Hi,
Recently I try to install Manjaro on a ZFS filesystem. The Manjaro-Architect doesn’t support manual mount of an existing ZFS dataset so I follow tutorials (this and this) to manually install Manjaro base system on it. (PS: credit to @dalto for helping me out with it )
The question is, is there any way that I can create a full Manjaro installation from a base system to a degree of the official KDE installation? I know that I can install desktop environment directly ( Install Desktop Environments - Manjaro), but I would like to make the system as close as the official release, just in addition with the ZFS support on the installed base system.
I read another thread that I can install manjaro-kde-settings to replicate the desktop settings to the official release. Does it also install all packages that the official release has?
What comes to my mind is if I can take advantage of the iso-profiles provided by Manjaro, and install the packages list in shared/Packages-Root in the iso-profiles using basestrap, and then install everything in manjaro/kde/Packages-Desktop, and copy everything in manjaro/kde/desktop-overlay to the base system?
It would be great if there is some reference of this proof-of-concept.
I think this concept works. I install the system on Live Media using basestrap with most of the packages from Packages-Root and Packages-Desktop and others such as zfs support, configure it for RAID1 and ZFS support, and then copy the settings from desktop-overlay from the Manjaro KDE iso profile. Then chroot to the install, edited the fstab to automount /boot and swap partitions, and configure the system with the 7th step of this tutorial, and set up systemd-boot as the boot loader. Finally, created my user account with useradd -m -G audio,lp,optical,video,sys,network,scanner,power,wheel -s /bin/bash USERNAME and systemctl enable sddm.service as suggested in Install Desktop Environments - Manjaro. The system boots into KDE successfully and get the feeling that is close to the official Manjaro KDE release .
I will find some time to draft a tutorial for this, as I found the guidelines for ZFS installation on the forum is too fragmented.