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ArchLabs


saturnian

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I haven't tried this one myself, but ArchLabs Linux was "inspired by" BunsenLabs. I'm a big fan of BunsenLabs even though I don't really use it these days, as I prefer my own Debian Stretch + Openbox installation. Still, BunsenLabs is easily my favorite Debian derivative, so maybe one day I'll have a look at ArchLabs. Can't imagine that I'd ever replace Arch with it, but I might like ArchLabs for a quick installation on a spare computer.

 

Anyway, thought I'd post a couple of links, for those who might be interested:

 

https://archlabsblog.wordpress.com/

https://sourceforge....jects/archlabs/

 

They've got a tutorial about installing ArchLabs in Virtualbox, too.

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securitybreach

It's a nice project. I know most of the team very well as they came from my Archlinux Community. I haven't played with it in a couple of releases but it was very polished last time I did. I even helped with a few scripts in the beginning when they were just focused on a environment.

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Excellent! Thanks for the reply! I do have Openbox in my Arch installation, and I've also got Antergos with Openbox. Had an issue come up with Antergos this past weekend that kinda gave me second thoughts about that distro, even though I got it fixed easily enough. But ArchLabs might be a better deal for me than Antergos.

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abarbarian

Thanks for the find saturnian. I had a look around the main site and some of the reviews, it certainly is a pretty looking distro. A bit puzzled by the distro though.

It is based on Arch yet is not a rolling release which seems to loose the reason for installing an Arch based os to me.

I wish them good fortune on their journey but the distro is not for me.

 

:breakfast:

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At the main page, it says:

 

As Arch Linux is a rolling distro, so is ARCHLabs. Install once and you are set.
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securitybreach

I think what you are referring to is this statement:

Updates will not be regular, we will push an update when we feel a change is required.

 

I think that they are speaking about the themes and configs for the environment.

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securitybreach

Do you install the Arch way or is it a pre-cooked installer like Calamares?

 

ArchLabs uses an installer like Calanares,

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abarbarian

Do you install the Arch way or is it a pre-cooked installer like Calamares?

 

How to install Archlabs

 

We have two options to install Archlabs :

  1. Calamares (starts straight away)
  2. Architect installer

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abarbarian

 

 

Roadmap

 

Here we will post our intentions for Archlabs : our roadmap for the future.

We are working to make Archlabs 5 the most perfect release we can, some of the things on the To-Do list are:

~Decreasing initial boot times for live session

~Decreasing wait times for first use of sudo/root

~More custom wallpapers

~Additional custom Conky configs

~We hope to implement ArchLabs as a rolling release distribution.

~Trim down ISO size

~Implement a Welcome Script/Welcome Screen similar to the BL-welcome script

 

From the horses mouth :harhar:

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I installed the original BunsenLabs in VirtualBox. The first time something went weird and my Openbox menu disappeared completely. I was getting Openbox errors about an empty menu.xml file (not good apparently.) On the second try I was presented with a very nice Welcome script which automagically handled most of the configuration. I did the usual Guest Additions which as I suspected went well.

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  • 6 months later...
  • 8 months later...

I finally got around to installing ArchLabs. This installation was from the 2018-07-28 iso. I'm very impressed by this distro. Takes some time to get through the installation process but the installer worked great -- it does a great job of walking the user through the process; it's really good for those who love Openbox and want a less painful way of building an Arch system (less painful than a "real" Arch installation, I mean).

 

Excellent live session and installer; very usable Openbox setup "out-of-the-box", with a BunsenLabs/CrunchBang look and feel; and, Arch underneath. The installer offers some other DE/WM choices, too. The default setup is good but I've made a lot of changes to it already -- rebuilt the menu and panel and added some of my favorite apps.

 

https://archlabslinux.com/

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  • 2 weeks later...

ArchLabs is very nice. But, in the same way that BunsenLabs inspired me to try a Debian installation with Openbox and no DE, this weekend I did an Arch installation, with only Openbox. Took me three attempts to get it up and running! This was my first time installing Arch on a UEFI computer, too. I struggled quite a bit with this installation. I almost came here to ask for help. I still have a lot of little things to do on it, but most of my apps are in place and working, and I've got the menu and the tint2 panel mostly set up. Lol, but this is exactly why great distros like ArchLabs and BunsenLabs exist, because doing all this is no piece of cake -- not for me, anyway!

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securitybreach

Cool. One thing you have to remember is, distros like Archlinux were never made to be easy or for beginners anyway:

 

Whereas many GNU/Linux distributions attempt to be more user-friendly, Arch Linux has always been, and shall always remain user-centric. The distribution is intended to fill the needs of those contributing to it, rather than trying to appeal to as many users as possible. It is targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems....

https://wiki.archlin...User_centrality

 

It's not that it was made to be hard but it has always been geared towards intermediate users.

