It’s about time I start blogging about Exherbo
We’ve been making a fair bit of progress recently. Even though, at this stage, we focus on improving exheres-0, the packaging format, we already have lots packaged. More on that later.
Up to now we’ve been neglecting to build newer stages, which, given how fast exheres-0 changes, makes it slightly annoying to install Exherbo on real hardware, or to quickly create a chroot to try new things out.
Hence why over the past days Bo Ørsted Andresen (zlin) has been working on scripting stage building.
The process is really rather simple, and goes roughly like this:
Create target directories:
mkdir ~/stage
cd ~/stage
mkdir -p ~/stage/{etc,var/db/paludis/repositories/installed,var/db/unpackaged,var/cache/paludis/metadata,var/cache/paludis/distfiles,var/tmp/paludis/build,var/repositories}
chown paludisbuild:paludisbuild ~/stage/var/tmp/paludis/build
chmod g+rwx ~/stage/var/tmp/paludis/build
Configure paludis in ~/stage/etc/paludis, as you normally would when setting up a new system.
mkdir ~/stage/etc/paludis/
vi ~/stage/etc/paludis/bashrc
...
Check out Arbor from git and bind mount it in the right place.
git clone git://git.exherbo.org/arbor.git
Use on the host system:
echo "/location/to/stage" >> /etc/paludis-stage/specpath.conf
Install the basesystem and make sure sys-apps/skeleton-filesystem-layout gets installed first
paludis --install --environment :stage baselayout
paludis --install --environment :stage system
paludis --install --environment :stage dhcpcd vim gdb strace colordiff screen
Chroot to the stage you just built, and rebuild everything in the chroot:
paludis --install --dl-reinstall always everything
Work out what is broken and go fix it.
This is a temporary solution pending a new resolver which will make using Paludis’ binary packages (pbins) feasible (and thus superior). Until that resolver is released we’ll attempt to keep these stages for x86 and amd64 updated.
You can find his updated stages here:
Exherbo amd64 (154M) Exherbo x86 (142M)
And bzipped tarballs, for those of you who don’t have lzma around yet:
Exherbo amd64 (233M) Exherbo x86 (221M)
Safety first kids, and check the sha1sums before using them. 
