Running a larch live system

Of course the details depend on what you have installed and how you have configured it. For example, the 'mini' example profile builds a console-only system, the 'xmaxi' profile boots to xfce.

One thing worth noting is that these supplied profiles automatically login to the root account, which - potentially - allows all sorts of 'dangerous' actions, like reformatting your disks or making a mess of your file-systems in other ways. This is because one of the main raisons d'être for larch is its use as an Arch-installation-and-rescue medium. For this, you need root access. However, if you want to use the system in other ways, e.g. for text or image editing, or for internet browsing or e-mail writing, it might be safer to do this as an unprivileged user. Users can be added during the 'larchification' stage of the build process - this is especially easy in the GUI. Alternatively, if using a medium with data persistence, such a user can be easily created with the 'adduser' command, or with some other utility (e.g. the graphical 'luser.py' script in the larch 'luser' package).

Boot parameters

As the larch build system is highly configurable, the available boot parameters can also vary, but by default 'swap' and 'nw' are provided. 'swap' indicates that an existing swap partition should be used (the default is not to use it). 'nw' means 'non-writeable', i.e. no data persistence between boots is supported (and is thus only relevant where this is at all possible). For experts there are a few more: 'tmpfs' sets the size of the tmpfs file-system (default '60%'); 'quiet' suppresses (some) boot messages, 'verbose' adds a few more, 'break' causes the boot process to be interrupted at the end of the initramfs code, for debugging purposes.

There are also boot options connected with the boot device. The 'nocd' boot option, if present, prevents booting from CD. This might be useful if you use a boot CD but want to boot a larch system on another device (normally a CD will be detected before other devices). This only works if the kernel is compatible of course.

The 'root=' option allows explicit specification of the device containing the larch system. It is also possible to choose the boot device on the basis of UUID ('uuid=') or label ('label='). The default maximum waiting time (to allow USB devices to be recognized) is 12 seconds (if a device is recognized earlier the pause will automatically be shorter), which should be adequate, but if you want to change this you can do it using the 'usbdelay=' option.

Configuration

The supplied profiles are not intended to be complete, though I hope they work reasonably well. They should be seen as examples, perhaps as starting points for your own configurations. If you are running a profile with X11, you may find that you need to configure it before it will run, though nowadays much hardware will work to at least some extent without any tweaking (even without an 'xorg.conf'). Minimal starting-point 'xorg.conf' files are offered in the xfce examples.

The 'xmini' and 'xmaxi' profiles should start a GUI (an xfce desktop) and provide a variety of useful programs, the latter providing a more extensive set than the former.

If you are stuck with the console, there is still hope. It's not as pretty or newbie friendly as an X11 desktop, but still quite capable. I always like to have mc available, it's a real godsend for non-geeks (you should also install lynx so that HTML files can be displayed on the console - at a pinch you can also surf with it, but it is painful).

If your console keyboard map is wrong, try running km (I stole this from the standard Arch install CD and modified it a bit to work in larch). It also modifies '/etc/rc.conf', so the change can be retained for subsequent runs if data persistence is enabled.

If you have a DHCP server on your network, you might well find that the network interface is configured automatically (assuming your rc.conf is configured appropriately). Otherwise you can use any method to set up the network available in Arch Linux - see the appropriate Arch Linux documentation (primarily the wiki, I guess) for details.

Of course the exact details of what you can do depends on what software you installed, so I won't rabbit on endlessly about it here. Nearly all configuration details should be just the same as in a normal, hard-disk based installation.

Installation to hard disk

The larch hard-disk installer larchin may be used to install Arch Linux to hard disk (or similar). ***+ Or, at least it will be possible to use it when I have updated (rewritten?) it for larch-8. -*** larchin deals with partitioning and formatting of hard drives, placing Arch Linux (primarily a copy of the live system on which it is running) on the newly formatted partitions, and installation of a bootloader.

As mentioned above the main approach to Arch installation covered by larchin is to copy the contents of the live system to a hard drive. Those (few) bits peculiar to the needs of a live system are removed and the result is a completely normal Arch Linux installation. I should perhaps mention the file 'delarch' in the 'larch/data' directory on the boot medium). This script (if it exists) is run at the end of the installation and allows custom installation actions to be performed (the main reason for its existence is to allow features of the live system to be removed, because they would be out of place in a normal installation).

'Live' installation to hard disk

This is sometimes called a 'frugal' install and means that the system as it is (compressed, running in an aufs file-system) on the USB-stick or CD is installed as a live system to a hard-drive partition. This might be useful if you want to run from a flash device, for example, as it minimizes write operations to the device (normal access is read only). This is actually no different from copying a larch system to a USB-stick, so the normal copying procedure can be used.

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