Transform Arch Linux Into XeroLinux

There is no shortage of Arch Linux installation scripts out there. Heck, I've even made two or three of these things over the years. These are basically just ways to automate the installation of Arch Linux and I was informed that there is this new Arch Linux installer called ZeroArch Installer. It basically takes your standard Arch Linux ISO and it gives you a way to run through a quick installation and turn Arch Linux into ZeroLinux. And you can see from the blurb here on the GitHub, this is a beautiful streamlined Arch Linux installer designed by ZeroLinux with a modern TUI. That's a Terminal User Interface. So it's basically your standard command line installation, but it does give you a nice little menu-driven installation program to go through. And all this does is when you boot into the Arch Linux live ISO, you run this command. Basically, it is a curl command. This curl command downloads the ZeroLinux zero install script and it executes it and then away you go and you're launched directly into the ZeroArch Installer. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a try. I'm going to run through a quick installation inside a virtual machine. So let me switch to a different workspace here. I'm going to launch VertManager. I'm going to go ahead and create a new virtual machine and let's go ahead. It has detected that that is actually Arch Linux. I'm going to give this machine, I'll give it about six gigs of RAM, a couple of cores of my 24 core CPU, which is more than enough. I don't know how much disk space we'll use. I think this is kind of a net installer and we do get to choose things. So I'll give myself 25 gigs in this VM, which should be more than enough space. And then I need to name the VM. I'm going to call this ZeroInstall and let's go ahead and finish. And let me make this VM full screen and let's go ahead and boot into the live environment of the Arch ISO. And this is your standard Arch Linux live environment. When you boot the ISO, you get a command prompt. Now, what do we do? Well, what I need to do is I need to go back and get that curl command to paste in the terminal to launch the ZeroInstall script. But before I do that, I want to make the font size here in the TTY here on the Arch ISO a little bigger. So I'm going to run the command set font. And then we're going to set the font to V32B, I believe is the font size. And there we go. We've got a nice big font. So you can read the curl command that I am about to enter here. And we need to do a bash and then the less than sign and then inside parentheses, we're going to curl dash FS capital S capital L and then HTTPS colon slash slash zero Linux dot XYZ slash script slash zero dash install slash install dot SH. Now, this is a lot to type and that's a long URL. We need to come up with a command that is shorter for the user to type because I think some people will struggle typing that command. There's a lot of areas where somebody could actually mistype something. But if I did that correctly, yeah, it downloads the script and it runs it. It says it's checking our internet connection. So we'll give it a second to check our internet. Yeah, I don't know what's going on here. It's checking internet connection and I've been waiting for about a minute. I'm assuming it was just checking if we had working internet here inside the live ISO. Maybe we don't. Let me control C just to cancel that. Okay. So it canceled the check for the internet, but I know internet has to be working. Otherwise the curl command wouldn't have worked. So I know the VM does have working internet. So I don't know why it was hanging on checking the internet connection, but I'm glad I got that on camera. That might be something that needs to be looked at. But anyway, let's go through the menu here so we can use the arrow keys up and down. First, you need to choose an installer language. By default, English is selected. So I don't need to change this. If I needed to change it, then I guess I could hit enter here and get a list of languages that I could then select. But English was fine. And then locales, English US, it is determined for me. But if I needed to change locales, for example, if I wanted German, I could go down here to German or French or whatever locale I needed for my particular locale on the keyboard and then keyboard layout. Obviously I want a US keyboard here. And of course those were the defaults, but I wanted to show you the menu so you could select it. And then disk configuration. Let's go ahead and do a disk configuration. So choose the disk that Xero Linux installs to. Now, because this is an automatic kind of install script, there's not a lot of customization. It's going to take a disk and format the whole thing. It's not going to partition it or anything, or it will do a partition, but you're not going to be able to manually partition that thing yourself. So I'm going to give it this 25 gig virtual hard drive in this VM. And it's going to take that and it's going to create a file system, whatever file system I give, ButterFS, Extend4, or XFS. Those are the options. I'm going to choose ButterFS to see what it does with that. Do we want to enable full disk encryption? Sure. Why not? Enter a encryption password. So let's give it a super complicated password and then confirm the super complicated password. And then we've done disk encryption or disk configuration. So now let's choose a swap. By default, it's going to use ZRAM. That's fine. I have no problems with that. If I hit enter, I'm assuming I could do swap file or no swap. If I wanted no swap, I'm fine with the ZRAM though. And then the algorithm ZSTD is typically the one you choose there anyway. And that's the default host name, the host name of the computer. It defaults to 0Linux, but I could change it. Maybe I wanted to do something like, I don't know, 0-VM and change the host name of the computer. That way when I'm SSHing into a virtual machine, I know exactly which virtual machine I'm SSHing into. In this case, it would be the 0 virtual machine. Graphics drivers. By default, it's Mesa. Let's see. I could choose AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, but here inside this VM, I need to choose VM. So that's going to be your default open source drivers for the VM. Authentication not configured. Well, let's go ahead and configure that. We need to create our username. I'm going to call my user DT. Now we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then confirm the strong and complicated password. And then root password. Use the same password for root. Yeah, because it's strong and complicated, we'll just use that password for everything. And then finally, we need to set time zone. It's set to UTC by default, but I want to set it to America and then Chicago. And even though I'm not in Chicago, let me start typing Chicago. But that is in the central time zone where I'm at, so it qualifies. And then finally, start installation. Hit enter. Start installation. This will