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Installation

What needs to be done

The following steps need to be done to get a useful paldo installation:

Setup a proper host system

This can be done the easy or the hard way...

The easy way

Download a paldo boot image, write it to a USB stick and let your computer boot from it. That's all that's needed for setting up the host system as this image holds all the necessary tools to build software. You can proceed with the bootstrapping step.

Note: The default password for the root user is set to "paldo".

The hard way

Since you decided not to choose the easy way (as you maybe don't have a USB stick available on your computer) you'll have to do some extra steps. You'll need a GNU/Linux distribution using at least linux-kernel 3.2 installed on your computer.

  1. Install all build essential tools, that involves gcc, glibc (with headers), binutils, make, gzip, bzip2, tar, flex, bison, and perl.
  2. Install mono either from here or directly from your running OS on your computer.
  3. Install Upkg by issuing ./configure, make and make install as root inside Upkg source directory.
  4. Edit the repository collection inside /etc/upkg.conf to point onto a paldo repository (e.g. 'http://www.paldo.org/paldo').

This makes your system ready to bootstrap paldo

Bootstrap paldo

By now you should sit in front of a perfectly setup host system. Bootstrapping paldo is a more or less fully automatic task but it needs some thoughts in the beginning. You need to do the following task as root.

  1. Partition the disk you'd like to install paldo on
    • cfdisk lets you create your partitions easily.
    • Use GPT as disk layout.
    • An EFI system partition is required. The recommended size is 500 MiB.
    • A full installation requires approx. 8 GiB disk space. To allow for installation of additional packages and not run out of space in short time, we recommend you to assign 25 GiB to the root partition and use the remaining space for the home partition holding your data. The home partition is optional.
  2. Format your EFI system partition. mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sda1
  3. Format your root partition, and the home partition if you have one. The standard paldo kernel supports ext4, btrfs, and xfs. Issue mkfs.<your fs> /dev/<paldo partition> to accomplish that, e.g. mkfs.ext4 -L vol-label /dev/sda2. Optionally initialize your swap partition by executing mkswap -L swap-label /dev/<swap partition>
  4. Mount the fresh root partition on /upkg (create the directory if necessary), e.g. mount /dev/sda2 /upkg.
  5. Mount the EFI system partition on /upkg/boot (after creating the directory), e.g., mount dev/sda1 /upkg/boot.
  6. Start the bootstrap process by executing upkg-bootstrap paldo. paldo can be replaced by paldo-desktop, paldo-server or any other package if you don't need the default full installation.

Wait. This can take quite long, depends how fast your internet link and your computer (especially the disk) is. A full installation needs to download approx. 2 GiB. The more unstable you have chosen your branch the higher is the chance that you need to build some software locally if there is no binary available on the repository. This will be shown to you in advance and will, of course, consume more time. If this process completes successfully, then you are ready to proceed with the final configuration.

Final, mandatory configuration

This step is normally done by an installer provided with an OS. Paldo does not provide such an installer yet and therefore these steps have to be done by the user.

  1. Change root to your fresh paldo installation either by issuing upkg-chroot /upkg or chroot by yourself.
  2. Replace the host name in /etc/hostname with the name you wish to give the computer.
  3. Replace the domain name in /etc/domainname with your domain. This does not need to be a public domain. Just invent something but it's really important that you set the domain name otherwise some core services will fail. Every system needs a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) consisting of 'host.domain'.
  4. Edit /etc/hosts to reflect what you have written in the last two files. Make sure you leave the localhost at the end of the 127.0.0.1 line in place.
  5. Edit the placeholders in /etc/fstab, /etc/kernel/cmdline, and /boot/loader/entries/*.conf matching your device names and filesystem types.
  6. The default root password is 'paldo' so I suggest you set up a new one by issuing passwd root.

Your paldo installation is complete by now. Exit chroot with exit and unmount with umount /upkg. Restart your system and load your fresh and shiny paldo system.