Hello Linode Staff,

I love you guys, have for quite some time and actively encourage others to try out your systems as often as possible.

But alas, I have a complaint: Every time I spin up a new arch instance, I have to do several things immediately. The first two here, should be in the distro image provided by you guys.

# locale-gen
# cp /etc/skel/.* /root

The locale-gen one is to get the console to stop whining that it isn't there, and if you check here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Of ... tall_Guide

It states (grep for locale-gen) that this process is run at the tail of the installation automatically. This should be done by the install before any user ever logs in.

The second one, I believe is an artifact on how the image was generated, though I cannot pinpoint as accurately where and why it came about.

But these are pretty minor reasons to update an entire distro, so if you are rebuilding it how bout doing:

pacman -Syu

Or reinstalling from netinstall.

Though this is not an issue or fault of Linode's, the fact of the matter is ArchLinux is a rolling distro and that image is well over a year old.

If you do a guided install, you can elect to do it via net and get all your sources updated.

As it stands the actual list of commands to get Arch into a functioning state (ready to update, or grab new packages).

locale-gen
pacman --sync --upgrade --noconfirm --force --refresh
pacman-db-upgrade
pacman --sync --upgrade --noconfirm --force --refresh
cp /etc/skel/.* /root

This can also impact stackscripts, as you have to compensate for the out of date/broken image of Arch currently provided.

Last, if you are bootstraping arch from arch do:

pacman -Syu devtools
mkarchroot -f /target_dir/ base

This will quite nicely put together a base system, fully upto date with all the little things Arch needs to run, and:

mkarchroot -f -r "bash" /target_dir/

will setup a perfect chroot env to finish any linode related tweaks, (such as removing the pre-existing kernel, or setting up inittab with hvc0)

PS: I'll write a guide on how to bootstrap a new arch from an existing one, if you guys will do it and provide a new image say once every 6 months?

Cheers.