[arch-dev-public] Bootstrap images for installing Arch from another system

[Thomas Bächler]

So, I heard a few people struggled installing Arch from another distro
or from a root server rescue system recently. The requirements for
pacman and friends are numerous and most systems don't have recent
enough libraries to easily meet them.

Setting up Arch on a root server should be as easy as this:
* Boot rescue system, make sure you have Linux 2.6.32 or later
* Download tarball from Arch, extract to /tmp/root.x86_64/
* Set up partitions and such, mount to /tmp/root.x86_64/mnt/
* chroot /tmp/root.x86_64/ (well, also some bind-mounts)
* pacman-key --populate archlinux
* pacstrap /mnt base and follow the installation guide

I'd like to generate such tarballs regularly (monthly like our ISOs?)
and put them on our mirrors, unless there are objections.

I took the liberty of writing a small script:
https://paste.xinu.at/ixbqt/

These are the resulting files:

total 143M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 71M 22. Jun 17:13
archlinux-bootstrap-2013.06.22-i686.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 73M 22. Jun 17:15
archlinux-bootstrap-2013.06.22-x86_64.tar.gz

Note that they are only gzipped, because we can rely on tar and gzip
being widely available.

Any comments?

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