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Installing Arkdep on a new system ​

System requirements ​

  • / is partitioned with btrfs.
  • /boot mounted boot partition.
  • 512MiB boot partition for max 2 deployments, 1GiB recommended.
  • Systemd-boot bootloader is installed and configured as the primary bootloader.
  • dracut, wget, curl, gnupg and btrfs-progs are installed.

Image building system requirements ​

  • arch-install-scripts and btrfs-progs are installed.
  • debootstrap is installed for debian variants builds.

Initializing Arkdep ​

The following command will initialize Arkdep, it will deploy a subvolume containing all Arkdep related files excluding kernels and initramfs to /arkdep. Kernel and initramfs will instead be stored in /boot/arkdep upon image deployment.

shell
# To init on the current root
sudo arkdep init

# Alternatively to init in to a specific directory
sudo ARKDEP_ROOT=/target/dir arkdep init

# If the ESP is not mounted underneath $ARKDEP_ROOT/boot, manually define it with ARKDEP_BOOT
sudo ARKDEP_ROOT=/target/dir ARKDEP_BOOT=/target/boot arkdep init

Prepping the overlay ​

Once Ardep has been initialized you should prepare the overlay located at /arkdep/overlay. The overlay is copied directly on to the root filesystem of a new deployment, create directories inside of it as-if it were a root filesystem. For example, /arkdep/overlay/etc will be your /etc folder.

Add the following files to the overlay;

  • etc/passwd, etc/shadow, etc/group, etc/subgid and etc/subuid files containing only entries for root and normal user accounts, system accounts will be supplied via the images and are stored separate in /usr/lib.
  • fstab file with at least /home, /root and /arkdep mounts configured, see the reference below.
  • (Optional) A etc/locale.conf, etc/locale.gen and etc/localtime symlink.
  • (Optional) Customize the default Arkdep configuration at /arkdep/config.
text
LABEL=arkane_root   /home               btrfs   rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep/shared/home,compress=zstd     0 1
LABEL=arkane_root	/root               btrfs   rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep/shared/root,compress=zstd	    0 1
LABEL=arkane_root	/arkdep             btrfs   rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep,compress=zstd                 0 1
LABEL=arkane_root	/var/lib/flatpak    btrfs   rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep/shared/flatpak,compress=zstd  0 1

Kernel parameters ​

To customize default kernel parameters edit /arkdep/templates/systemd-boot

For distro maintainers ​

At the top of the arkdep script are defined as variables the defaults for the script. These defaults are used as a fallback and when initializing a new system for Arkdep. As a distro maintainer who is packaging Arkdep for their own project you will likely wish to customize these settings to match your preferences and repository configuration.

You can find a reference pkgbuild file here.