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Smaller ISO's and faster installations

First post and not native english.

I have some points regarding the installation of Artix.
I belive it should fit here.

1. I regulary work with VM's and it is really annoying to wait for ISO's to download and to be moved around.
I belive that there are many ways to decrese file size for instalations with online access.

2. The GRUB menu is not responsive enough for my taste.
After seeing the new Ubuntu server i quite like it's installer.
I might be cabable to create something similiary.

TLDR. I belive an installer would help greatly for those with a low paticens.

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #1 –
The base isos aren't small enough for you? They aren't that big. Not sure what you mean by the GRUB menu not being responsive enough (why would it even differ from distro to distro). There's a calameres installer that comes with the non-base isos; of course that has the downside of making the iso size bigger. Installing manually doesn't take too long though.

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #2 –
1. The GRUB lag is caused by my system. I have tested it on other systems and there it works.
2. I am used to embedded systems and 480MB compared to 16MB is big.

As for the installer, i probably meant an custom ISO generator or patcher sorts of thing.
Like creating the nessary partitions on the source medium and setting up SSH with keys.


I am currently looking to boot the artix installer from a ISO using a custom grub menuentry.

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #3 –
Ah. Well Artix is arch-based plus its a GNU distro so I doubt it's realistic to have a really small embedded-like file size. I don't think anyone is necessarily opposed to an install script or something like that, but AFAIK it doesn't exist and the priority for that would be very low.

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #4 –
I created some scripts, for unpacking modifyng and repacking the iso's.
After repacking an unchanged ISO is ~0.95GB in size. Not what i wanted.  :D

Is there a Script or Wiki entry for creating the ISO's?
I used the Arch Linux for my hacky scripts.

* edit
NVM i included the rootfs.sys multiple times.
Scripts do not work as wanted. Might work on them if i have more time and post them here.

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #5 –
Artix Wiki buildiso

The basic Debian installer was / is? a very minimal bootable OS that had very little functionality except to be able to partition disks using say cfdisk or something, and install the compressed packages on the CD with it's install scripts. This could also be used on it's own without any local packages and download them from the internet directly. It didn't have much in common with an installed Debian system. That's why it's so small. I think it was BusyBox or KLIBC or something like that. If you wanted to run pacman or other GLIBC apps on something like that, perhaps it would work if it was recompiled with static libraries as a GCC option, and the build system had a kernel version that was not too far removed from the installer one.
The Artix base iso works on a similar principle except it's not a minimal system, it's a full Linux GLIBC BASH OS without a desktop and a few install tools added. You boot the iso and use it to install packages from online repos to the target HDD.
Sometimes you get live iso's which copy themselves to the target HDD, and have extra packages that set up the install, they are either not installed or delete themselves on the first boot after running some final setup.
I'm not sure what the Mate community iso does exactly if you installed from it, I downloaded it a while ago to use as a live iso for various things. You don't seem to get the Mate desktop, only the LXQT one, so I think it must have the packages for Mate stored on the iso although the install would be run from the LXQT desktop environment. It does have gparted though, which is useful. But that's why that iso is so big, anyway.
The "lrzip" package has zpaq compression and lrztar -z -L9 is better than xz but it's slower to pack and just as slow to unpack, but might be helpful especially if you had a fast CPU. It also has other compression options and full multi threading support so is exceptionally good incidentally. BTRFS has a compressed file system option but I've not tried it, and also you can build things with GCC optimized for size if you wanted to rebuild everything on an iso.

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #6 –
Quote from: ####### – on
I'm not sure what the Mate community iso does exactly if you installed from it, I downloaded it a while ago to use as a live iso for various things. You don't seem to get the Mate desktop, only the LXQT one, so I think it must have the packages for Mate stored on the iso although the install would be run from the LXQT desktop environment.
The MATE/LXDE community ISO contains both (not LXQt, that must have been a typo, right?) and by default autologins into LXDE. If you just logout, you can select MATE as your session and login into it. Same thing applies to the installed systems this ISO produces (minus the autologin).

Re: Smaller ISO's and faster installations

Reply #7 –
No, I meant LXQT - but was wrong  ;D  Every other Artix iso is LXQT, it's just the mate-lxde one that isn't! Makes sense to have 2 GTK desktops together of course.
Knowing how to use that iso is a big help. I also found the connman-gtk network connection GUI this time, on the bar at the bottom towards the right, or invoked via the terminal. I thought it just had CLI connection before as there was no WICD or NetworkManager around. Now I can impress non-Artix users if the opportunity presents itself.
It's successfully rearranged some partitions, and resized one with Gparted previously, and it booted on a recent - ish W10 UEFI boot PC after turning off secure boot in the BIOS. The self test takes a while but given how often USB's seem to fail it's probably a good idea.
I guess the "calamares" package on the iso takes care of the installation.