Installing Skywave as a Normal Filesystem

[Brightflash64]

Skywave Linux is primarily a system you run as a live environment from a USB stick or SD card, as a compressed filesystem in an iso file. It is possible to write that filesystem to a flash drive, SSD, or hard drive as a regular uncompressed Linux filesystem.

Ubiquity is extremely bloated and not included in the published iso file. Calamares is i little less bloaty, and I suggest using it if you want to install Skywave but are not comfortable with the command line. Aside from Calamares, there are other graphical tools such as Systemback and Clonezilla.

The most crude way on the command line would be using rsync (with the --delete option) to write your live system into an existing Ubuntu 20.04 setup. A less ham-fisted method would be to use rsync with more specific options (replaces system files, kernel, and so forth):

rsync -axHAWXS
--delete \
--numeric-ids \
----info=progress2 \
--exclude='/home//.gvfs' \
--exclude='/home//.local/share/Trash' \
--exclude='/var/run/' \
--exclude='/var/lock/' \
--exclude='/lib/modules//volatile/.mounted' \
--exclude='/var/cache/apt/archives/' \
--exclude='/home//.mozilla/firefox//Cache' \
--exclude='/home//.cache/chromium' \
--exclude='home//.thumbnails' \
--exclude=.cache --exclude Cache --exclude cache \
/ mnt/ > ~/rsync.out 2> ~/rsync.err

If you decide to manually write that filesystem to a blank storage medium, remember to set up a boot partition and bootloader first, then devote space for the Skywave Linux filesystem. A 32 GB system partition should be more than enough.

[Scott Tranchitella]

is there a list of apps included somewhere?