Install Arch i586

Preface

This document tries to describe the process which let me successfully build Arch Linux under other architectures.

Requirements

• A faster PC with Arch Linux already installed, we'll use it to build packages for i586.
• free disk space about 2G bytes.

(space reqirement might grow to 4GB for a core repository per the begin of 2009)

• enough time, experience and temper prepared for fixing any problem encountered during the long long build

(the core repository might take two days to build, excluding those failed, on a 2GHz E5405)

Step 1. Prepare build enviroment

Prepare your system for build tasks as described in Makepkg#Setting Things Up :

pacman -S base-devel abs

Check /etc/abs.conf for activated repos, you should have at least core activated, check out or update your abs tree. Then create an work directory for your i586 PKGBUILDs and duplicate repos into it.

# abs
# mkdir -p /home/i586/abs
# cd /home/i586/abs
# cp -r /var/abs/core .

(in order to avoid building packages as root, it is better to customize specific ~/.abs.conf and ~/.makepkg.conf instead of system-wide /etc/abs.conf and /etc/makepkg.conf)

You also should create an directory where you will put the packages.

# mkdir -p /home/i586/pkg

Edit the /etc/makepkg.conf or copy to ~/.makepkg.conf , modify the following lines, we'll use -mtune option for x86 can also use the binary packages.

CARCH="i586"
CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-mtune=i586 -O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-mtune=i586 -O2 -pipe"

For faster compiling take a look on ccache and/or distcc.

Step 2. Build packages

After we have prepared our build enviroment now is the time to run some last commands and get some coffee. Change to your i586 abs directory and run makeworld.

# cd /home/i586/abs
# makeworld --clean --ignorearch --syncdeps --rmdeps --noconfirm /home/i586/pkg/core/ core/

When you didn't want to repeat typing your root pw for resolving dependencies you could allow your build user to use pacman without retyping pw. See Disable root password and gain su sudo with no password for more information.

(sudo is designed with security concerns, environs are stripped during sessions; so for those have only proxied access to the internet, it is better to expicitly allow passing environs like http_proxy/ftp_proxy/RSYNC_PROXY etc in /etc/sudoer)

And do not forget to deactivate it after using for building process!

Step 3. Solve Problem during Compiling

After the build Process come to an end, we should check which packages have problems while building.

# grep failed build.log

Then you should change to the package directorys in your abs copy and retry building it.

# cd core/<failed package>
# PKGDEST=/home/i586/pkg/core/ makepkg --clean --ignorearch --syncdeps --rmdeps

For more information about building packages see in makepkg

Step 4. Share Built Packages for i586

Set up a Custom local repository for sharing your packages with the target system.

Step 5. Install Arch Linux on i586 by bootable linux

See Install Arch from within another distro, and use your custom repos as package source. More soon ....