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Yeah, I don't think I can be called a "beginner" but I'm not the sharpest guy on the planet, either! Installing and setting up Arch is no piece of cake from me, even when I refer to my notes from previous installations. I definitely struggled with the UEFI stuff -- that's actually the reason why I had not yet installed Arch on either of my newer notebooks (both UEFI machines), because I knew it wasn't gonna be easy. ArchLabs handled that perfectly, though.

 

ArchLabs is a very nice distro. I would have simply kept it but I was determined to do a "straight" Arch installation on this notebook. Arch really doesn't seem all that complicated to me once it's installed and all set up, and I guess that's the beauty of distros like Antergos and ArchLabs, they take care of all that for you.

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securitybreach

Yeah, I don't think I can be called a "beginner" but I'm not the sharpest guy on the planet, either! Installing and setting up Arch is no piece of cake from me, even when I refer to my notes from previous installations. I definitely struggled with the UEFI stuff -- that's actually the reason why I had not yet installed Arch on either of my newer notebooks (both UEFI machines), because I knew it wasn't gonna be easy. ArchLabs handled that perfectly, though.

 

ArchLabs is a very nice distro. I would have simply kept it but I was determined to do a "straight" Arch installation on this notebook. Arch really doesn't seem all that complicated to me once it's installed and all set up, and I guess that's the beauty of distros like Antergos and ArchLabs, they take care of all that for you.

 

 

Oh, I know that. :)

 

I wasn't referring to you as much as the comment about the difficulty of installing and setting it up.

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I haven't tried an arch installation with UEFI - most of my stuff is pretty old and MBR based. Nor would I be able to duplicate the look and feel of say MX-17 with any Arch install as I am not really a good tweaker. My Arch installs are pretty vanilla in appearance.

That said I learned a lot about the nuts and bolts of Linux by installing Arch, it really is a lot of fun to get it working, and at the end of the day you have a solid system with a great package manager. Maybe you can dodge some of the installation gotchas with Manjaro and Antergos but going through the Arch install has a hidden beauty all its own.

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Maybe you can dodge some of the installation gotchas with Manjaro and Antergos but going through the Arch install has a hidden beauty all its own.

 

You can always use GParted from a live distro to make setting up a tad easier. I guess the partitioning and formating and mounting bit from the install puts of quite a lot of novice penguins.

The UEFI install is probably easier than a MBR install but you do have to learn a new road map which can be a challenge if you are used to another system. I find the EFI boot manager much simpler to use than GRUB and I believe that systemd can be set up as a boot manager which would make it even simpler. Following the Arch Wiki should produce good results and if things go bottom up then it is not a big deal, just a learning experience on the way to better things.

 

:breakfast:

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securitybreach

Maybe you can dodge some of the installation gotchas with Manjaro and Antergos but going through the Arch install has a hidden beauty all its own.

 

You can always use GParted from a live distro to make setting up a tad easier. I guess the partitioning and formating and mounting bit from the install puts of quite a lot of novice penguins.

The UEFI install is probably easier than a MBR install but you do have to learn a new road map which can be a challenge if you are used to another system. I find the EFI boot manager much simpler to use than GRUB and I believe that systemd can be set up as a boot manager which would make it even simpler. Following the Arch Wiki should produce good results and if things go bottom up then it is not a big deal, just a learning experience on the way to better things.

 

:breakfast:

 

Yup, I use systemd-boot and Luks encryption with UEFI on my main rig and it wasn't too bad to set up. I also have a couple of machines with Grub and Luks on UEFI as well. The only non-uefi systems I have are my RPis

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Well, I felt like I wasn't seeing clear instructions at the wiki about how to deal with the UEFI angle. So I re-installed ArchLabs, this time taking good notes, and that's how I figured out the UEFI part, by looking at how the ArchLabs folks handled it. I think this was actually the first time (or maybe it was the second or third time, not sure) since I started running Arch where I wasn't able to solve something by referring to the wiki. It was probably my fault for not reading carefully enough.

 

I have two UEFI notebooks, both of them HP, and I think I have the BIOS settings the same in both. But things don't always work the same on both machines. For example, one of them won't boot my MX flash drive, but the other one does! It's very odd to see a computer that won't boot MX from a flash drive. In fact, I wasn't able to boot that same notebook with GParted Live, either -- so I used another distro (live) for the partitioning (that live session also contained GParted). I think those are the only two distros that wouldn't boot from a flash drive on that computer, but they boot all my other computers just fine.

 

I'm kinda getting to the point where I prefer the "parent" distros over the "derivative" distros. Like, my Stretch Xfce installation compared to MX, or my Arch installations compared to Antergos and ArchLabs -- when I go with the "parent" I end up with a cleaner system, not as many added "tools" and stuff that I don't want or need. Takes more work, though.

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securitybreach

Well that is probably because one of them is set to UEFI and the other is set to Legacy. Depending on the age of your HP laptops, look under the Boot menu and change it to either UEFI Native (Without CSM) or it may give you the option to Enable UEFI and disable Legaco. If it the latter one, you also need to go into the Secure Boot menu and disable it. (I work with various business class HP laptops at work).

