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stagex

Bootstrapping info

Upstream: https://stagex.tools/

Bootstrapping documentation: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex#reproduce-entire-tree

Requirements: Anything that can run Docker

Automation: Building containers is automated, but treating it as a distro needs manual work

Integration testing: Yes, in Codeberg

What you get: A collection of containers that can be turned into a distro

Can install further software from source: A few hundred packages, as buildable containers

Manual testing

Version: Git commit 9212430f

Architecture: x86_64

Date: 2025-06-18

Build time: About 1 day with i5-10310U

Testing process

  • Using Arch Linux host
  • Install dependencies: pacman -S git make docker python
  • Switch to containerd
    • sudo mkdir -p /etc/docker
    • As root, edit or create /etc/docker/daemon.json, so it has the key {"features": {"containerd-snapshotter": true}}
    • Restart docker, eg: sudo systemctl restart docker
  • Clone our repos
    • stagex has the basic packages: git clone https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex.git
  • Build stagex
    • cd stagex
    • Change the mirrors URL in packages/user/acpica/package.toml to something that resolves, eg: https://www.coreboot.org/releases/crossgcc-sources/acpica-unix-{version}.{format}
    • Bootstrap up from live-bootstrap: make IMPORT=1 bootstrap-stage3
  • Turn this into something distro-like
    • It's now just a bunch of containers, but it's not hard to make it bootable
    • I built a quick demo of a bootable distro with stagex-boot, but there's also Airgap and ReprOS
    • cd .. to exit the stagex repo
    • git clone https://github.com/vasi/stagex-boot/
    • make run to build the requisite packages, turn them into a VM image, and run it with qemu
    • make ssh to SSH in
  • Our VM is now self-hosting, and can build packages
    • git clone https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex.git /build/stagex
    • cd /build/stagex
    • make IMPORT=1 bootstrap/stage3
    • We can then run the images produced
  • We can kinda "install" these packages by copying their contents. Eg: for mtools:
    • make IMPORT=1 user-mtools
    • mkdir /mnt
    • ctr -a /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.sock -n moby image mount docker.io/stagex/user-mtools:local /mnt
    • cp -a /mnt/* /
    • umount /mnt
  • Can we boot on real hardware?
    • Create a new partition on my EFI-booting ThinkPad T14s g1, format as ext4
    • Copy contents of boot.img (first partition) and root.img to the new ext4 partition
    • I already have rEFInd as a bootloader, so just setup a simple "refind_linux.conf" in the filesystem root, specifying the "root=/dev/..." flag for this partition
      • core/grub is also available in stagex, so we could probably use that
    • Fixup a few things before boot
      • Edit rcS to omit sdc stuff
      • Add some more ttys to inittab for convenience, with lines like "tty2::askfirst:-/bin/sh"
    • Reboot, and it comes up ok!
    • Change the network interface in rcS to the one I have plugged in
      • Run dhcpcd $IFACE to bring it up
      • Ping, wget work
    • Create a quick "stagex-install" script to automate the installation procedure above
      • Works great with user/tmux, though the dependencies (core/ncurses, user/libevent) need to be installed too
    • Let's bring up pkgsrc
      • Install some stagex dependencies first: core/gcc core/binutils core/gawk core/xz core/linux-headers
      • Clone pkgsrc git, and bootstrap (according to the pkgsrc docs). It works!
      • Can install nano, links, psmisc
      • Some things don't work out of the box, mostly due to musl issues, eg: lowdown, libbsd, llvm