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.
  • Make sure you have 'pyqt' and 'python-pexpect' packages installed.
  • Download the latest larch-setup script to an empty working directory. Then run it (it is a shell script). It will download and prepare the 'larch' and 'larch-profiles' packages so that larch can be run from this directory.
  • Run './larch' in the working directory. As it is a gui program, you must of course be running xorg (see Command-Line Interface for use from the command line). In general you should start larch as a normal, unprivileged user, so that the access to the configuration files is as the correct user. It will ask for the sudo password when it needs it.
  • To build a larch live system you basically just have to go through the tabs one after the other.
  • The first tab 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' tab 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' tab 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.
  • A few customizations of the medium are accessible on the 'Medium Profile' tab, for example the bootloader configurations.
  • Finally the 'Medium' tab 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 (both on the 'Larchify' tab).
  • Further details of the customization process are in the section Profiles and in the documentation to the individual gui tabs.
  • Share and Enjoy!
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