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Thanks, securitybreach. I should probably look into this more but I've got the Arch installation done, so...

 

I told you wrong, though, because neither HP notebook will boot either MX or GParted Live. Both of those flash drives boot fine on my older notebooks.

 

However, both of the UEFI notebooks boot my Debian Live 9.5 flash drive with no problem. In fact, as I recall, they both boot every other distro's flash drive I have here with no problem. For the heck of it, I tried a few others just now: BunsenLabs Helium, Kubuntu 18.04, Arch Linux, ArchLabs, Devuan 8.0.0. They all boot both notebooks. Seriously? If you're counting, that's six up, two down (lol).

 

I go over to System Configuration > Boot Options and both notebooks are set up the same, Legacy Support is disabled, Secure Boot is disabled. Both show the same "Rev. 5.0" at the upper right corner.

 

So I'm not sure why I should bother to try to do something differently for two distros (MX and GParted Live), especially when Debian and other Debian-based distros (and Arch and other Arch-based distros) boot both notebooks fine. This doesn't really make much sense to me, but that's okay, I can install Debian and Arch on the UEFI notebooks (I currently have Arch on one and Debian Stretch on the other), and those are the most important distros to me. Most distros' live sessions include GParted these days, so I'm cool with that, I can certainly live without booting those two notebooks with MX or GParted Live. I'll still keep those two distros on flash drives for my older notebooks. Thanks again.

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I have a 2012 era HP notebook that used to belong to my daughter. It is a legacy BIOS machine that ran Windows 7 originally and I had no trouble booting an MX Live USB stick and installing MX-17 on it.

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securitybreach

I have a 2012 era HP notebook that used to belong to my daughter. It is a legacy BIOS machine that ran Windows 7 originally and I had no trouble booting an MX Live USB stick and installing MX-17 on it.

 

Well if the drive was partitioned using mbr/bios, then it would work fine. On the other hand, if the drive was parititoned with GPT, you couldn't read it on a legacy bios machine.

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I'm kinda getting to the point where I prefer the "parent" distros over the "derivative" distros. Like, my Stretch Xfce installation compared to MX, or my Arch installations compared to Antergos and ArchLabs -- when I go with the "parent" I end up with a cleaner system, not as many added "tools" and stuff that I don't want or need. Takes more work, though.

Agree with you there. MX is slowly turning into a beginners distro with lots of tools that do very little, and mostly functions I already do with one line in CLI. It's still a great distro as it's incredibly reliable and has some nice backported programs to keep it more current than Debian, and great theming. siduction is still my main distro but endless upgrades get a bit tiring too. I have one Stretch install (with NeptuneOS' Plasma 5.12) which is tempting to use but as siduction's Plasma 5.13 is miles better than Stretch's 5.8, I think it may be after Buster get's released when I finally return home to mother.

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Yeah, that does sound odd.

 

Yes, this seems strange. I don't think I want to spend much time worrying about this (my apologies for not starting a new thread), but I don't understand what's going on here. Went back this afternoon and tested one of these notebooks with some different flash drives.

 

This notebook is currently home to Debian Stretch, with GNOME, and it's the computer I use at home for business and important stuff. I am not wanting to replace Stretch with MX-17.

 

I used dd to write to each flash drive. All of these boot fine on the older, non-UEFI notebooks. The isos used were:

 

MX-17.1_August_X64.iso

gparted_live-0.32.0-1-amd64.iso

devuan_ascii_2.0.0_amd64_desktop-live.iso

debian-live_9.5.0_amd64-xfce.iso

bl-Helum_amd64+build2.iso

Kubuntu 18.04.1 (forgot to write down the iso name)

 

Pardon me if I've made any typos there. The first two won't boot (I get taken right to the Stretch boot screen), the others boot fine. In fact, I don't recall having any problem booting this machine with any other distros besides MX and GParted Live. I don't think I should have to do something different in the BIOS setup for only those two distros. I tested these because they're all more or less related to Debian.

 

Also, when I'm logged into Debian Stretch on that machine, the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives don't automount (in GNOME), but the others do.

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securitybreach

Well that may the issue... you cannot use both UEFI and Legacy on the same machine. In my experience, it doesn't matter if your biois allows you to set it as hybrid (uefi and/or legacy), you can do only have it set as one or the other. So if your bios is set to use legacy and mbr, you cannot run uefi and gpt partitions on the same machine.

 

Hybrid is supposed to allow you to use either or, but I have had not had very much luck with that. It's best to choose one or the other.

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Well that may the issue... you cannot use both UEFI and Legacy on the same machine. In my experience, it doesn't matter if your biois allows you to set it as hybrid (uefi and/or legacy), you can do only have it set as one or the other. So if your bios is set to use legacy and mbr, you cannot run uefi and gpt partitions on the same machine.

 

Hybrid is supposed to allow you to use either or, but I have had not had very much luck with that. It's best to choose one or the other.

 

I don't get it. Why would I have a problem with only the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives, then?

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