Give Ubuntu/Darch a ride in a virtual machine.

[pauldotknopf]

https://pknopf.com/post/2018-11-09-give-ubuntu-darch-a-quick-ride-in-a-virtual-machine/

[sliem]

darch looks real interesting, and I want to take it for a spin. I'm momentarily stuck on windows, is there a boot.img (or vdi) available for download? Or are they too large?

[pauldotknopf]

Good idea!

I just updated the post to include ready-to-go VM images.

[kinduff]

This is awesome. Mind-blowing awesome. Thanks for your work, Paul.

[phunni]

I'm really interested in this project, but I have a couple of questions:

1. The tagline for darch in github states that it's both immutable and stateless. I assumed that by "immutable" it meant the system couldn't be changed - not even by root. I understand that any changes would be lost at reboot anyway, but it still seems better to me if any changes have to be made by updating the script or rebuilding the images anyway.

2. All the examples now seem to use ubuntu. I'm an arch user - is arch still well supported?

3. Is this project still being maintained? The last commit seems to be around 9 months ago...

[pauldotknopf]

1. I don't mean immutable at run time. I mean across reboots.
2. Arch is still well supported. Since it is a rolling release, they did change something that another Darch/Arch user had to take care of. See this. Beyond that, it will work.
3. I use it every day. Me recipes here. My builds here. Although there is some things I would like to do (like supporting podman, optionally persisting overlay, etc), the core features are stable IMO.

[i2]

@pauldotknopf Sorry to revive an old discussion thread, but now the most recent build on this link is 6 months old, and it reads:

Since June 15th, 2021, the building on travis-ci.org is ceased. Please use travis-ci.com from now on.

Do you build on travis-ci.com now? Thanks!

[mcladams]

https://pknopf.com/post/2018-11-09-give-ubuntu-darch-a-quick-ride-in-a-virtual-machine/

Zfs clones and snapshots give some of this functionality but not all.
I'm going to give it a go on bare metal - in a zvolume formatted ext4 in my pool so I can roll back any mistakes... Looks like a lot of work went into it.