Oh my Glorious Arch
I need a good Live CD, but I still cannot find a perfect one for me.
- SystemRescueCd is awesome, but it's Gentoo-based and not so easy to extend it. Now it's based on Arch, and it becomes bigger and lacks some tools I need.
- Debian-based distributions are easy to make, but I don't like the style of deb/rpm packages. Well, Grml is awesome for admins.
- Arch is glorious, but its Live CD is a bit simple.
So now I'll make another Arch Live CD of my own. I'll make a new airootfs.sfs from any other GNU/Linux distribution, and package it in an iso file. My liveusb-builder also supports it.
The name glorious comes from r/linuxmasterrace.
Usage
Dependencies:
- systemd (for systemd-nspawn)
- squashfs-tools
- xorriso
To prevent you from screwing up your machine, you'd better use this script in a VM.
You need root to run the install script, because chroot is needed. The command is very simple:
sudo ./install.sh <archiso> [--mirror=<mirror>] [--desktop=<desktop>] [--comp=<gzip|xz>]
To add more packages, you can put your Arch packages to aur-packages/.
The format of <mirror> is the string after Server = in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.
<desktop> can be mate, xfce, dde, lxde-gtk3 and lxqt.
Default mirror and desktop is TUNA mirror and MATE desktop.
Example:
sudo ./install.sh archlinux-2017.05.01-x86_64.iso --mirror 'http://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch' --desktop=lxqt
Packages
I now have these tools in my Live CD:
- flashrom: to flash coreboot to my machine
- coreboot-utils: cbmem, inteltool, intelmetool, ectool, etc.
- acpid and iasl: for handling ACPI things
- htop: the glorious task manager
- debootstrap: to install a Debian-based system easily
- picocom: to access the serial console
- WireGuard VPN
For the Live CDs with a desktop environment, I have:
- a good desktop environment: MATE, Xfce, LXDE-GTK3, LXQt or DDE
- QEMU: to install other OS with an ISO image, including Windows (using my disk as virtual disk). This is the most glorious feature of this Live CD. And Grml adopted my idea.
- gparted: the glorious partition manager
- Firefox to access the Internet
- Riot web
- Pidgin with OTR plugin
Download
I built a gloriousarch Xfce4 iso and uploaded it to sourceforge. It's signed by a PGP key whose primary key fingerprint is 7079B481F04B5D8B65A0ECDEEA2DB82FE04A9403.