 Okay, what's up everyone? So in this video, I'm going to be migrating an Arch Linux installation to Parabla without having to uninstall the whole thing. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, so Arch Linux, you probably know what it is. It's the Linux distribution I have been using for a while. And of course, a lot of my subscribers use it, but my favorite Linux distribution is actually Parabla. Don't have huge strong feelings about it, but it's probably my favorite all things considered. And what it is is just a version of Arch Linux with only free software. So in this video, I'm going to be migrating an Arch Linux system to a Parabla system. So I totally recommend you use Parabla. It has some extra security features and privacy features and stuff like that. It just, it won't load proprietary blobs and it won't install free software. Now that's good in terms of freedom and privacy or whatever, but on the machine I was using before, the X220 and on a lot of other laptops, sometimes the Wi-Fi card, it's usually the Wi-Fi card that gives you problems. It won't have, you won't be able to install, you won't actually be able to run it because it needs some kind of proprietary blob. So I prefer to always use Parabla unless I run into something like that. You can actually cheat and make it work if you've changed the kernel, but who's not gonna do, I'm not gonna do that. So in this video, the reason I'm doing this is because of course I was using my X220 as my main machine, now I'm using my X200 and I have it Libra booted with a EtherOS Wi-Fi card. So now I can have all free software, no problem, which is what I used to do a couple months ago. So anyway, so in this video we're going to run through this. So here of course Parabla, it is one of the few FSF approved 100% free distributions just so you know. Now there are guides out there on how to migrate from Arch Linux to Parabla. I'm more or less gonna be following these with my own additions and own clarifications about what actually is going on. But aside from that, it should be pretty simple. So I'm gonna go ahead and get this thing started. So let's open up a terminal. So the first thing we're gonna wanna do is, so we're gonna be installing another distribution on our machine, we don't need a live CD or anything like that, we can do it within the machine. So the first thing we're gonna wanna do is actually make it so we can install foreign packages with Pacman because normally Pacman requires, actually I'm gonna become rude, Pacman requires a package to be signed with some kind of Arch Linux approved signature. So the first thing we gotta do is I'm gonna open up the Pacman conf. And what you wanna do is you wanna find this line here, the remote file sig level, that's the important thing. Now by default it's gonna be commented out and it's gonna say required. What we wanna do is uncomment it and change required to never and just save that for the time being. Now this is a dangerous setting to keep set like this, we only need it for a minute or so. But as of right now it's not gonna be checking packages for signatures, but that's what we want for the time being. So I'm gonna pull up another terminal. And all we need to do with this is again I'm gonna be rude, don't wanna put in my password too lazy. So I'm gonna be rude and what you're gonna wanna run is Pacman and then we're going to install a particular package on the internet and it is at HTTPS colon slash slash parabola dot new. Oops, parabola dot new slash packages slash Libre slash any. And the package name is going to be parabola key ring. Parabola hyphen key ring does spell that right, it looks like it and we're gonna go to downloads. Downloads, or is it download? I wrote it down, yes, download. Now when you run that what this is just doing is installing the parabola key ring package from the internet directly. So now it is going to add all of the developer keys from all the people who work on parabola to your key ring so they can actually get approved. Now the next thing we're gonna do, I'm gonna move this up, just go back to the same command you had before and instead of parabola key ring, you wanna put in pacman, pacman mirror list. So this is going to download the, like all the different parabola mirrors out there where you can download files from. Because of course as of right now, if you have an Arch Linux system, it's just using the Arch, excuse me, yeah, yeah, the Arch mirrors or whatever. Okay, so now that that's done, you should go back to your etsy dot dot, or excuse me etsy pacman dot comf and change this back to required or comment it out or something like that. I'm pretty sure if you just commented out the default is required, but anyway. So just save that and that's all you need to change with this file, or well actually no, it's not all you need to change with this file, but that's all you need to do with the file signature. So the next thing we're gonna wanna do is go down to where it says, it lists out all the different repositories. So we have core, extra, community. Now we're gonna wanna add two, well we're gonna wanna add at least one thing, possibly two. One is you wanna put in a Libra category because Parabla uses Libra to keep most of its packages in or the Libra ones of course, and you're gonna wanna just copy what you have down here in these lines up here. And this is gonna allow pacman to actually look at all of, you know, these files or whatever. In addition to that, you probably wanna add, instead of Libra, put in what is it, no prism. Now this isn't necessary, but Parabla has this very nice repository of basically hardened software for privacy reasons, and it has some additional security features and it'll have better versions, more