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installation errors

Open step- opened this issue 2 months ago • 3 comments

First experience installing instantOS using the 2025.10.01 arch ISO. After booting the ISO, I need to run the following commands otherwise the instantOS installer enters a loop complaining about a missing gum command:

pacman -S gum
bash <(curl -L instantos.io/install)

With gum installed, the instantOS installer can carry on for some time, emitting with some warnings, but eventually it enters another loop printing the following messages:

warning: bash-5.3.3-2 is up to date -- skipping
error: target not found: nitrogen
warning: lshw-B.02.20-1 is up to date -- skipping
/root/instantARCH/moduleutils.sh: line 15: imenu: command not found
/usr/bin/reflector
[2025-10-26 hh:mm:ss] WARNING: failed to rate http(s) download (http://mirror.ufscar.br/archlinux/extra/os/x86_64/extra.db): Download timeout out after 5 seconds(s).
[2025-10-26 hh:mm:ss] WARNING: failed to rate http(s) download (https://mirror.theo546.fr/archlinux/extra/os/x86_64/extra.db): Download timeout out after 5 seconds(s).
[2025-10-26 hh:mm:ss] WARNING: failed to rate http(s) download (https://sg.arch.niranjan.co/extra/os/x86_64/extra.db): Download timeout out after 5 seconds(s).
[2025-10-26 hh:mm:ss] WARNING: failed to rate http(s) download (https://in.arch.niranjan.co/extra/os/x86_64/extra.db): Download timeout out after 5 seconds(s).
:: Synchronizing package database...
core downloading...
extra downloading...
multilib downloading...
retrying package installation in 4 seconds

warning: bash-5.3.3-2 is up to date -- skipping
error: target not found: nitrogen
...

And so on and so forth. After more than an hour in this loop, I pressed Ctrl-C to exit. Even though the installer said "Installation successful" the installation media was not bootable.

step- avatar Oct 26 '25 09:10 step-

Hello, huge instantOS fan over here. I love it, loved it so much that I took it personally to solve this problem (I had it myself). The next workaround is the consequence of several days of trying and failing.

  1. Boot live ISO from a USB.
  2. Before running the installer, make sure the pacman.conf has commented out the community repo, since it's no longer up and makes the installer have a stroke.
  3. Right after the installer script git clones the instantARCH repo, but before the GUI pops up, open a terminal and sudo nano /root/instantARCH/data/packages/system and delete the nitrogen package (it's no longer on the Arch Linux Extra repo).
  4. Let the installer run. It'll get stuck on a loop again soon, because instantwallpaper depends on nitrogen, and gtk2-perl (another package that removed from the extra repo) wasn't installed either. By this point, the installer should've already made the boot entry. You're safe, turn of the computer and remove the USB.
  5. Using the tty2 (Ctrl + Alt + F2), login using the credentials you created during the install. Then, sudo -S pacman yay base-devel.
  6. You'll be using yay to install and compile the missing binaries: yay nitrogen, followed by yay gtk2-perl. It'll take some time.
  7. Now, run sudo pacman -S instantos. This will install the things instantOS was missing before having the nitrogen deprivation stroke.
  8. Next, curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/instantOS/instantTOOLS/main/netinstall.sh | bash followed by ibuild fullrepo to install all the instantOS extra packages that make instantOS great. (Tip: the instantSHELL package is missing some updates, I recommend using my fork of it.)
  9. Don't forget to install the grub-theme.
  10. You should now be able to reboot and have instantOS ready.

Afostyrio avatar Oct 29 '25 03:10 Afostyrio

@Afostyrio thank you for your detailed comments. Unfortunately, I cannot follow them, especially where you refer to a GUI installer. I am using the command-line installer. Fortunately, I noticed that @paperbenni's recent d98c786 and e7299c8 commits address the gum and nitrogen issues. So I hope the command-line installer will soon be working again.

step- avatar Oct 31 '25 14:10 step-

I uploaded some fixes, unfortunately I cannot test them right now, but maybe it's working again. I'm also drafting a CI which will automatically catch these kinds of errors and will make uploading fixes a lot easier

paperbenni avatar Oct 31 '25 16:10 paperbenni