arctic

a bsd userland, built on glibc

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arctic is a linux distribution built from source, pairing a BSD userland (toybox, zsh, doas, netbsd-curses, bmake) with glibc and an LLVM toolchain underneath. busybox handles init. packages install through alpm, its own package manager, with per-file verification and one-command rollback built in. a musl libc port is currently underway as an alternative base.

features

toybox userland in place of GNU coreutils, zsh as the login shell
clang, lld, and libc++ — glibc is kept only where the NVIDIA driver requires it
doas instead of sudo, netbsd-curses instead of ncurses
alpm: rollback, -nomod staging, per-file sha256 verification, alt-nonfree counterparts for every proprietary package
NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel drivers coexisting through libglvnd
boots to a TTY — no display manager, no desktop, install one afterwards with alpm

STATUS: arctic-minimal boots and installs end to end — Limine → kernel → initramfs → busybox init → zsh, with alpm installing from the repository carried on the medium. no desktop image exists yet, by design.

install

# wired is automatic, for wireless:
iwctl station wlan0 connect YOUR-NETWORK

mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt

# arctic-conf asks the questions and writes an answer file
# arctic-strap installs from it, non-interactively
arctic-conf /mnt
arctic-strap /mnt

mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/boot
arctic-boot-conf /mnt/boot
arctic-boot-strap /mnt/boot --efi

reboot

build it yourself

every build runs sandboxed under bubblewrap — the host is mounted read-only, only the build tree and /tmp are writable. that is not a formality: a recipe that forgets DESTDIR once installed glibc straight over a host's /usr/lib. it now just fails with EROFS instead.

build/arctic-sandbox --check
build/build.sh

contribute

502 packages are defined in ports/manifest.tsv, with recipes generated from it rather than hand-written. adding a port means adding a line to the manifest, not boilerplate.

pull requests welcome on github.