InstArch

My blog has obviously been quite inactive the past year. I've started a bunch of new projects and worked on some really interesting stuff in that time. I'm going to try to gradually describe the things I've been playing with here.

One project I started in the summer of 2013 is a personal Arch-based LiveCD. My goal in building this LiveCD was purely personal: I wanted to have a LiveCD with my preferred programs and settings just in case I hosed my main system somehow. I want to have minimal downtime, particularly when I need to keep producing for work. That was the idea behind this project. I called it InstArch, as in "instant Arch".

The build scripts for this project are hosted on bitbucket, while the ISOs I build are hosted on sourceforge. InstArch was recently added to Softpedia, and it has received a bit of interest because of that. Again, the idea behind this project was entirely personal--I'm not trying to make a new distribution or community because I'm dissatisfied with Arch or anything like that. There is some erroneous information about InstArch on Softpedia, but I haven't yet written them to ask them to fix it. Soon enough :)

If you're interested in playing with my live CD, feel free to download it and offer suggestions on the issue tracker. I may or may not implement any suggestions :) I've already had one person email me asking about the default username and password for InstArch. If you also find yourself needing this information:

  • username: inst
  • password: arch

You shouldn't need this information unless you try to use sudo or try to switch desktop sessions.

Here's a video of my live CD in action.

Also note that I haven't built/published a new live CD for several months.


Another part of the InstArch project, which I started looong before the actual LiveCD, was to create my own personal Arch repository. It tracks a bunch of packages that I build from the AUR and other personal Arch packages. Anyone is free to use this repo, and it's one that's built into my live CD.

If you wish to use this repository, add my key:

pacman-key -r 051680AC
pacman-key --lsign-key 051680AC

Then add this to your /etc/pacman.conf:

[instarch]
SigLevel = PackageRequired
Server = http://instarch.codekoala.com/$arch/