The stal/IX on-disk installation guide from source code
Boot the machine from a bootable media, such as an Ubuntu/Fedora/NixOS live CD, and launch a terminal:
sudo sh
Install the tools:
test -f /usr/bin/parted || yum install parted || apt-get install parted
# gcc >= 13 can't bootstrap IX right now, so we prefer Clang where possible
test -f /usr/bin/g++ || yum install clang lld || yum install g++ || apt-get install g++
test -f /usr/bin/git || yum install git || apt-get install git
test -f /usr/bin/make || yum install make || apt-get install make
The exact commands for installing parted, clang/g++, git, and make will depend on the distribution that you use, but the above should work on Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and their derivatives.
For general instructions on partitioning a disk, see
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide#Partition_the_disks.
Prepare EXT4 (or any other file system) on /dev/xxx using parted (you can also use fdisk or cfdisk), mkfs.ext4 (or the equivalent command for your file system), and mount it:
mkdir /mnt/ix
mount /dev/xxx /mnt/ix
Prepare several symbolic links to form the future root filesystem:
cd /mnt/ix
ln -s ix/realm/system/bin bin
ln -s ix/realm/system/etc etc
ln -s / usr
mkdir -p home/root var sys proc dev tmp
Add a symbolic link to trick the IX package manager:
ln -s /mnt/ix/ix /ix
Add user “ix” who will own all packages on the system (note: UID 1000 is important):
useradd -ou 1000 ix
Prepare a managed directory owned by user ix in /ix, /ix/realm, etc.:
mkdir ix
chown ix ix
Prepare the home directory of user ix, owned by ix:
mkdir home/ix
chown ix home/ix
Change user to ix and run all commands as user ix:
su ix
cd /mnt/ix
Download the IX package manager, which will be used later, as the ix user before rebooting and as the root user after rebooting:
# we don't want to change our CWD
(cd home/ix; git clone https://github.com/stal-ix/ix.git)
Some oddities:
# like tmp dir, so realm symlink can be modified only by its creator/owner
# it is important who create/own system realm, because only they can operate it
# sudo chown {{username}} /ix/realm/system will help, iff one wants to transfer ownership
mkdir -m 01777 ix/realm
And run the IX package manager to populate the root filesystem with bootstrap tools:
cd home/ix/ix
export IX_ROOT=/ix
export IX_EXEC_KIND=local
./ix mut system set/stalix --failsafe etc/zram/0
./ix mut root set/install
./ix mut boot set/boot/all
Now prepare a bootable kernel for your hardware and install the GRUB bootloader. Reboot into GRUB and select the menu entry corresponding to your kernel. After a successful boot, switch to tty5, the root prompt will appear.
. /etc/profile
. /etc/env
We now have some useful utilities in the PATH from /ix/realm/root.
cd /home/ix/ix
# very important step, rebuild system realm
./ix mut system
After this, the shell will restart. In fact, after any change to the system realm, the init will restart the entire supervised process tree.
cd /home/ix/ix
./ix mut $(./ix list)
Rebuild the world and add a completely new user without sudo capability.
Try logging in from tty1.
What’s next:
Add uniqueness to the system, without it some packages refuse to install:
./ix mut system --seed="$(cat /dev/random | head -c 1000 | base64)"