build:
  • Copy an example profile (from larch/profiles) to your working directory, giving it an appropriate name.
  • Edit 'locale.gen' for your glibc locale needs.
  • Edit 'rcconfx', which contains just the changes to the default /etc/rc.conf. Especially the locale and console keyboard setting may be interesting.
  • Editing the overlay (the set of files which are changed from the default installation) might be a bit trickier, as permissions and ownerships must be correct. Please read the relevant documentation before attempting this.
  • OPTIONAL: If you want ssh access to your live system, see 'ssh access'
  before running mklarch.
• Another possibility is to use larchify (run './larchify -h' for a usage description) to 'livify' an existing Arch Linux installation, even the currently running one. Certain packages must be installed, but then running './larchify path/to/installation' should be enough for a simple build. See 'Making a live CD from an existing Arch installation' for more details.
• After a while, the iso for the CD should be ready for burning.
• Alternatively, you can put it on a USB-stick, by passing the '-u' option to 'mklarch'.
• Share and Enjoy!