private versions of certain things like I stuff or something like that. And I think it's just nice to have. So I always add this as well. So once you're done with that, you can go ahead and save and quit. So now what we're gonna do is clear the pacman cache. So how you do that is of course pacman SCC. So this is going to get rid of all the Arch Linux packages that are just in your cache. So say yes to both of these and that's that. Now you have gotten rid of all those packages. The next, okay actually I realize I just forgot something. So one thing you're gonna wanna do is when we install that mirror list, you have, oh where is it? So in etsy slash pacman dot d, you are going to have two files, two mirror list files. One just plain mirror list and one mirror list dot pac new. So mirror list is the Arch Linux mirror list that we already had and when you install that new mirror list, it put it right here. So we're just gonna wanna replace the old mirror list with the new one. So I just for safety I guess, I'm going to take the first mirror list and I'm gonna back it up, we'll say pacman d mirror list dot arch or something like that and then I'm going to copy, let's see, I'm gonna copy the pac new mirror list directly to where Arch is, or Arch and parabola are going to be looking for your mirror list which is just in the mirror list file. So that's all you have to do there. Now once you've done that we can actually update our packages and download and well let's just do it. So this is gonna be your first update on parabola so to speak although you haven't really installed anything on it but it's gonna start syncing, you're gonna see it's loading the Libre repository, it's loading the core repository and everything else. It should load, no prism as well if you put that. So I'm gonna wait for a second. Now it's probably gonna be installing a lot of stuff after this but I wanna get to the confirm and then I'll probably cut off all the intensive stuff but this is gonna be the period where it's gonna actually be installing, oh well that's it, okay. Oh yeah, it's not gonna, I didn't tell it to upgrade. So that was just syncing the repositories, now we actually have to upgrade. I was talking like we were gonna upgrade packages. So now what you wanna do is, so what you can do is just pacman suu, this is gonna upgrade packages, the two us mean that it's also going to downgrade packages if their like addition number is older on the parabola mirrors just in case because sometimes it is. So I'm also gonna wanna put in a couple other things. You wanna say pacman explicitly because you want that pacman itself to be totally refreshed and there are two other things you should add. One is the package yourfreedom. So yourfreedom is a nice little feature that parabola has, it is a blacklist program. How it works is it's a program that doesn't do anything but it has conflicts built into it with every known non-free software. So when you install yourfreedom, it basically, whenever you try and install a non-free program, it says hello, this is not a free program, just telling you that this causes a conflict with it. So it's a nice way of making sure you don't have any non-free programs on your computer. And if you did add the non-prism repository, you can also install the package, your privacy. And this does the same thing. So your privacy, it doesn't target non-free software, it targets free software that might integrate with non-free cloud services or something like that. Like if it sends metadata to Amazon or Google or something like that, your privacy will say, hey, watch out, this program does some things that you might not like or something like that. So when we run that, what it's gonna do is it's gonna start asking you some replacements. So I have installed Firefox, I don't actually use Firefox, but I installed it just for this. So it's gonna ask me, do I wanna replace Firefox with Icecat? So there are a couple things in Parabola that are rebranded or renamed that they might be Forks. So Icecat is a fork of Firefox that has a whole lot of other privacy features and stuff like that. So just say yes to all of these. I don't know why it's asking both Icecat and Ice Weasel, but whatever. So importantly, it's definitely gonna ask you if you wanna replace Linux with the Linux Libre kernel. So pretty much say yes to everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You'll notice that, so there are a couple things here, like a bunch of my LaTeX packages, the Parabola repositories, don't worry about this, they look like errors, but they're no problem. The Parabola repositories it looks like right now have older versions of these, that's totally fine. Don't sweat it. And it also says here, it can't find a package required for the upgrade for Unrar. So I'm just gonna say yes to this, I'll worry about this later, but it looks like it can't find an equivalent of this even though it has non-free software in it. So most of the stuff you're gonna be dealing with, it's gonna be totally fine since there are just equivalents in the Parabola repository. But in this case with Unrar, I'm gonna have to double check all this. So I'm gonna say yes to that. