Ānanda Āropa - The new initrd & installer combo for BlissOS

Introduction

Ānanda Āropa (/ɑːˈnʌndə/ /ɑː.ɾɐw.pɐ/) or aaropa is BlissLabs' latest attempt in improving the installer & initrd for BlissOS, with some of additional features & improvements compared to the original Android-x86 console installer:

• Refactored Android-x86 init scripts.
• All prebuilts are now being downloaded instead of stored in the repo.
• A new script on initrd to generate fstab that is compatible with Android's fstab.
• A whole new installation environment based on Devuan ceres with a minimal desktop and an installer that uses Calamares.

The new installation environment also include programs such as:

• JWM for the desktop
• PCManFM-Qt for file manager
• QTerminal for terminal
• GParted for disks & partitions management
• L3afpad for text editor
• GPicView for photo viewer
• GSmartControl for drive health monitor
• Htop for process monitor

With these programs, your installation media is not only for Live booting or install BlissOS, but also to diagnose or debug issues related to the operating system & your PC.

Compatibility

As of right now, aaropa only supports x86_64.

Status

Beside this main repo, aaropa is also made of several other repos including:

• 

  This repo contains patches & modules for Calamares which will be built into .deb file

• 

  This repo contains the Grub2 theme that we're using which will be built into .deb file

• 

  This repo contains busybox program that is on initrd, it will also be built into .deb file

• 

  This repo is a Debian (or Devuan) repository that contains the above programs.

• 

  This repo is used to generate the rootfs image for the installer. It get the above repository to install the programs above and all the program listed in Introduction. After that, it will provide an image contains the installation environemnt, a grub-rescue.iso file as the skeleton of BlissOS iso image, and initrd_lib.tar.gz contains required programs & libraries for the initrd.

Usage

If your BlissOS source has bootable/newinstaller, remove it. After that, clone this repo to bootable/aaropa

git clone https://github.com/BlissOS/bootable_aaropa.git

Once done, run the download.sh script on the repo to get all the required files

bash bootable/aaropa/download.sh

You can also apply this commit to create a vendorsetup.sh script which will automatically run whenever you start a build.

After that, just lunch and make iso_img like you usually do to build BlissOS.

Meaning behind the name

Ānanda & Āropa combines the Sanskrit words "Ananda" (bliss) and "Aropa" (imposing or placing upon), creating a phrase that means "blissful installation" or "blissful startup."

Credit

• Android-x86 for the original initrd & installer in newinstaller.
• Devuan for a linux distro that doesn't use systemd.
• All the programs that are listed above. Without these programs, we couldn't be able to achieve something like this.

And Shadichy, the one who started it all!