Let's fix Arch!

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Continuing the discussion from CoMmUnItY eNgAgEmEnT – L1T Leader AMA: AdminDev Edition:

It will be glorious!

I’ve been meaning to get back into the arch space, since Fedoras lack of ZFS on Root has been frustrating me. I’ll carry this torch as far as I can on my own, but I’m going to need a couple days to find some time to get arch installed.

Dragging @AnotherDev in because he said he was interested.

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I hear @redgek uses Arch

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Yeah, but he’s an XFS pleb.

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ext4 ftw

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Point is, you’re using a legacy filesystem.

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ur a legacy, old man

in all seriousness i’d try zfs already, but am always too lazy

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Let’s switch gears to manjaro instead of arch because … new users would appreciate this than arch folks. About half the arch folks will have a philosophical objection to this approach to recovery, I bet.

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Okay, so the only complaint I have with this is that Manjaro doesn’t officially support ZFS root in their installer, while Antergos does.

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So do we want to go off of manjaro or arch? I’m going to need to build an installer iso for both, since the antergos zfs package is currently borked and the maintainer isn’t responding quickly enough.

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I would be happy to help, although probably mainly in testing.

I also second Antergos, but still Manjaro over base Arch.

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So, they’ve talked in the past about patching the manjaro installer to add zfs support. Should we do that first?

There’s an open issue for it somewhere.

Scratch that, there is no open issue.

This is the open issue for the Antergos packages:

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I just updated the ticket with all the info they should need to get the packages fixed.

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I think step one is prolly manually installing zfs and automating the mounting of / to be one of the snapshots, and making a shellscript or something to both create a snap and update the boot menu?

The installer will be easy to update once the proof of concept works. Idk if there are any landmines we might encounter with zfs on / manualledit: and prolly manjaro or antergos is fine. Patching in zfs manually is NBD if we have to tho.

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Alright, so are you still sold on Manjaro first? I wanna know which iso to build.

Actually, I’m gonna do Antergos. By the weekend, hopefully all these packages are fixed.

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No worries either way, but this will take me some time. I’ve never been able to get Manjaro installed.

This is coming from a guy that installs “pure” Arch Linux without referencing the Wiki and I’ve used Antergos for years :grin:

I think it’s my hardware.

Gig-Ah-BIT! *shakes fist!!!*

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I think so as well. Go join the amd is for poor people club.

I’ve never been happy with a Manjaro install.

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Been strongly considering. However, at the immediate moment, “it’s good enough” and better has been getting me through a lot.

The first time the coveted nomodeset failed me :confused:

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FROM THE WIKI

ZFS does not support swap files

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That Manjaro installer is a bit of a turd, if you have any partitions on the disk you want to use it crashes. Noticed this with Solus too fwiw. Anyways, nuking the partitions on the disk and rebooting works… but meh.

Seen this on multiple systems…

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Thanks for the tip! That is insanely helpful. I am reading through using archzfs repos right now but I will definitely give Manjaro a shot.

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