Arch in Africa

captain-sensible

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abstract [ one hell of a challenge]
This is not a rant just my experience so far having a look at Vanilla Arch sub Sahara.

I have a tower i built over 4 years ago; that has no wifi network card; internet access only by wifi and i only have some outdated usb wifi adapters to use.


Power went off today and yesterday in the middle of an install, and for most of the days i can remember.

wget i find generally works pretty well for downloading linux distros from my laptop ; its great
for distros that you can do full install from the iso once downloaded- for other distros that need stable internet its a problem

IN parts of Africa internet access is limited and expensive.There are power outages and when there is power often its half current which seems to affect quality of wifi.Thats all i basically have access to


I got the latest Arch iso using my laptop, that wasn't so bad at around 750 MB its under 1 gig. dd 'd it to a usb and had a go at install.


I used iwctl to confirm adapter and that i could connect to internet ; i manually edited mirrors in /etc/pacman.d/mirror list

There are no Arch mirrors in Ghana the nearest mirrors being South Africa and Kenya.

Install started off well except with poor internet the required download of around 700 MB took over 3 hours then failed

So i then thought might as well maybe try automated with possible candidates being Archfi and Anarchy.

Anarchy was pretty good it easily allowed access to a shell to check Internet access and started install from terminal using command : anarchy Install failed due to download requirement during install

Archfi i tried with vanilla arch iso; ok but internet again letting me down.

I've ended up putting archbang and using live from a usb; also downloading Endeavor OS via laptop- since it has an "offline install" option

Estimated download time 19 hours !
 


If you are looking to install Arch without wanting to do the manual install and don't find the official Arch installer enough. The one that I found the best out of all the Arch based distributions and Arch installers is Archlabs but it's also around 700M in size as well.
 
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As far as i can see Archlabs used to be an installer for Vanilla Arch but now appears to be a Distro itself. As i said its not the manual work to install vanilla Arch but the fact that it requires for here in Africa a chunky download , in the middle of installing which is going to be a no goer. I had power off while downloading the iso using Torrent and kget ; resumed download and still managed to get an un-corrupted iso

I managed to get a confirmed sha512sum ok an the iso for EndeavorOS https://endeavouros.com/latest-release/ its booted live (i'm on it now) and has an Online or offline choice of install.

Its probably the nearest i'm going to get to Vanilla Arch and uses vanilla Arch repositories for software. I will play with it live next couple of days and try an install on the old Tower. Looks like it has plenty of potential as my 2nd'ary Distro

[update]
i've successfully installed EndeavourOS onto one of family laptop that has only circa 30 gig HD and due to being "full" was unable to take any more Windows 10 updates.So this is my start at getting familiar with an Arch based OS
 
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had another go at installing Arch ; the wifi was good today and i decided to shrink Endeavour partition and in remaining space try to install Vanilla Arch. I'm pretty au fait with the sequence for doing it manually but used "anarchy" installer. Doing the install it stated "installing Anarchy Linux" yet i thought
anarchy had morphedint an installer for Vanilla Arch. The wifi card on wifes laptop made all the difference and all core packages installed in about half an hour. Now it might seem a daft question but with distro's based on other distro how do you know what your actually running. This command seems to confirm i'n running vanilla arch with xfce desktop:

andrew@anarchy: ~ $ cat /etc/*-release
NAME="Arch Linux"
PRETTY_NAME="Arch Linux"
ID=arch
BUILD_ID=rolling
ANSI_COLOR="38;2;23;147;209"
HOME_URL="https://www.archlinux.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://wiki.archlinux.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://bbs.archlinux.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.archlinux.org/"
LOGO=archlinux
andrew@anarchy: ~ $

so i guess i can recommend anarchy Arch installer
 

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