Carbs Linux Installation Guide

First, we need to download the rootfs tarball. You can do the following in order to obtain the rootfs. If you are using an i686 machine, replace the x86_64 with i686. We are setting this in a URL variable so that we don't have to write it every time.

wget $URL/carbs-rootfs.tar.xz.sha256
sha256sum -c carbs-rootfs.tar.xz.sha256

It is highly recommended to verify the signature of the tarball. You will need GPG for this.

wget $URL/carbs-rootfs.tar.xz.sig
gpg --recv-keys FF484BDFEFCEF8FF
gpg --verify carbs-rootfs.tar.xz.sig

You will need to extract the tarball to your desired location. For partitioning, you can follow this guide. This will assume that you will be mounting your root partition to /mnt.

mount /dev/sdx1 /mnt
tar xf carbs-rootfs.tar.xz -C /mnt

You can obtain the cpt-chroot script in order to do a simple chroot into your new root filesystem.

wget https://dl.carbslinux.org/distfiles/cpt-chroot
chmod a+x cpt-chroot

Newest tarballs do not come with repositories, so you will need to manually obtain them, and set your CPT_PATH environment variable. Carbs Linux repositories can either be obtained by git or rsync. While rsync repositories are overall faster and smaller, git offers the whole history of the repository and a means to manipulate your repository as you like it. If you want to obtain the git repository, you will need to install git itself.

The following guide will assume that you put the repositories into ~/repos/ directory, but you can put the repositories into any directory you want. So go ahead and create that directory:

mkdir -p $HOME/repos

It is good practice to make sure your system is up to date, especially before building new packages. If there is an update for the package manager you will need to update twice.

cpt-update && cpt-update

Since you are operating on a really small base, you might need to build and install new programs to extend the functionality of your system. In order to build and install packages new packages in Carbs, you need to execute the following. "Package" is not actually a package and is given as an example.

cpt-build   package
cpt-install package

Here is a list of software that you might want to have on your system.

BOOTLOADERS

• efibootmgr
• grub

FILESYSTEMS

• e2fsprogs
• dosfstools
• ntfs-3g

NETWORKING

• dhcpcd
• wpa_supplicant

TEXT EDITORS

• nano
• vim
• neatvi
• emacs
• emacs-nox (terminal-only version of emacs)

USER SHELLS

• bash
• zsh
• oksh
• rc

POSIX BASE UTILITIES

• busybox
• sbase
• coreutils

DOCUMENTATION

• carbs-docs
• man-pages
• man-pages-posix

All the documentation for Carbs Linux can be found on a single info manual to be viewed offline. You can obtain texinfo or the info (standalone) package in order to view the documentation.

# Install the documentation.
cpt b carbs-docs && cpt i carbs-docs

# Install either texinfo or the info package. We will be installing standalone info
# as it doesn't need perl.
cpt b info && cpt i info

# You can then run info and navigate through the documentation.
info carbslinux

You might want to add a hostname, especially in a networked environment. Your hostname will default to 'carbslinux' unless you set this.

echo your-hostname > /etc/hostname

You can edit your /etc/hosts file, which is the static lookup table for host names. By default, there are two entries for localhost which are OKAY. You can replace the 'localhost' part of these entries to your hostname.

127.0.0.1  localhost.localdomain localhost
::1        localhost.localdomain localhost ip6-localhost

You can visit the https://kernel.org website to choose a kernel that you want to install. Though only the latest stable and longterm (LTS) versions are supported.

# Download the kernel and extract it
wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.9.1.tar.xz
tar xf linux-5.9.1.tar.xz

# Change directory into the kernel sources
cd linux-5.9.1

In order to compile the kernel you will need to install some dependencies. You will need libelf to compile the kernel. If you want to configure using the menu interface you will also need ncurses.

# The package manager asks to install if you are building more than one package,
# so no need to run 'cpt i ...'
cpt b libelf ncurses

In the vanilla kernel sources, you need perl to compile the kernel, but it can be easily patched out. You will need to apply the following patch. Patch was written by E5ten. You will need to obtain and apply the patch in the kernel source directory.

wget https://dl.carbslinux.org/distfiles/kernel-no-perl.patch
patch -p1 < kernel-no-perl.patch

Next step is configuring and building the kernel. You can check Gentoo's kernel configuration guide to learn more about the matter. Overall, Gentoo Wiki is a good place to learn about configuration according to your hardware. The following will assume a monolithic kernel.

make menuconfig
make
install -Dm755 $(make -s image_name) /boot/vmlinuz-linux

In the main repository, there is efibootmgr and grub to serve as bootloaders. efibootmgr can be used as a standalone bootloader, or can be used to install grub in a UEFI environment. efibootmgr is needed unless you are using a device without UEFI support (or you really want to use BIOS for a reason).

Only thing left to do is installing the init-scripts, and now you are almost ready to boot your system!

cpt b carbs-init && cpt i carbs-init

You can now manually edit your fstab entry, or you can use the genfstab tool. If you want to use the tool, exit the chroot and run the following:

wget https://github.com/cemkeylan/genfstab/raw/master/genfstab
chmod +x genfstab
./genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

While not 100% compatible with cpt, you can use kiss repositories in your system the same way you are using the distribution repositories. Here is an example for the KISS Linux Community repository.