Archtail is a Archlinux installer using whiptail. It's supposed to be a simple Arch installer for the masses. But mainly it was an excuse for me to learn whiptail.
To use this script, issue this command from your freshly booted archiso image:
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deepbsd/Archtail/master/archtail.sh
It will be best if you use three different tty's. Open the script in your editor on tty1
and run the script ( bash archtail.sh ) on tty2. On tty3 you can watch the installation
progress by tailing the install log: tail -f /tmp/install.log
I'm new to whiptail, so I ran into a problem with the --gauge switch. Apparently, if you
want to show a progress gauge, you have to find a way of outputting a number stream to STDOUT
that represents the progress of your process. That capability is not built into --gauge
by default. It's up to you to build that into your program. How to do this? Well, that's
what I'm currently experimenting with in my whipsample.sh program in
my binfiles repo.
Currently the progress gauge works okay. The installer works up to the Xorg-less part. There are still two or three places where STDOUT gets displayed to the screen rather than to the logfile. Have to chase those down. Also, I need to debug the X install functions. They are not fully working yet.
The script works. You'll wind up with a freshly installed Archlinux system if you don't make any mistakes.
Unfortunately, it's probably still possible (maybe even easy?) to type some wrong things and end up with a broken system. I'll still need to build in some more resiliency.
Another idea I've been working on is to build a configuration file with either a whiptail script or dynamically. Then have that config file get used to automatically install an Arch system. That process might be duplicated by a process across any number of containers, for example. I'd like to try that.
Anyway, I'm glad to say it works. All the features except cryptsetup. Everything else. Yaaay!
I've done a fair amount of work on the script. lv_create now calls external scripts. Also we're giving the user the chance to install a non-us keyboard keymap.
Eventually, I'll need to break this sucker up into separate files, and at that point you'll have to clone it into the Archiso instance. That's fine. I'd prefer to have kept it simple, but it's just gotten too big.
There are some other things that have struck me though:
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Break some of the larger functions into smaller functions. Particularly lv_create. That one is too big. UPDATE: Haven't done this, but I have re- organized the sequence of the functions into Utility functions, Disk functions, Installation functions, and Other functions. These could later be broken out into separate files. NOTE: lv_create now calls external functions. But it's still pretty big.
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(DONE) I want to have a list of all executables in the script and at the start of the script make sure they are all in the $PATH (or at least are all executable). UPDATE: This currently works now, but the extra repo is not active by default.
Still looking into that. -
(DONE) The user should be able to determine his/her own desktop environment or window manager. Right now they're getting Cinnamon and lightdm whether they want it or not. UPDATE: This currently is how the script works. The default is still Cinnamon with lightdm, however. But whatever the user selects will become the default environment.
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I don't need to ask for whether to do LVM or not. I should probably just get the user's choice of disk for installation by default and install my usual LVM to it using ext4. I can build in whether it chooses GPT or MBR disk labels. Not sure on this. I could just survey the top Linux installers and see what they do.
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(DONE) Is there a way to re-use the same functions for creating LVs and regular partitions? Seems like there should be, but I should find out. UPDATE: If I decide to do away with non-LVM disk prep, that will remove quite a few functions.
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Cryptsetup: Do I want to bother with it or not? (Still haven't worked on this again.)
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(DONE) Use a checkmark to indicate the item is complete on the main menu. UPDATE: Creating an actual checkmark on a TTY is actually more trouble than it's worth, so I just created an 'X' in a box in front of each startmenu pick item.
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I should also check that archtail is being called by BASH and not zsh, for example. (Have not addressed this yet.)