The scripts expect this repository folder archon-core to be in the same root folder as the archon-repo folder.
I suggest making an archon-linux folder and cloning archon-iso, archon-core and archon-repo inside of it. But if you are going through that trouble, you should be doing this with your own forks so you can save changes and even offer pull requests ;)
You can build a single package by running ./build.sh in each folder, or build all of them with ./build.sh at the root of the project. They will be moved to the archon-repo/x86_64 folder once built, so don't forget to rebuild the repository when done with ./build.sh in archon-repo.
aurpackages has a list of all the AUR packages we will need when building the iso.
Custom grub theme.
Dynamic gtk3 themes to change colors with flavours. Also has the skel files to set those themes as default.
The issue I ran into was of course file conflicts. I only had the issue for a few files but it was key ones. When the iso is being built if my archon-system package also had a /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file with my changes it would conflict with the one from the lightdm package.
How I dealt with that initially was by bloating the airootfs folders with those files that would conflict and remove them from my package as the airootfs files take precendence and will not conflict during the build. There is no problem with doing that but that was not my plan, I wanted clean packages that had the proper configs, which would make things much easier to maintain and develop.
My next take on it was to compile my own lightdm package with my defaults and that would have been fine as well. But compiling my own package just for a config file seemed overkill and that also moved the config file away from my archon-system package, so I did not like it either.
Then I tried something else, compiling the package without the config files which solved them being moved away from my custom config packages, but still, compiling my own version of grub and bash for a config seemed silly. Keeping up this readme 'blog' helped rubber ducky debug those choices and I came up with this solution.
I had only a few files that had the issue, but more could come along the way so I settled on using scripts to fix my configs.
I have my custom packages PKGBUILD rename my conflicting configs to original_name.archon in order to avoid the file conflicts, and they keep their proper names in the packages code repositories.
archon-system package, sets up a new service that gets run before the user login at boot and starts the before_login.sh scripts.
I use this script to fix all the things required for the live boot. This includes replacing pacman.conf, pamac.conf and lightdm.conf with the .archon ones that came from our packages. Then fixing the default cursor, and creating the default xdg directories, I did not like the capitalized names so mine are called documents, downloads and so on. Small things, but very much needed for a semi-proper live environment experience. The goal is not to make a complete mirror of the installed system in the live boot, but something close to it and useable. As we'll see a lot will happen still after the first boot on the installed system.
Now comes the post installation scripts. post_install.sh is started by calamares at the end of the install process, in a normal non-chrooted environment. It is mainly used to detect the current graphics card to remove unsued drives under chroot later and copies over the stub-resolv.conf to have network access under chroot.
Once that is done it starts the chrooted_post_install.sh script. This is a big boy and very important. It removes unused packages, starts and cleans up services, such as removing our before_login.service and script, cleans up the graphics and vm drivers, removes autologin from display managers configs, setup snapshots for snapper, and once again does the same config fixes before_login.sh did along with a few other tweaks for the installed system such as zramd settings.
And that is how I eneded up dealing with conflicts while keeping clean looking packages.
I made the choice to include the calamares-config files in archon-system as it was also in charge of system setup.
All of those post install changes were system wide, but we need to finalize our user home folder with a few more things. I could have done it all in the chrooted_post_install.sh script but that would have made it a really single user system, so thats why most distros have a welcome app to setup user specific changes that can be run again by newly created user.
I chose to use ansible for that as it's part of my regular workflow and it does the job. I know I am taking a gun to a knife fight :) So until you run a task once or any time you type archon a welcome script will start that will finalize the installation.
I highly suggest running all the tasks, expect things to be half broken if you dont. Check archon-iso for more info.
A short selection of wallpapers, will grow over time.
Simply builds the calamares release we want from their git repository.
Package the mirrorlist and keyring into the archon-repo/x86_64 folder.