Using Ansible to install Arch Linux with LUKS and Btrfs

Automating the installation of Arch Linux is an ongoing topic in this blog. In the past, I often used meta packages, but this approach has some drawbacks. So I started trying out Ansible and created some playbooks that enable the automated remote installation of Arch Linux with different flavors: A simple setup (UEFI, and an Ext4-formatted system partition, no encryption, no swap) and a more complex setup (UEFI, a Btrfs-formatted system partition with a customizable subvolume structure, and - optional - LUKS encryption and a swap file).

Managing Arch Linux ARM Repositories from x86_64 Systems

(Update: The tool armutils which is mentioned in this blog post is no longer maintained. The source code respository was archived).

I have some custom repositories for Arch Linux packages that I use for packages from AUR and other packages that I created. Recently, I started supporting ARM architectures and thus needed a way to manage (i.e., add/build, update, remove) these packages for ARM architectures as well. One possibility to do so is installing Arch Linux ARM on an ARM device and use it for the management tasks. However, by combining some tools it's also possible to manage ARM packages from a x86_64 system, even distributed builds via distcc are supported. In this blog post, I explain how this works.

Automating the Installation of Arch Linux Systems

Arch Linux is great because it brings flexibility and gives users control since it's their decision how the system is set up and configured. On the other hand, the standard installing process1 is completely manual, and if the installation needs to be done more often or if multiple machines need to be installed, the process can become cumbersome and annoying. In this post, we will discuss some approaches to make the installation more convenient and easier to repeat.

Wireless freedom – that’s the appealing slogan of OpenWrt, a Linux distribution specifically made for embedded devices such as routers and access points. It gives you full control over what is installed on the device, its customization and can extend the functional capabilities of your router significantly compared to the vendors firmware. But the installation can be quite tricky. In this post I want to share some learnings I made when installing OpenWrt on an Archer C7.