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<br />
<h1><big>larch</big>
–
a do-it-yourself live <em>Arch Linux</em> CD</h1>
<img style="border: 0px solid ; width: 320px; height: 320px;" alt="" src="larch1.jpg"
name="graphics1" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="10" />
<br /><br />
<h2>Running a <em>larch</em> live-CD/USB system</h2>
<p>Of course the details depend on what you have installed and how you have
configured it. For example, the 'mini2' example profile builds a console-only system,
the 'xmaxi' profile boots to xfce4.
</p>
<p>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 <em>raisons d'être</em> for <em>larch</em> is its use
as an <em>Arch</em>-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. Such a user is easily created with the 'adduser' command, or
in KDE with 'kuser' (or using the 'luser.py' script in the <em>larch</em>
'<em>luser</em>' package). If you have a writable boot medium, such changes can be
'remembered' by saving the session when you shut the system down (the possibility
will normally be offered automatically).
</p>
<h4><a name="bootparm"></a>Boot parameters</h4>
<p>As the <em>larch</em> build system is highly configurable, the available
boot parameters can also vary, but by default 'swap' and 'c2r' are provided.
'swap' indicates that an existing swap partition should be used (the default
is not to use it). 'c2r' means 'copy to RAM', i.e. the system data is copied
to main memory before the system is initialized. This allow the system to run
very fast and frees up the boot device (e.g. the boot CD can be ejected and the
drive used for another CD), but it does require a lot of memory (significantly
more than the size of the boot medium), and the boot process is rather slow
because so much data must be copied. Because of the high memory usage, I have
arranged it so that 'c2r' also implies 'swap'. With A USB-stick as boot medium,
the 'c2r' parameter should generally not really be needed, performance is normally
pretty good and it doesn't occupy the CD-drive (if an extra boot CD is needed, on
a machine that can't boot directly from USB, that can be removed after
booting even without 'c2r').
</p>
<h4><a name="config"></a>Configuration</h4>
<p>The supplied profiles are just intended as starting points for your own
configurations, they are fairly primitive, in fact only a little more than a newly
installed <em>Arch</em> sytem. If you are running a profile with X11, you may find that you
need to configure it before it will run. Since <em>Xorg</em> version 7.3, it
is often possible to run without an <strong>/etc/X11/xorg.conf</strong>, but
it may be necessary to create and tweak the configuration file for your system.
You can try 'X -configure' or 'xorgconfig' to create a starting point which you can
then tweak. Start X with <em>startx</em>.
</p>
<p>The 'xmini' and 'xmaxi' profiles use a slightly more elaborate login approach on
the first terminal, with a simple menu as well as automatic login. There is also
a logout gui for xfce, which together with the login script can
trigger session saving directly, bypassing the console prompt.
</p>
<p>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
<em>mc</em> available, it's a real godsend for non-geeks (you should also install
<em>lynx</em> so that HTML files can be displayed on the console - at a
pinch you can also surf with it, but it is painful).
</p>
<p>If your console keyboard map is
wrong, try running <i>km</i> (I stole this from the
standard Arch install CD and modified it a bit to work in <em>larch</em>).
It also modifies '/etc/rc.conf', so the change can be retained for subsequent
runs by performing a 'session-save'.
</p>
<p>If you have a DHCP server on your network, you might well find that
the network interface is configured automatically (assuming your <em>rc.conf</em>
is configured appropriately). On my prototype, I could just fire up <em>konqueror</em>
and the world was my oyster, as they say. If not, well I'm afraid it's
not so easy. Until someone comes up with something better, you'll have
to edit the appropriate configuration files (primarily '/etc/rc.conf')
- see the <em>Arch Linux</em> documentation for details - and then do
'/etc/rc.d/network start'. If you already have a running network
interface but want to change it, you may need to stop it running first,
using 'stop' instead of 'start', then make the changes, then start it.
I don't know if 'restart' would work (it stops then starts the network)
after a change to the configuration.
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<h4><a name="install"></a>Installation to hard disk</h4>
<p>The <em>larch</em> hard-disk installer <em>larchin</em> may be used to install
<em>Arch Linux</em> to hard disk (or similar). At the moment it is very fresh
and rather minimal, probably rather buggy, but I hope it will improve over time.
It is not intended as a complete solution for all aspects of <em>Arch</em> installation,
but I have tried to concentrate on those areas that are unique to the installation
process. In other words it does very little system configuration, because such
requirements can also exist in an already installed system, so I think this should
be covered by separate tools.
<em>larchin</em> deals with partitioning and formatting of hard drives, placing
<em>Arch Linux</em> (primarily a copy of the live system on which it is running)
on the newly formatted partitions, and installation of the GRUB bootloader.
It is so fresh that it hasn't yet got any documentation yet, but it's usage
should be very straightforward - just run 'larchin.py', as root).
</p>
<p>As mentioned above the main approach to <em>Arch</em> installation covered by
<em>larchin</em> 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 <em>Arch Linux</em> installation. I should perhaps mention
the file 'larch0' in the '/.livesys' directory (copied there from the 'larch/copy'
directory on the boot medium). This script is run at the end of the installation
(if it exists) and allows custom installation actions to be performed.
The possibility of doing a completely fresh installation using ftp to
fetch the latest packages may be added at some point, but that is not yet certain.
</p>
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