Zen Installer Reviews

This is a great looking installer. It boots, no problem and asks all the questions that you'd expect but doesn't appear to get much further. There were some icons at the bottom of the screen that brought up tooltips but they too became unresponsive. The system didn't crash, as such, it just froze and nothing worked. The only option was to power off forcibly. If this gets fixed, the installer badly needs some sort of progress meter - maybe there is one and it froze before displaying it? I saw nothing.

No longer a viable installer, as it fails to actually install a working Linux system.

does this project still exist or is it a dead Arch Installer, since its been a few years, since the last iso release, it files are dated 2020 and its now 2023, I am looking into ones that provide an gui gnome offline pure version of arch linux without using the text, my older gigabyte is kind of picky about which versions can be used it likes arcolinuxb-gnome-v23.03.01-x86_64, archlinux-gui-gnome-2022.07-x86_64, Calam-Arch-Installer-2023-04, manjaro-gnome-22.0.5-230316-linux61, archlinux-gui-plasma-2022.07-x86_64 , garuda-dr460nized-gaming-linux-zen-230319 But I can't run these openSUSE-Tumbleweed-DVD-x86_64-Snapshot20230407-Media, carli-2023.04.05-x86_64 and alinstaller-2022.11.02-v47-x86_64 they all seem to lose the displayport output to my M28U Gigabyte 4k monitor, 3D card is an Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 and Gigabyte G1.Assassin 2 (rev. 1.0) Intel® X79 Chipset motherboard hardware with ddr3 memory. I have my other pc using the htmi 2 connection, and xbox series x on my htmi 1 connection on it. I use rufus to load the iso on my USB drive. but only some of them seem to display the desktop, I used ones like manjaro that allow the nvidia drivers to load, but that not included in all of them, I don't know if that's the problem, also Ubuntu 23.04 amd64 will boot into Graphics safe mode to the desktop in the grub boot loader for lunar-desktop-amd64, during the install I click on the option to install the nvidia drivers, which I think will allow that version to work I hope, I wanted to try the gnome 44 desktop, but the arch linux doesn't have it yet in their ports or pacman -Syu system yet. I might switch back to arch linux afterwards it depends on now stable the gnome 44 is going to be under ubuntu.

просьба обновить

OS is not installed (from any ISO) =( Gives a message: isolinux: Found something at deive = F6 isolinux: Found something at deive = F5 isolinux: Found something at deive = E0 ..etc. isolinux: Looks reaonable, continuing ... 0.0.0.00.0.0.0 Tried on different PCs on different HDD/SSD.

Was selecting the default locale -> crashed. Was selecting the display manager -> crashed again. Thanks for ruining Arch!

This is a very simple and easy way to install Arch Linux. I installed the Wen Kernel and it is working very well. Haven't had any issues. I do wish you would create an installer for FreeBSD.

Good! This installer is easy to use and it is very fast.

I need help. I dant to format my disk with XFS Filesystem, but in gparted is this grey ? Why?

October 31, 2019 release is broken. LightDM will not load after install. Neither on actual hardware or a virtual machine. --- edit: --- The previous build "works". The installer lags and I had to start gparted outside the installer. But if you can wait and take your time the previous release works. Avoid October 31, 2019 though

Can someone plz help. I have tried installing 9 times and every time I do all the steps right but after it when I restart it it just goes back to windows and i have to start again

This worked very well for me. Straightforward install with no uefi or dual boot. Would have liked option to install kde base with plasma to get dolphin and konsole at least. Also, unless I missed a step, the home directory was not populated with basic directories (Documents etc). Still - MUCH easier than the standard Arch install which I have done a couple of times. Thank you very much for your work! I would give 4.5/5 due to the above minor things.

VoidISOs i3/HL need a password for Anon or Other in the Login Manager!!!! So, what is the pass????

I got kind of knowledgeable of Linux from my years of toying with different programming languages and SDKs, installing libraries, compiling projects, etc. I started on Debian and later switched to Ubuntu just to get rid of This knowledge is mostly concentrated in the "user-surface", though (like setting up initialization scripts, using aptitude, fixing Makefiles and using include paths, etc). I've always wanted to try Arch but I didn't want to be burdened by all this filesystem-level of knowledge of configuring many files by hand, setting up groups, etc. I like the developer way more than being a system administrator (which I don't plan to become, ever). This installer guided me through the installation like any other and it felt totally painless. Now I can dive deeper in the parts of the system, but only IF I want to do so. I still have general system configuration knowledge to get by if I need to configure anything, but I don't need to care about doing the ground-work since Zen has taken care of that for me. A sincere thank you to the authors!

