Alpha 2.4latest
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer
- a fresh install could never get onto wireless: iw was on the live image but never landed on the installed system, so first boot had wpa_supplicant and nothing that could scan for a network to use it with
- iw and wireless-regdb are installed onto the target now, and installing network tools is no longer optional - a machine with no network path is a worse failure than stopping the install while the medium is still in the drive
- arctic-install fetches repositories itself, first, rather than running against whatever the live session's index happened to already be
- a failed install left the disk mounted, so a retry hit mke2fs refusing to format it - the target is unmounted before formatting and on any failure now
- the prompt is one line, not two - the arrow is the end of the line, not a line of its own below it
- tab completion works without a hidden, unanswerable prompt about directory permissions on first boot
- the first-login message has no mascot, matching the live session
Download a2.4
sha256 4f563f49d30fb3f1e8673aec9afead93618fba9c4dca49b53a907452730cf65a
Alpha 2.3
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer
- the installer was throwing away its own error - target_alpm ran alpm with no output capture at all, so every failing step's log had nothing beyond the step name, and "the base system failed to install" was the entire post-mortem whatever actually went wrong
- alpm's output is captured into the install log now, and a failure prints the last twelve lines of it instead of the one sentence it was called with
- install.conf's commented A_INIT example read initialization, the init that has been known to freeze at boot since a2.2; it reads busybox, the actual default, with a note on why
Download a2.3
sha256 1fc2f8c26d4f430e0daef13ca4bd414f8dbbe02370532491bb5aa66b62545807
Alpha 2.2
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer
- no installed system could be logged into: util-linux-libs, a package whose own name says libraries only, shipped util-linux's entire program set including /bin/login, which links libpam over busybox's login applet which links nothing
- every base install pulls it in for libblkid and libmount, so every install replaced a working login with one that could not start - it builds --disable-all-programs now and ships 45 files, none of them a program
- dwm died on libharfbuzz.so.0 - freetype links it and never declared it
- every installed machine called itself Alpha 1.1: arctic-install carried its own version literal and copied it into the installed system's release file, so the boot banner said so on every boot
- the boot banner is gone, and a service line is now [ done ], [ fail ] or [ skip ] with no elapsed time
- initialization is no longer the default init - a machine installed with it froze partway through boot and never reached a login; busybox is the default and initialization is a deliberate choice
- limine's violet backdrop, which read as a pink wash behind the boot menu, matches the terminal background
- the ASCII penguin is gone from the live session
Download a2.2
sha256 77bda9785d75f4d2cdecf66ee9d63a6a163867a721deaabf9455e86cbb0eaa03
Alpha 2.1
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer · not fully tested
- Alpha 2 fixed wireless and then broke it a second way: the supplicant was invoked with -f to capture a log, and -f is compiled in by CONFIG_DEBUG_FILE which this build does not set
- an unknown option makes wpa_supplicant print its usage and exit without ever touching the radio, so association was never attempted - and the log the failure printed was that usage text
- the option had been checked with wpa_supplicant -h on the build host, whose build does accept -f; flags are checked against the binary Arctic ships now
- a supplicant that never started counted as started, because -B forks and the exit status says nothing about whether it survived - the control socket and the process are checked now
- udhcpc names its script explicitly rather than relying on a compiled-in default, and its output goes to a log instead of /dev/null
- everything from Alpha 2 is still here: the wpa_passphrase fix, the missing ctrl_interface, the regulatory database, and root=UUID= which is what lets an installed system boot at all
Download a2.1
sha256 cadf9cb207973d8f57a71bafeb6d425b843959ab5275a49ae97bf13bd65a547f
Alpha 2
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer · not fully tested
- wireless could never have associated on any network - wpa_passphrase reading from a pipe exits 1 without writing anything, so the config had no network block in it at all and the 30s timeout blamed a passphrase that was always correct
- nothing wrote a ctrl_interface, so wpa_cli could never connect and the error told you to run a command that could not work
