---
title: "Arch Spin pt. 1 — The perfect bootable"
subtitle: "There's no such thing . . . yet"
description: "I started trying to think of a distro that fit all my daily needs that I could take on a flash drive with me wherever I went and I couldn't"
date: 2018-08-15T10:38:00-04:00
cover: /assets/pngs/arch-spin/pt-1.png
categories:
  - Technology
tags:
  - Arch Linux
  - Arch Spin
---

Today I had an orthodontist appointment and a voice lesson. The
appointment was at 15:00 and the voice lesson at 16:00. I got to the
orthodontist's office 10 minutes early, was told to right to the back
(like always), I sat down in the seat, and the orthodontist came over
after a few minutes with another patient. He looked at my teeth, had me
put my retainers in, checked how they fit, then said I don't ever need
to come back (unless I do need to). That all took about 7 or 8 minutes.
My voice lesson was ~5 minutes away so I had an hour to kill. I drove to
the college (where the lesson was), went into the computer lab, and
booted my [multibootable](http://multibootusb.org/) bootable.

I went through the distros I had and chose the [i3 spin of
Manjaro,](https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/)
forgetting that it hadn't written correctly and was corrupt. I went
through a couple of other distros that were as well and settled on
[Parrot Home.](https://www.parrotsec.org/download-home.php) While I love
Parrot Home for security reasons, it wasn't what I was looking for. I
started trying to think of a distro that fit all my daily needs that I
could take on a flash drive with me wherever I went and . . . I
couldn't.

I would boot it, try to install some app I'm missing (Telegram, for
instance), find that I need to first update everything then upgrade some
packages then have no space left to install Telegram. There isn't one
distro I can think of that I wouldn't have to do that with. So I thought
I'd try my hand at installing Arch on a flash drive.

As I was reading, I decided I would rather make a *live* system. This
way, I can log into whatever I need to and, as soon as I turn it off,
whatever I did disappears. I asked around in the Arch [Telegram
channel](https://t.me/archlinuxgroup) and was given a few pages to read
up on the wiki as well as a youtube video. First is [building the arch
iso,](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/archiso) [making a custom
repo](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks#Custom_local_repository)
for installing AUR packages, building them in a
[chroot](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:Building_in_a_Clean_Chroot)
so you don't mess with your current setup, and the [YouTube
videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqV1BJtJXEA) that help tie it
all together:

## Summary
That'll be it for this post. It was originally a lot longer but I think
I want to keep them to a quick read so it's easier to pick up where you
left off. I'm not sure what the next post will contain but I am sure
that it talks about setting up your dev environment 😉