erase slash dev slash VDA. So we did get a little bit of a summary. It tells us all the selections we chose. And if everything looks right, I'm going to hit yes. Now I'm going to partition the disk for us. I'm going to set up the encryption. And away it goes. And that part of the installation went rather quick and installed a little more than 800 packages. And now we get to the next thing. After the base installation has completed, it says the system will now cheroot into your new installation to run the Xero Linux KDE setup script. So let's go ahead and press enter. And now the script will install KDE Plasma. So I guess we haven't done a desktop yet. So it's going to install KDE Plasma, essential KDE applications, your selected AUR helper and packages, and then the Xero Linux configuration files. So do we want to proceed? Yes. And choose your preferred AUR helper. Paru is fine. That's the default. It's number one. And then personalization time. To make your system truly yours, we'll ask you to choose a few quick categories, browsers, apps, tools. So we get to choose our apps. Okay. Well, let's go ahead. Web browser. We've got Florp. I don't know what Florp is. We've got some strange choices in here. MOLVAD, Tor Browser. Those are not, you know, I guess people would want to install them, but that's not, you're going to need something better than those. FileZilla is not really a browser. That's an FTP client. That's for a remote desktop, you know, into a remote machine. So FileZilla is not a browser. Probably shouldn't be in this list. I'm going to choose Brave. And I think I'll just leave it at Brave. If I was installing this on my own personal equipment, I would probably also install FileZilla because I do use that when I FTP into other machines. But we'll just install Brave for purposes of this video. VPNs, I'm going to skip. I don't need a VPN, not in a virtual machine. I don't use them even on my physical equipment. Then social apps. These are not apps I would typically use. Discord, I keep around because I do use Discord on occasion for web conference calls. The rest of this, I would not use. Android tools, I'm going to choose no, but they're here if you need them. LibreOffice, I would choose yes if this was a physical machine. So I'll choose yes here. Do we want to do a language choice here? Default English US is fine, but I can choose a different language for LibreOffice. That's probably for some of the helper tools like spellcheck and stuff. Choose your dev tools. Hugo, Meld, VS Codium, GitHub Desktop. Don't use any of that stuff for dev tools. I use Emacs. Emacs is not in the list. I'll skip all of that. Password manager, KeePass is here. Bitwarden is here. One suggestion I would give Steve is to add the standard Unix pass program, the pass command. That's what I use to manage my passwords. I think that's what a lot of people in the Linux space use pass. I mean, a lot of people use KeePass and Bitwarden. They should be here too, but I'll add pass to the list. Then choose your creative tools. If this was a physical machine, I would probably install GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender, but I'm not going to take up the disk space in the VM, so I'll skip all of that. Choose your music apps. For this, I only need MPV, which is usually a dependency for other stuff anyway, so MPV would probably be there, but I chose it. Choose video tools. If this was a physical machine, I definitely want Kdenlive because that's what I use to edit all my videos, but I'm not going to install that in the VM. Do you want Apple sideloading apps? No. Do you want QEMU virtual machine support? Yes, on a physical machine, but I'm in a VM, so I'll skip that. Then ready to install your personalized KDE Plasma Desktop. Let's go ahead and click enter, and it should install the Plasma Desktop plus the extra packages that I told it to install. It looks like we're getting close to the end. It's looks like a final setup, and that was it. Now it tells us we need to do a sudo reboot, so let me go ahead and reboot the machine. I don't need to add sudo because we're naturally the root user here, at least in the live ISO of Arch Linux, and the machine looks like it rebooted just fine. Let me make it full screen. We need to enter our encryption password, so I had to enter my super secure password there. Then let's go ahead and click on zero Linux in the grub menu, and then enter passphrase, so a second encryption. How many levels of encryption? I shouldn't have to decrypt twice. I think that's a little weird, but maybe I missed something up there, and then we got to log in a third time. Let's go ahead and log in to the zero Linux KDE Plasma desktop, and there you go. It launches the zero toolkit, the little customization tool that comes with zero Linux. The very first thing I want to do though, I want to go into the menu system, and I'm going to search for displays, display configuration, and let's go ahead and set the screen resolution to the correct 1920 by 1080 resolution that I want here, and then hit apply, and then choose keep the configuration, and now every time I launch this VM, it'll remember that I want 1920 by 1080 when I log into this KDE Plasma session. So there you have it, zero Linux. You've probably seen zero Linux before. It's a fantastic Arch Linux based distribution, uses a highly customized KDE Plasma desktop. It looks really good, got some fantastic wallpapers. I'm not going to go through the desktop. You've seen the desktop before. Really today, I just wanted to cover that excellent installation script, and it's very easy. No longer do you have to fool with some kind of gigantic ISO to download. You download the standard Arch Linux ISO. Arch Linux puts out an ISO every month. Every month, Arch Linux puts out an ISO. It's very small, a few hundred megabytes, because it's just the command line, and then from that command line, you enter that curl command to download the zero install script, which then runs a net installation program, and it was very fast. You know, that installation was maybe 10 minutes. Now, I didn't install a lot of stuff. If I installed a lot of extra programs, maybe the installation takes 15 minutes, right? Either way, it's a very easy install script, automates everything for you. I didn't have to partition a drive. I didn't have to install the bootloader myself or any of that stuff that you would have to do in a traditional command line Arch Linux installation. Overall, I think this script is really well done. I want to congratulate Steve at Xero Linux for putting together that script. I think it is done in a very responsible and smart way, and I think a lot of people are going to install Xero Linux using this script. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Matt, Steve, George, Darlof, Lee, Mark, Methos, Erjan, PeaceArch, Fedora, Roland, Wargen2, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at the new Xero Arch install script would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.