So, I heard a few people struggled installing Arch from another distro or from a root server rescue system recently. The requirements for pacman and friends are numerous and most systems don't have recent enough libraries to easily meet them. Setting up Arch on a root server should be as easy as this: * Boot rescue system, make sure you have Linux 2.6.32 or later * Download tarball from Arch, extract to /tmp/root.x86_64/ * Set up partitions and such, mount to /tmp/root.x86_64/mnt/ * chroot /tmp/root.x86_64/ (well, also some bind-mounts) * pacman-key --populate archlinux * pacstrap /mnt base and follow the installation guide I'd like to generate such tarballs regularly (monthly like our ISOs?) and put them on our mirrors, unless there are objections. I took the liberty of writing a small script: https://paste.xinu.at/ixbqt/ These are the resulting files: total 143M -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 71M 22. Jun 17:13 archlinux-bootstrap-2013.06.22-i686.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 73M 22. Jun 17:15 archlinux-bootstrap-2013.06.22-x86_64.tar.gz Note that they are only gzipped, because we can rely on tar and gzip being widely available. Any comments?