A friend of mine was telling me about how wonderful archinstall is and how he managed to get KDE plasma up and running with very little effort.
I know you can add a custom config file, archinstall produces a config at the point of creating install. So you can either modify it or use it recreated an existing system. Now what if you could add commands to that file? Well you can by using your own config file or modifying a ready made one.
So lets look at a simple config file:
{
"custom-commands": [
"pacman -S --noconfirm wayland otf-ttf-awesome sway-contrib alacritty firefox rofi-wayland",
]
}
So with sway tiling window manager selected via installer I am now adding some packages that I use/need in new install.
You can add what you like!
My thinking is pull in a git repo, put required configs into new install….
In the custom command section you can basically add any terminal command, it might even be able to setup a new user and start services.
Have included this basic config.json file on latest ArchBang iso, all you need to do is run in a terminal:
sudo pacman -Sy archinstall
cd ~/.config/archinstall
sudo archinstall --config config.json
Could Archinstall replace abinstall? yes and no. Positives archinstall has all the features needed including auto partitioning, can install a number of desktops or window managers. Negatives a user would need a working network connection to perform an install, while not a deal breaker many archbang users can currently install without a network connection.
At the moment I will not be shipping ArchBang with archinstall, I need to test config and see if I can pull in source files from there I could make it work for me and recreate ArchBang.
If anyone is interested then please get in touch, am new to this stuff so it has taken me a little while to get my head around it. From this point I feel more able to get archinstall to do what I want 😉
Stay safe….
