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Arch Spin pt. 3 - packages.x86_64

Reading Time: 2 minutes | Published: 2018-08-18 | Last Edited: 2023-03-19

Arch Linux Arch Spin

Package configuration

As I said in the last post, this is the file in which you list the applications you wish to install. I won’t list the defaults because there a lot. However, this basic setup only builds to a total of ~440 MB so you can add many more applications.

I want the setup on this bootable to be exactly the same as what I currently have on my system. I did not want to manually enter every single package though. Thankfully, pacman is a feature-complete tool and it lets you get a lot of information about installed packages. pacman -Qne lists all the currently installed packages that you explicitly installed. It does not list dependencies of those applications. What I did was run pacman -Qne >> ~/liveiso/packages.x86_64 to add all the apps I have installed from the official Arch repos to the end of the file so nothing was overwritten.

After, I ran pacman -Qni >> official.txt so I could get information about all those packages and decide whether or not I wanted to keep them. For example, I removed some stuff from deepin that I no longer used, SuperTuxKart, and a lot of other stuff. This shrunk my iso from 3.6 GB to 2.5. Now I have a lot of space to use for installing my applications from the AUR. This includes making a custom repo for the packages and building them in a chroot so you make sure you have all the needed dependencies while keeping your system from being messed up while building.

All of this will be discussed in the next blog post (when I get to it).


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