Well to start with if would be nice to add just some more terminals in the software downloads because I do not want to install ANY apps since i am coming from pure Arch I want to be as close to that as possible and if you choose KDE with no apps you will not have a terminal so adding Konsole would be nice. The worst thing I have seen is not adding the : initrd /intel-ucode.img to the /boot/loader/entries/Arch.conf This should be loaded at boot. Another difference for me is the sudoers file. I am normally in the wheel all all and not the root root and I normally make it where I don't need a password so maybe add and option for not needing a password for root. I know I can chroot in the system at the end and add konsole but since it is an installer then maybe add an option for konsole. You make reference to grub and grub is not installed so that is gonna confuse people for sure especailly people not normally using systemd-boot. I always use systemd boot so it was not big deal for me but grub folks will have a little problem there. Also add a hook to the the systemd-boot so that people dont need to update there system boot every time. It is like this. sudo nano /etc/pacman.d/hooks/100-systemd-boot.hook [Trigger] Type = Package Operation = Upgrade Target = systemd [Action] Description = Updating systemd-boot When = PostTransaction Exec = /usr/bin/bootctl update This will save new folks a lot of problems because if this is not in place you must run sudo bootctl update and that will be just like sudo update grub if they are coming from another distro for example. Just small things that are very easily fixable.

I liked all the features, but the bios doesn't detect a boot record on the arch install.

Works perfectly

Support should be added for F2FS through grub-git. Everything else is a very good job.

I have no doubt that Arch is the best Linux distribution. However installing it by console is not for anyone. Installing Arch with Zen installer is a simple and pleasant task. Being able to enjoy this marvel of operating system is incomparable. I want to congratulate the Zen team, their effort and dedication to the project is highly valued by the users. A warm greeting from Argentina.

First off, if you look at the negative and 1 start reviews, your will see every one of them has complaints that have nothing to do with the installer, and everything to do with no understanding what they are doing, and thinking they could unthinkingly click some buttons without any consideration/knowledge of their system. I personally would not recommend this to anyone who is not familiar with the typical Arch installation using the command-line. I would argue that if you aren't proficient enough to do it "old-school", you likely are not going to be happy with the results, even if you successfully install it. There is nothing magical about the installer, it is simply a graphical front-end to the typical base installation, with some boxes to check instead of typing the long-hand commands. As someone who has installed Arch many times with the command-line, I only ever use this now. It is simply easier to and faster to have do it through a graphical installer. It does not magically find all your systems drivers for you. It does not hold your hand every step of the way and prevent you from making a mistake. It doesn't fry eggs either. It simply provides a more user-friendly interface to a mundane task, with the added benefit of using a browser on the live ISO to look up any answers to questions you might encounter.

I have installed Arch two times now. The first run the Zen Installer included the spookyaur repo two times in the pacman.conf file so after that mate was not be installed and installations of other packages were not possible. Also os-prober was not installed so that grub-mkconfig only found the Arch Installation and not my other Operating Systems. I bootet into the new Arch and Lightdm started but after logging-in Lightdm comes back immediately cause missing mate I think. I started a Console Login and had no Network Connection cause networkmanager requires X I think. At the second run I installed it without AUR checked the pacman.conf which is okay now and after the installation I started a chroot-term to install os-prober and let grub-mkconfig run which succeeds. But I wanted to install mc( midnight commander) which was not possible cause there was a Problem with the pacman-keys. I had tu run pacman-key --refresh-keys to update the keys and then Installation of mc succeeds. I see you added a new ISO. So I made a new test. New game, new luck. This time I decided to not install grub at installation time cause I thought the booting can be done by my Manjaro Installation which I have on a other partition. The installation of mc goes without trouble. But I decided to install pamac, may be this is the reason why spooky_aur is included two times in the /etc/pacman.conf. At the first run I installed some programs with pamac, no problem so far. Then I wanted to install snapd but it cout not be retrieved. So I wanted to install yay which was not be able to retrieve, too. Then I wanted to install yay on the console way and got the info that git was not installed by the installation. I wonder cause I think I choosed to install with AUR access. After installation of git it was possible to install snapd by pamc. But before the first start I had to care for AppArmor(with installation and enabling in grub).

I am an arch user for more than 10 years and frankly spoken I hated installers...until I tried this out: awesome ! Congratulations to the zen team. I installed KDE and virtualbox. Only one error: for some reason the system installed virtualbox-host-modules-arch AND virtualbox-host-dkms while I selected linux kernel only. It resulted in the impossibility to load the modules (vboxdrv,...) what was obvious because instead of looking for the .conf file in the modules-load.d directory, it was trying to find it elsewhere . So maybe this could be helpful for a small improvement.

Just a small bug... It's impossible to login as rot in native terminal^ throws error "Login incorrect"... When using sudo or giving a root pasword in DE everything is OK... "sudo passwd root" didn't decide the problem...

Installing Arch is hard. Zen makes it easy. Installing it is more dependable than Anarchy, whose site seems to go up and down. Zen's installer isn't perfect, but It beats installing Arch by hand.

This is an excellent installer for Arch Linux. It's a simple, straightforward tool to easily install a basic working installation, 5/5 would recommend to any new user.