- no installed system could boot: the installer wrote root=PARTUUID= and busybox findfs implements LABEL= and UUID= only, so every install finished, reported success, and stopped in the initramfs shell
- fstab had the same problem, which is why /boot would not mount either; both are UUID= now and the initramfs falls back to LABEL=arctic-root so older installs come up
- the image carries a regulatory database - without one the kernel sits in world domain 00 where most 5 GHz channels are receive-only, so an access point shows in a scan and the card may not transmit to it
- the firewall had no package at all: nftables fell back to compiling inside the target and failed, and the install reported success anyway
- the boot was right-aligned against column 80 of a 240-column console, and every service reported t=0.0s
- the live session prints how to install Arctic instead of a hardware inventory
Download a2
sha256 b4972b233eda64f30717d8271f2787b752f3315a326d40f2836f6e56491fdf2b
Alpha 1.24
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer
- a boot partition that failed to mount was ignored - the bootloader went into a directory on the root filesystem and the machine did not boot
- the compiler is on the image: clang and lld, no download first
- alpm speaks one language - add installs, rem removes, repo add adds a repository; ins and del are gone
- llvm shipped llvm-lit's count and not, which toybox owns, so anything needing mesa stopped on a conflict
- mesa and vulkan-loader install; graphics failed entirely before
- wireless waits for the link before asking for an address, and retries the lease
- the network you install over is carried into the installed system, beside the wired one
- arcticfetch is off the login, zsh loads autosuggestions only, and the boot banner is a rule rather than a row of punctuation
Download a1.24
sha256 180f4c03859c661cb22aad750a0e92e0e61dbae7319c110032594b8a309504a9
Alpha 1.23
x86_64 · 695 MiB · live image and installer
- the compiler is on the image - clang and lld, so it can build without downloading one first
- alpm speaks one language: add installs, rem removes, repo add adds a repository - ins and del are gone
- llvm shipped llvm-lit's count and not, which toybox owns, so installing anything needing mesa stopped dead
- mesa and vulkan-loader install now; graphics failed entirely before
- wireless waits for the link before asking for an address - a correct passphrase used to end in DHCP failed
- the network you install over is carried into the installed system, beside the wired one
- arcticfetch is off the login, and zsh loads autosuggestions and nothing else
- the boot banner is a rule and a title rather than a full-width row of punctuation
Download a1.23
sha256 996af053e5033c08202434468bc3fe104a2ac01107c9c8e29343267605f6d353
Alpha 1.21
x86_64 · 492 MiB · live image and installer
- alpm add installs and alpm rem removes
- alpm rem -a takes what the package left behind, -d its dependencies, -f forces it
- repositories are alpm repo add <url>
- mesa installed its drivers into /usr/lib64, which does not exist here - nothing could load them
- vulkan-loader is packaged; the drivers are of no use without it
- mesa declares the Vulkan and VA drivers it contains, so asking for vulkan-radeon resolves
- choosing nvidia says the proprietary driver is not packaged instead of installing nothing silently
- the old verbs - ins, del - still work
Download a1.21
sha256 1a5309744ac26354a913cff811cc98346e23d6d5e6acf48e4791d605c4300fea
Alpha 1.2
x86_64 · 383 MiB · live image and installer
- an installed machine had an address and a route but no resolver, so every lookup failed
- wifi-connect scans, lists what is in range and takes the passphrase masked
- iw is on the image - nothing there could list a network before
- mesa 26.0.2 with the Intel drivers, which were missing entirely
- the Xfce 4.20 desktop, openbox and icewm are packaged
- initialization, the fork of nitro, is the default init
- the installer asks before writing a bootloader and names the partition
- nvidia and nouveau are configured, with a reboot notice
Download a1.2
sha256 387c84d9b22199c1b3e1e481c1e280f29c7077bc940b970566989c6fd427a1d9
Alpha 1.1
x86_64 · 382 MiB · live image and installer
- the install runs end to end from the network repositories
- the live session could come up with no network at all
- lzo shipped no shared library, so mkfs.btrfs could not start
- the repository indexes were weeks out of date behind a CDN
- alpm system upgrade and alpm system fix
- toybox claimed 27 commands other packages own - the install stopped at /usr/bin/blkid
- wpa_supplicant pulled OpenSSL in beside libressl, leaving no curl and no NetworkManager
- the live image's wget was toybox's, which cannot speak https
Download a1.1
sha256 89735185b8d203fbafbb7d90ddf6edc84b1f62f174959f6121a0502ac2c917d3