Arctic Linux - Alpha 2.3

Arctic Linux Alpha 2.3 — Arctic-linux-a2.3.iso, x86_64, 695 MiB.

Several a2.2 installs failed with only "the base system failed to install" on
screen and nothing more useful in the log. This is a fix for that failure mode
itself, not for one specific cause of it — whatever actually goes wrong during
an install is now visible.

The installer was throwing away its own error

target_alpm, the function every install step runs alpm through, called alpm
plain with no output capture at all:

target_alpm() {
    ALPM_ROOT="$TARGET" ALPM_YES=1 alpm "$@"
}

Every failing step reports itself with bail "... - see $LOGF", and the log
had nothing in it beyond the step name — alpm's actual reason, whatever it
was, went to the terminal and nowhere else. On a serial console or a
screenshot taken after the fact, that reason is gone. "the base system failed
to install" was the entire post-mortem, every time, regardless of cause.

alpm's output is captured into the install log now, and bail prints the last
twelve lines of the log instead of just the one sentence it was called with.
The next installer failure — whatever it turns out to be — will say why on the
screen that shows the failure, not require a chroot and a manual read of a log
file to find out.

busybox is the explicit default in install.conf

A_INIT already defaulted to busybox in the installer itself as of a2.2.
The commented example line in install.conf still read
#A_INIT=initialization, which is the one line most likely to get uncommented
by someone reading the file top to bottom looking for what to turn on. It
reads #A_INIT=busybox now, with a note on why initialization is not it yet.

Known

• The specific cause of the a2.2 base-install failures is not yet identified —
  this release makes it visible, not fixed. If it recurs, the on-screen output
  now names it.
• gmp-alt has no binary package, so nftables cannot install and the firewall
  does not come up.
• No web browser; firefox, librewolf, chromium and qutebrowser all need Rust.
• No audio — wireplumber will not build against the packaged lua.
• No terminfo database, so tput does not work.
• initialization freezes at boot; not diagnosed yet.

Install

dd if=Arctic-linux-a2.3.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Run wifi-connect if you need wireless, edit /etc/arctic/install.conf, run
arctic-install.