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Installation/Retro_i486

Installing AOSC OS/Retro on i486 Devices

Installation of AOSC OS/Retro on i486 devices.

Forenotes§

Choosing a Tarball§

All i486 tarballs are generic (universal for all supported devices), the only thing you would have to do here is choosing your favourite one - appropriate for your taste and your use case.

Note: Another consideration is whether your device is capable for a specific variant, please consult System Performance (x86) section on the Retro/intro page for more information.

Preparing an Installation Environment§

It is impossible to install AOSC OS/Retro without a working Live environment or an installed copy of Linux distribution on your local storage. Live images are not yet available for AOSC OS/Retro

For installing AOSC OS/Retro, we recommend that you use TinyCoreLinux, dumped to your USB flash drive - and our guide will assume that you are using CorePlus as the Live environment.

Warning: Be sure that you downloaded the CorePlue, only it is bootable.

Note: You may need to remove the hard disk from your device and install AOCS OS/Retro on it if your device have a small RAM or don't support booting from CD/USB flash disk.

# dd if=nameofimage.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

Where:

After you are done, boot to CorePlus Live.

Extra Notes§

Preparing partitions§

For the installation of AOSC OS/Retro on i486 devices, we only describe the case of MBR partition tables.

It is relatively easy to use fdisk, provided with CorePlus to configure your partitions. For more details on how to configure your partition with fdisk, please refer to the fdisk Manual.

Extra Notes§

Un-tar!§

With partitions configured, you are now ready to unpack the AOSC OS/Retro system tarball you have downloaded. Before you start un-tar-ing your tarball, mount your system partition(s) first. Say, if you wanted to install AOSC OS/Retro on partition /dev/sda1:

# mkdir /root/mnt
# mount -v /dev/sda1 /root/mnt

Additionally, say, if you have /dev/sda2 for /home:

# mkdir -v /root/mnt/home
# mount -v /dev/sda2 /root/mnt/home

And now, un-tar the tarball:

# cd /root/mnt
# tar --numeric-owner -pxvf /path/to/tarball/tarball.tar.xz

Initial Configuration§

Here below are some extra steps before you configure your bootloader - strongly recommended to avoid potential issues later.

Bind mount system/pseudo directories§ 

# mkdir /root/mnt/run/udev
# for i in dev proc sys run/udev; do mount --rbind /$i /mnt/$i; done

Chroot§

Enter AOSC OS/Retro chroot environment:

# chroot /root/mnt /bin/bash

Note: Commands in all sections below are executed from chroot.

/etc/fstab Generation§

If you have chosen to use multi-partition layout for your AOSC OS/Retro installation, you will need to configure your /etc/fstab file, one fast way to achieve this is genfstab :

# genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /etc/fstab

Check the resulting /etc/fstab file, and edit it in case of errors.

Update, Your, System!§

New tarball releases comes out roughly each season (or longer depending on developers' availability), and it is generally a wise choice to update your system first - just to get rid of some old bugs since the tarball's release:

# apt update
# apt full-upgrade

Bootloader Configuration§

Now you should be able to configure your bootloader, we will use GRUB for the purpose of this installation guide.

Note: All commands below are run from within chroot.

Installation and configuration of GRUB is straight forward on BIOS systems, only thing to look out for is where the MBR for your hard drive(s) are. In our example, we assume that your MBR is located on /dev/sda, but it may vary, but in most cases, MBR is located on the hard drive, but not on a partition.

# grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

User, and Post-installation Configuration§

All tarballs do not come with a default user and root user is disabled, you would have to create your own account before you reboot into AOSC OS/Retro - while leaving the password empty for the root user - you can always use sudo for your superuser needs.

Add a user§

To add a new user, (aosc as an example), use the useradd command: 

# useradd -m -s /bin/bash aosc

Make sure that your username contains only lower-cased letters and numbers.

And add additional groups to the user (audio, cdrom, video, wheel should get you started just fine):

# usermod -a -G audio,cdrom,video,wheel aosc

Setting full name for your user§

To set a full name for your user (also using aosc as an example, replace "AOSC User" with your desired name:

# chfn -f "AOSC User" aosc

Setting password§

Although it is not required to protect the newly created user aosc with a password, it is highly recommend to do so: 

# passwd aosc

Enabling Root§

Although strongly discouraged, you can enable the root user by setting a password for root:

# passwd root

Note: Decent Linux users need not the root user.

Setting System Timezone§

Timezone info are stored in /usr/share/zoneinfo/<region>/<city>.

# ln -svf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Shanghai /etc/localtime

Setting System Language§

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment needed locales. Generate the locales by running:

# locale-gen

To set default language for all users, edit /etc/locale.conf. For example, to set system lanaguage to Chinese Simplified (China):

LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8

Notes: After you rebooted the computer into the new system, you may use the localectl command to do this:

# localectl set-locale "LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8"

Setting System Hostname§

To set a hostname for the system, edit /etc/hostname. For example, to set the hostname to be MyNewComputer:

MyNewComputer

Notes: After you rebooted the computer into the new system, you may use the hostnamectl command to do this:

# hostnamectl set-hostname yourhostname

Configure preset services§

This will use our preset files to enable some services such as xdm and NetworkManager .

# systemctl preset-all
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