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so here's the big install, it's nearly, so what this install is gonna do is it's gonna replace everything in your Arch Linux system with the Parabola equivalent. So I'm gonna run this, I'm gonna cut the video off for the time being and I'll see you when this thing gets done. Okay, and we're back. I actually went for a walk and did some other chores and I was gone I think over an hour, but yeah, so yours probably didn't take anywhere near that long, I don't know how long mine took. So if you look at mine right here, you actually see a bunch of errors. If you see something like that, these come from the LaTeX packages, you can just ignore them, they're not fatal. But you'll see that it pretty much, it successfully installed pretty much everything. And to prove to you that we are actually on Parabola, I brought up an art screen fetch when it began installing, but if I run NeoFetch again and you will see that I am now on Parabola. So yeah, we've successfully switched over. But we're not quite done yet. We have to redo the bootloader and we also have to, well, I'll talk about some other things in general. Okay, so let's go ahead. So one thing you're gonna wanna do, well, you're gonna have to do is renew your, get a new grub config or whatever bootloader you're using. I'm gonna assume you're using grub. Well, actually I'm not gonna assume that, but I'm using grub, so I'm gonna put in the commands for it. All you have to do is grub, of course this is as root still, just remake your config just like you did when you were installing Arch Linux or whatever. So grub make config with the output to boot grub, grub CFG. And that's all you're gonna have to do. Did it add another file here? Okay, I guess it saved some backup or something like that. But anyway, just output it to grub.cfg and that should run and that should be it. So at this point you should be able to boot up and come back. Actually, I think that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna reboot my computer and see if it works. I hope it did. It would be awkward if I, well, I guess you wouldn't know. It wouldn't be awkward because no one would know because I wouldn't put the video up. But anyway, I'm gonna reboot and come back in just a second. Actually, hold on, before I do, I noticed something. The screen fetch I took of Arch Linux, I was actually recompiling two videos at the same time and my CPU usage was 101%. But anyway, I just wanted to note that. All right, so rebooting now. I'll see you guys in a second. Okie dokie, so looks like we have a successful boot. So if you're using another bootloader that's not grub, you're gonna have to, of course, do different things. If you're using SysLinux or something else, I assume that if you installed Arch and you installed your bootloader yourself, you know how to do that. You can look it up on the wiki if you don't. I would show you, but of course I can't do anything. I mean, since I only have grub, I only have grub, so that's what I can do. So anyway, but yeah, so now we've successfully installed this. The computer is now 100% free. You'll see that since I'm using the X200 and I have an Aetheros Wi-Fi device, I do still have my Wi-Fi. It's working fine. Again, the one caveat when installing Parabla or usually other or, well, any free software distro that's 100% free is the thing most likely to mess up is your Wi-Fi device. A lot of laptops are not gonna work or they're not gonna have free software Wi-Fi devices. So that's the one thing you need to look up. If it's Aetheros, you're probably fine. Anything else, it might be a little suspect. I'm not really sure. So anyway, that's the one caveat. Okay, so a couple of things about differences between Arch and Parabla. So first off, what about the AUR? So by default, I'll put it this way. Parabla, from my experience, has more stuff in its default repositories than Arch. They of course have, they have Libre packages only, but they put some of the stuff that's on Arch in the AUR in the main repositories. So you don't necessarily need any kind of AUR manager. In fact, I don't think they'll work exactly as they're intended on Parabla. Now, let's say you, that said, you can build anything from the AUR. So any package build that works on Arch should work on Parabla. Your only potential problem is theoretically there might be a dependency that Parabla can't pull because it's all free. But that's never happened to me. I mean, for all normal programs, you're gonna be totally fine building them from the AUR. So in order to do that, actually I have a really ad hoc solution to that that's really lazy. That is, I literally just have a command called AUR install that I've had on my computer for a while. And literally what you do is you just say AUR install and then XYZ. And what that does is there's no error reporting or anything. It literally just downloads the program XYZ from the AUR and tries to compile it. And that's it. So that's actually what I do when I really need something from the AUR. But I don't think, there are probably a couple programs I'm running on my machine now that are like I would need the AUR for. But again, Parabla's repos have a lot of stuff that Arch doesn't. Or at least in my experience, there's some things. I think they put like I3 gaps in the main repos before Arch did. I don't even know when Arch did, but I think it was pretty recent. So anyway, that's just to keep note of it. Otherwise, managing Parabla is pretty much exactly the same as managing Arch. Again, the biggest, well, actually not really again because I haven't said this before, but if you're an Arch user, you probably know that what you should, in addition to updating regularly, you should always check the RSS feed for Arch Linux. And the same applies for Parabla. You should be checking the Parabla RSS feed in your RSS feed reader. I mean, there's not gonna be anything daily, but every couple of months you might need to do something manually. But that applies to Arch Linux just as well. So otherwise, it's gonna be pretty much exactly the same. The same experience of Arch just with software that is all free and more privacy respecting and stuff like that. So anyway, that's about it. So I'll see you guys next time. Hope you learned something and have a good one.