Oh my Glorious Arch

Arch is the best! <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_is_the_best>_

I need a good Live CD, but I still cannot find a perfect one for me.

• SystemRescueCd <https://www.system-rescue-cd.org/>_ 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 <https://grml.org/>__ 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 <https://github.com/mytbk/liveusb-builder>_ also supports it.

The name glorious comes from r/linuxmasterrace <https://www.reddit.com/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 [--mirror=] [--desktop=] [--comp=<gzip|xz>]

To add more packages, you can put your Arch packages to aur-packages/.

The format of is the string after Server = in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.

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. <https://github.com/grml/grml-live/issues/71>__
• 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 <https://sourceforge.net/projects/garchiso/files/>_. It's signed by a PGP key whose primary key fingerprint is 7079B481F04B5D8B65A0ECDEEA2DB82FE04A9403.