Unfortunately some people think that Exherbo’s assertion that you aren’t supposed to use it means “you’re supposed to use it”. To stop these people from asking the same annoying questions again and again, here’s how you do an install. Note that you will almost certainly find lots of weird and obvious bugs — this is of course a deliberate feature.
- Boot your system off a netboot image or livecd or whatever. Set up your disks and networking.
- Pick a stage based upon arch, datestamp and which developer you think is least likely to have screwed up / deliberately broken things to see if you’re paying attention. Extract said stage into your root.
- Tinker with the Paludis config you get from the stage until you’re happy.
- Do your bootloader and kernel thing.
- Reboot into the stage using
init=/bin/bash. - Set up mounts, device nodes and networking by hand. Hope it’s your lucky day, and try to use Paludis to install Paludis (you’ll need current SCM trunk, not a release). This probably won’t work, because we probably completely changed the
exheres-0format between when your stage was made and when we updated the tree. So install Paludis by hand, then reinstall it using itself. - Idly consider installing a proper init system. Your choices appear to be:
- Upstart + either my hacked scripts called ‘rightstart’ that you’ll need to edit by hand because they do fun things like hardcoding mount points that my laptop uses straight into the event scripts or Mike Kelly’s possibly less hacked scripts + Annie.
- baselayout-1.
- A shell script.
- Reboot.
- Belatedly realise that no-one told you to set a root password. Curse.
- Try updating things.
- Realise you just wasted the past three days.
